YOU LET ME DOWN

I ALSO EXPERIENCED A "TOTAL MELTDOWN" TODAY!
SAME THING, MY BID WAS $200.00+ OVER THE WINNING BID AND WAS "GREEN READY" TO SNIPE AND DID NOT EXCECUTE! THREE MONTHS TO FIND THIS ITEM IN THIS CONDITION AND POOF! GONE!!!! I HAVE USED THIS SITE NUMEROUS TIMES BEFORE...NOW??? WORST OF ALL I COULD HAVE PLACED THE BID MYSELF!!!!

Please review the "News and Updates" forum on our boards.

The specific post:
https://community.auctionsniper.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=84260069&f=975608021&m=663103248&r=828103248#828103248

As of 9:30pm we should be processing the "Confirm Bid" page that eBay released today and all your snipes should be fine from here on out.

-Kevin

Sadly it's a fact of life - eBay doesn't warn of impending changes so AS has to react to them as quickly as it can. There's a risk that some snipes won't 'work' during the lapse between change and fix, it's small but you have to accept that it exists.

R2 (who never types in CAPITALS unless he's really angry!)

There’s also the situation that tattoo762x39 had:

>> here <<

Why didn't you put a banner on your site saying there was a problem? Or send an e-mail to people with pending snipes telling them to bid manually? Even when you knew there was a problem, you didn't inform your users.

Good idea - you'd think that a system could be set up that would email all users likely to be effected by a problem. It cannot be that hard to implement, especially as not everyone reads this forum hourly or even daily...

What do you reckon Bill (he works for AS!)???

R2

Also would have appreciated an email explaining why my winning bid was not placed. I know it was not AS's fault, but I most likely lost a killer deal, and didn't even recieve the normal "You did Win" "You Didn't Win" emails.

I agree wholeheartedly that AS should have done
SOMETHING, especially the fact that they didn't
even send the won/lost message. In politics there are "little things"that turn out to be
"big things"and I think this is definitely one
of the latter.

I agree - AS needs to look into how it handles these situations (ie. where an ebay change throws them off), especially if they want to keep the punters sweet.

Thought: what if ebay makes a change that AS cannot cope with? eg. Character recognition on the confirm page... Quick, sell those AS shares!

R2

quote:

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Or send an e-mail to people with pending snipes telling them to bid manually?

---

This actually is not a bad idea! Once AS support determines there is a problem with the ebay-AS link after an ebay software change, they could "flip a software switch" that would automaticly e-mail users with scheduled upcoming snipes, warn them of the problem, and encourage manual bidding/sniping. The DOWNSIDE (for the users) is that then the AS programmers could forget about fixing the problem until regular business hours the next day!

I don't have a dog in this fight as I had no snipes affected by this recent outage. However, I DO realize the precarious position AS is in -- always having to RESPOND to software changes ebay makes without warning! Personally, I think the AS folks made a heroic effort ON A SUNDAY WHEN MOST PEOPLE HAVE OFF FROM WORK to get the AS software coping with the ebay changes.

Actually, it seems kind of odd ebay rolled in software changes on their busiest day of the week! It's almost as if they INTENDED to confound the various software services that work simbiotically with ebay!

Did you notice the News and Updates is empty on the front page?

At least I was lucky: when AS didn't get my bid in (the auction closed 1/25), the auction closed with no bidders. I contacted the Seller (item #5746303471) and arranged the buy directly. (This item is RARE, and if I had missed out on it, I could have paid 10x as much retail as for this "used" item.)
Until I got into the Forum, I thought this problem was limited to me. Not so. --What also disturbed me was the explanation for "DID NOT WIN": as detailed in the subsequent text, the reason for "DID NOT WIN" was "DID NOT WIN". D-U-M-B!!

quote:

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Originally posted by Kevin:
Please review the "News and Updates" forum on our boards.

---

It's not like we're all monitoring news and updates 24 hours a day, and I hope you aren't expecting us to.

I too lost a few bids, one of them was very important.

I agree with the other users. Next time, be prepared and have an e-mail ready to be triggered telling us that the system is broken and that we have to bid manually.

I'm surprised this wasn't in place already.

The excuse that it was posted to News and Updates is just totally lame and caused a lot people to miss out on auction wins.

--

Come on AS - a nice bit of TLC seems to be what's needed now, even if it wasn't your fault!

R2

quote:

---

Actually, it seems kind of odd ebay rolled in software changes on their busiest day of the week! It's almost as if they INTENDED to confound the various software services that work simbiotically with ebay!

---

Hadn’t thought of that. Then ebay sure did screw up by doing it in the AM instead of the PM.

We are working on creating a more effective way of showing when we believe Auction Sniper is having issues with our interface to eBay. I have seen various recommendations regarding us sending out an e-mail during such situations. Unfortunately, this is not an option due to the length of time it takes to send out bulk e-mails to our customer base.

Hey Bill!

quote:

---

I have seen various recommendations regarding us sending out an e-mail during such situations. Unfortunately, this is not an option due to the length of time it takes to send out bulk e-mails to our customer base.

---

Understandable, but that isn't quite what was recommended. AS's ENTIRE customer base need not be contacted in such situations, only those with imminently pending snipes. The "bulk" e-mails could be batched by who has a pending snipe within the next 15 or 30 or 60 minutes (whichever increment results in a workable number for the bulk e-mailing). The next batch would be those who have a snipe scheduled in the next time increment, and etc. to some arbitrarily set advance time (maybe 4 - 6 hours out, or maybe this could be set when the routine is initiated). As each hour (or maybe time increment) passes without the problem being resolved, the next batch of customers with snipes scheduled 5-6 hours out would be e-mailed.

While I'm sure this isn't a quick piece of code to write, it would be a very useful little routine that could be called into use every time ebay makes a change that adversely affects the AS-ebay interface. Not only that, it would go a long way to sooth customers' ruffled feathers when there is an AS "outage" due to ebay changes.

Is this a common practice – sending out emails when a service isn’t servicing? Grant it, I don’t get out that often, but I haven’t encountered it.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jabbergah:
AS's ENTIRE customer base need not be contacted in such situations, only those with imminently pending snipes. The "bulk" e-mails could be batched by who has a pending snipe within the next 15 or 30 or 60 minutes (whichever increment results in a workable number for the bulk e-mailing). The next batch would be those who have a snipe scheduled in the next time increment, and etc. to some arbitrarily set advance time (maybe 4 - 6 hours out, or maybe this could be set when the routine is initiated). As each hour (or maybe time increment) passes without the problem being resolved, the next batch of customers with snipes scheduled 5-6 hours out would be e-mailed.

---

Since we’re brainstorming, here are some issues:

• Someone might place their snipe right before the auction ends. Wouldn’t the routine need to also monitor all new snipes as they are being placed so the user could be warned/emailed? If *everyone* received an email, then all new snipes wouldn’t need to be monitored, but then that’s back to the “bulk” email problem.
  
  
• What duration of downtime would warrant sending emails? 30 minutes? 1 hour? 2 hours?
  
  
• How do you determine, in advance, how long the service will be down?
  
  
• Do you want to send emails to users if the service is only going to be down for 15 or 30 minutes? Might not mass hysteria kick in? What if it turns out it’s only down for 5 minutes (allowing for the time it takes the programmers to make some coffee)?
  
  
• Of course, there are the few poor souls that can’t sign onto eBay at work and place a manual snipe or a proxy bid, so with the uncertainty of the duration of the down time, would it be best to email them even if their snipes are say 10 hours out (allowing them enough time to work, get home, read their emails and place a manual snipe or proxy bid)?
  
  
• Would you also send out a “The sniping system is back up” message?
  
  
• How would you respond to those that received a warning email and then placed a proxy bid which started a bidding war and were then notified that AS was back up within time for AS to have placed their snipe? There’s also the issue that AS would charge them for the snipe even if the proxy bid won.
  
  
• What happens if the problem is with the server, or servers, that stores the snipes? Put another way – how can the upcoming snipes be determined when the thing that knows about the upcoming snipes is down?
  
  
• Do you want the AS techie/techies using brain cells thinking about when/how/if to implement the notification system, or spending their full energies fixing the problem?
  
  
• What is the priority of this improvement/enhancement? Does it make sense to spend programming resources addressing this, or can the time be better spent elsewhere? (Infinite needs – finite resources)

I suspect that any system implemented will only replace the current ruffled feathers with other ruffled feathers (same bird, just different feathers).