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TAGnotes Mon 18 Sep 2000 Vol 2 Number 135 Issue 217
 

The Auction Guild Notes for Monday 18 Sep 2000
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*******VOTE******* VOTE******* VOTE********
The Million Auction March wants to move you to VOTE.
List your items on V enues O ther T han E bay
For more information go to http://www.millionauctionmarch.com
New Auction Houses, Sales Venues and Service Providers are
joining daily. All are offering incentives and specials to the OAI.
If you have any comments, questions, information, ideas or
suggestions please email us at tag@theauctionguild.com
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ebaY had a full day of intermittent outages and problems on 17 Sep.
ebaY reported at 17:55:14 PT on 17 Sep that from 17:25 PT they had
intermittent availability problems. At 19:40:39 PT they reported that
the problems were resolved at 17:44 PT, with the exception of feedback.
The feedback problems lasted until approximately 18:01 PT. ebaY claimed
that all areas of the site were working after 18:01 PT. In contrast
users reported on the OAI boards that on 17 Sep at 07:15:09 PT ebaY view
item and My ebaY, were down and search was not working. At 3:50:10 PT
ebaY's pic hosting was reported by users as not working. A red x was
all that showed up, no pictures. At 14:33:17 PT users got network error
messages with cgi3 down. The site stabilized for a few hours but
trouble started again as reported by ebaY. At 17:59:47 PT cgi3 on the
UK site also started throwing network error messages. At 17:55:14 PT
ebaY itself reported that they were having problems. The access
problems appear to have cleared up after 18:00 but several other
problems emerged. The first was acknowledgement by ebaY in a message to
a seller that Mister Lister was not working. In the message posted by
the seller, ebaY said - QUOTE one of our servers has been down since
late Friday early Saturday morning. As a result, many members are unable
to post items to eBay to review, using this program. Please be assured
that our engineers are working on the trouble, however it does seem to
be caused by a piece of hardware. We have ordered the part and with some
luck hope to have it Monday. Once replaced, you should begin being able
to upload your collections later that day. ENDQUOTE

Another problem noted on the boards was an incompatibility between
Netscape 4.7x and My ebaY.

There is also a problem where an auction closes, and shows a winning
bidder with a winning bid. Most sellers do not rely on ebaYs
intermittent and usually late end of auction notices to send out
end of auction (EOA) emails, they rely on what is posted on My
ebaY and the auction item page. In several cases noted on the
OAI boards, when the end of auction notice finally showed up
two days later, the bidder and final bid amount in the notice was
different than the one shown at the end of the auction. The item
page was updated correspondingly was also updated to show a
different bidder and closing amount. A user posted this example
of the problem QUOTE -
http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&item=422694889 When
the auction first ended, it showed that winning bidder at $163.25. Sent
the email off, only to hear back the next day that she was not the
winner - went back and looked at the auction, and found out that there
was quite a difference not only in the amount, but who the winner was.
Note when the time of the winning bid was placed now that's a REAL
sniper! eBay did not show this person as the winner until 24 hours
later. Apparently, after reading your messages, this is not just an
isolated incident. ENDQUOTE This
appears to be happening with bids made in the last few seconds
of the auction.

Some users received non-valid outbid notices. When the auction
ended they were the high bidder after all, even though there had
been no bid cancellations. There were also cases of putting in a bid
of $15.15, and it came up $1515.00. After canceling the bid and
going back to the item to rebid, and carefully reentering the bid,
this time for $14.14, it came up $1414.00. Based on this seller report
check your bids, carefully.

On 18 Sep at 18:37:16 PT ebaY reported that Billpoint was
intermittently down, beginning at about 17:11 PT. 18:59:35 PT
ebaY reported the problems with Billpoint were fixed. There were
reports on the boards throughout the day of infrequent, very short,
intermittent problems with site access, search, ability to list and
relist items.

ebaY is featuring Sports items and Tickets/Experiences featured on
the ebaY home page and throughout eBay as part of an eBay on eBay
promotion. Every two weeks, two categories will be featured to
introduce items.

A third party is forging the email headers to make emails that users
are receiving appear as if they had originated with eBay. This forging
technique is simple to do and impossible to prevent. Some of the forged
email addresses are as follows:
tra-@ebay.com
trav-@ebay.com
2tra-@ebay.com
eBaymembe-@subdimension.com
Report any instances of these email to ebaY by forwarding them to
supp-@ebay.com with full headers. ebaY is NOT participating in
this promotion or give-away.
ebaY reminds users to practice safe trading -
1. Do not give out your credit card information via email. ebaY will
never ask you to submit your credit card information via email, and
no other legitimate organization will either.
2. Do not give out your password.
3.   Change your password on a regular basis. To change your ebaY
password, go to http://pages.ebay.com/services/myebay/selectpass.html

Approx 4.91 million current listing
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml
* * * * *
Yahoo Auctions has been having some adjustment problems. They
are trying to make their site more professional, cut down on non
auctions and deadbeat bidders. From TAGs point of view, though these
goals are worthy and will probably help the site improve, unfortunately
the way the changes are being implemented leaves much to be desired.
For example, all buyers need to be credit card verified. There is no
accommodation made for those people who don't have credit cards (or if
there is we could not find it, and got no response to our queries to
customer support), and the established buyers on the site were not
grandfathered, as they should have been. We have also heard that a buyer
just gets a message that he/she cannot place a bid, but are not told
WHY. For a new registration, this is not a problem, as they must
provide a credit card to register, but for pre CC verified buyers, there
is no message provided telling them they must verify.

The implementation of the CC verify has also raised the bar on who
can bid. If you have your auctions set to have a minimum bidder
rating OR a credit card, this is now interpreted as needing a CC
AND the minimum set rating. Since changes to auctions must be
made one at a time, this mid stream change makes it very difficult
for large sellers who do 2 auto relists, to correct this anomaly. This
may severely limit the numbers of buyers who MAY bid on their
auctions for three to four weeks.

The possible consequences of all these site changes appear to not
have been thought through before implementation. They will all
probably be worthwhile in the long run, but in the short term they
have hurt their users. A better implementation program, and
consultation with the folks most effected, would have made the
changes better accepted, and the price to the users less costly.

Basic site information http://www.auctionguild.com
Go to OAI Site Basic Details from left side toolbar.
Yahoo site map
http://auctions.yahoo.com/phtml/auc/us/promo/sitemap.html
13 Sep actual count 2.32 million.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/
* * * * *
Amazon Auctions have been very negatively impacted by the site
navigation changes. Many sellers are reporting a serious reduction
in sales. There have also been serious problems with listings moving
from the not yet open state to the current auction state. This includes
both new listings and auto-relists. Auctions are taking more than 24
hours before they become active. Customer service has reported to some
sellers that the problem is being worked on, and to others that Amazon
doesn't know about this problem. Amazon has once
again resumed telling customers that the customer calling is the only
one with the problem, and to clear their cache. TAG observes that this
is the standard Amazon answer when they do not want to deal with
an Amazon Auction problem. Are the few person to person auction
sellers still trying to sell on Amazon going to be the last ones Amazon
lets know that Amazon Auctions are no longer an option?

Basic site information http://www.auctionguild.com
Go to OAI Site Basic Details from left side toolbar.
http://www.amazon.com
* * * * *
Invenna AuctionAmigo auction management software is running
a sweepstakes with prizes that include a Kodak digital camera, a
Handspring Visor, an HP Scanner and more. To enter, Auctions
must have ebaY Start Times from 12:01AM (PT) September 9th
to 11:59AM (PT) October 9th. Each listing counts as an entry into
the sweepstakes. No purchase or registration necessary, they will
notify the winners automatically.
http://www.invenna.com/promotion/sweepstakes.htm
* * * * *
PayPal TAG is still waiting to hear from the PayPal rep. We keep
making appointments with them to call, and they have not yet called.
Check these links to the original PayPal agreement
http://server3002.freeyellow.com/j-d/pay-pal-for-auctions.html
http://server3002.freeyellow.com/j-d/uses.html
http://server3002.freeyellow.com/j-d/logo.html
http://server3002.freeyellow.com/j-d/terms-of-use.html

Posts on the OAI boards noted that the PayPal site was inaccessible
for most of the day today 18 Sep. Users got error messages and
heavy traffic messages. http://www.paypal.com
* * * * *
OAUA first anniversary celebrations can be found at
http://auctionusers.org/birthday/birthday.html
JOIN the OAUA today. http://www.oaua.com
* * * * *
If you would like an Auction House or Service Provider added to
this list, please email us at tag@theauctionguild.com
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