Still unable to place bids in Mature Audiences Section

Laserguy,

My case is 153858, you might add that to your notes to them so they coordinate. I placed 12 snipes last nite on some mags I have never seen befoere on Ebay - they all ended without the snipe being placed -still I have confidence AS will get it working. I have had so many snipes work for so long.

A-

alan,

You'll love this. here's the response to the support case I filed.

Posted Friday, October 08, 2004, 5:27:43 AM
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Hi,

Your status for the item number 5524478677 shows as Unknown.

Your snipe could be not be placed because of an eBay server error. In the event of this, Auction Sniper continues to bid for you up to 15 times. These type of errors are not common, nor are they limited to Auction Sniper. Although this is ultimately the responsibility of eBay, we do all that we can to prevent this from happening.

Regards
-Vince S.
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Now since you missed 12 auctions as well without bids being placed, it's obvious that some rare and random eBay server error is not the problem. Apparently they haven't completely fixed the problem as yet.

I just place snipes on three more auctions tomorrow morning. They're items that I don't mind losing. I'll wait and see if they also disappear and if so, I'll summit the info to my original support thread and see if they give the same answer.

Anybody else here active in the Mature Audiences section?

L-

That response is verbatim what they gave me. I had someone else to start with but got that response from Vince also.
A-

Ignore that, we know theres a problem but haven't been able to fix it yet. Vince is a little out of the loop on this one. Normally what he said is true, but in this case there is something wrong with items that require an adult login. We're not sure what since we have to login in order to even add the snipe. Hopefully we'll find and fix it early next week.

Sara,

Nice to see that someone is acknowledging that the problem goes beyond eBay.

Here's the results of today's test snipes. As noted in yesterday's post, I placed snipes for early morning auctions to see if the bids would get palced. I actually placed 6 snipes in My Snipes. All were received and showed as ready.

For two of the auctions, I also manually placed bids directly through eBay as I wanted to make sure I didn't lose them by not having bids plaed through AS.

Bids were sucessfully placed by AS for all 6 auctions including the 2 that I was already the high bidder on.

At this point I thought everything was back to normal, but I have my preference set to be notified by AS email on results of attempted snipes. No emails arrived from AS although I did get the "Bid Confirmed" and "Item Won" emails from eBay.

I logged into my AS account and guess what. No record of snipes in the "Won" section and no billing for the 6 snipes under my account "Balance".

I'm an honest person though and don't mind paying for the service when it works, which is the reason I'm posting these results here.

Sara, you need to let your people know what's happening at this point as it's obvious that there's still a problem and it appears to be on your end.

L-

Oh, that's good news. Maybe the programmers fixed it yesterday. I sent them some emails but didnt get a chance to talk to them before I left.

As for the charging it sounds like our billing robot might not be able to confirm you've won the item. That happens sometimes and when we find those cases we rerun them though. So they still may yet show up as wins and be charged. When the robot cant determine if you won or not it gets flagged and each we look at the flagged items and fix our system. It's usually that eBays changed some text or data that we rely on to see if you've won. eBay makes over 1,000 changes a week to their web pages. Our robots were built so that most of those changes don't affect us. But sometimes they make a change so big that we have to recode things to handle their new layout or text.

It's a never ending game of cat and mouse with eBay making changes and us catching up with them.

Hi,

I was able to succesfully snipe again today

Thanks AS

Alan

Well, you just gotta love support people. Just thought everone would love to read how this all finalized. As mentioned previously, I have been able to snipe again in the MA section since the 9th. As of yesterday, none of the items I've won using AS had been billed.

I made a list of every auction I've had snipes placed sucessfuly since the 9th and included the date, item number, auction title and winning bid amount. I sent the info to support and this is the reply I received.

quote:

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Hi Mike,

I appreciate your honesty and that you took pains to inform us about your unpaid snipes.

However, I checked to find out that these items were not won and hence you will NOT be charged for them. We charge you only if you win.

Regards,
-Michelle S.

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I sent her a reply stating that rather than rely on the info from the AS software, she should take a few of the item numbers I provided and check eBay herself. This was the next reply.

quote:

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Hi,

We have the records with us and as Michelle told you, you have not won the items which you sent us. So you will not be charged for those.

Regards
-Vince S.

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Ok, I figured that I gave it my best shot, so if AS wanted to let me use the sevice for free, so be it. Well aparently somebody higher up the food chain must have finally figured out that maybe there was a problem on their end because when I got up this morning and logged onto my computer, I had 23 email Auction Sniper Snipe Status Reports in my Inbox including notifications for several from last night that I hadn't included on the list. Maybe things are finally back to normal. We'll see........

L-

Reminds me of years ago a friend of mine was given $100 too much at his bank. He took it back to the bank manager and stated they had made a mistake. He was informed that the bank never makes mistakes! They wouldn't let him explain so he went home finally, $100 richer...for a day and a half, at which time the bank manager called him and asked for it back.

M said:

quote:

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He took it back to the bank manager

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Is that what BM stands for?

In some cases, maybe so! In some cases, maybe not!

M said:

quote:

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In some cases, maybe so! In some cases, maybe not!

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Good!

Thanks Laserguy, we'll fix that. We usually catch such things and reset the items and then the billing system kicks in and charges for the, but it's better we catch it now then later becuase it really confuses people when old charges show up on their balance.

Sara said:

quote:

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.... but it's better we catch it now then later becuase it really confuses people when old charges show up on their balance

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That's one of the reason's I wanted to make sure the problem was caught now rather than later.

L-