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TAGnotes Mon 30 Oct 2000 Vol 2 Number 156 Issue 238

The Auction Guild Notes for Mon 30 Oct 2000
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THANK YOU FOR TAKING OUR SURVEY. THE RESULT
842 subscribers, 146 responded (17%) 88 (60%) want the details
of the outages in TAGnotes and 58 (40%) want a Summary in
TAGnotes with a link to the website. We will continue to put
the details in TAGnotes. We will also continue to post details
of severe problems on the website. TAG hopes these constant
outages get resolved soon, so that TAGnotes is not dominated
by this detailed and somewhat tedious, but very useful information.
Please continue to provide us with your input, and we thank you
for assisting us with this decision.

Support TAGnotes - get two of your friends or associates to subscribe.
If you have any comments, questions, information, ideas or
suggestions please email us at tagn-@theauctionguild.com
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On 28 Oct 06:56:02 PT Listing was not working. At 08:55:23 PT
revise and relist an auction were not working on WEBTV. AT
12:46:26 ebaY posted that they took down the account tab in My
ebaY and account status and they would not be available from
13:15 PT to 13:45 PT.   At 14:16:58 PT Mister Lister was not
working and back up at 14:36:42 PT. At 14:36:55 PT Users reported
that search had slowed down to a crawl. At 16:51:39 PT cgi3 started
throwing errors when posting. Soon after that ebaY settled down and
worked for the rest on the evening.

On 29 Oct at 05:38:36 PT My ebaY was not working, only showing a
maximum of 300 auctions. At 13:01:56 PT ebaY posted that the
Disney co-brand site was unavailable between 09:30 PT and 12:30 PT.
At 17:57:34 PT search started having intermittent problems and outages.
These lasted until approx 18:21 PT. The site ran well for the rest of
the evening.

ebaY posted on 30 Oct at 11:38:18 PT that they have imposed a
temporary 300 item limit on the selling tab within My ebaY. This is
to reduce the load on their back-end databases.   In January ebaY will
paginate the My ebaY tables, including the Items I’m Selling table.
When this is finished users will then be able to get the entire list of
items through My ebaY. You can see your whole seller list by doing a
seller search from
http://pages.ebay.com/search/items/search_seller.html
A workaround for this problem, discovered by a TAG subscriber,
is to go to ebaY UK or ebaY AU and access My ebaY from there.
http://www.ebay.com.au/   http://www.ebay.co.uk/
At 19:37:03 PT ebaY cgi3, cgi6 and most site functions went down.
This lasted until 19:49:26 PT. ebaY posted at 19:51:56 PT that
View Items was unavailable from 19:32 PT until 19:37 PT.

TAG strongly recommends that anyone who feels their auctions were
negatively impacted by these outages apply for credit. Request listing,
special feature and Final Value Fees. Go to the form at
http://cgi3.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?
SendSupportEmailShow&subject=Credit%20--%20How%20can
%20I%20receive%20credit%20for%20insertion%20fees%3F%20
Send -
* The item number(s) of the ended auction(s)
* The specific fee(s) charged for them
* Your seller's email address or User ID
* The phrase, GIVE CREDIT in the Subject line
This can also be accessed from
http://pages.ebay.com/help/basics/select-support.html
PLEASE - IF YOU ARE DENIED REFUNDS LET US KNOW
TAG can't emphasize enough that sellers should not take NO for an
answer. If you get a refund denial, keep requesting and
re-requesting refunds until you get them. Some sellers are also
challenging ebaY charges to their credit card, based on services
not rendered. TAG recommends you use that as a last resort, if at all.

ebaY has received complaints that some members are receiving an
Input Error when trying to submit items for sale. This can happen
using an older, bookmarked version of the Sell Your Item page.
The bookmarked page may no longer contain all the information
ebaY requires. They recommend you update your bookmarks to the
new page. The problem TAG sees with this, is that for many sellers
the new listing page does not work at all.

Another possible problem sellers should watch for - after you finish
the first page of a listing, and before you submit, carefully
check the special feature check off boxes to make sure ONLY the
features you want are included. It appears that along with all the
other problems with the new listing page, sometimes items show
up checked off even though you did not check them . Review
your auction listings carefully.

ebaY has created category pages for Clothing & Accessories, Home
& Garden, Tickets, and Travel. ebaY plans to do promotions through
Related Categories and Theme Pages. New pages are at
http://pages.ebay.com/catindex/clothing.html
http://pages.ebay.com/catindex/home.html
http://pages.ebay.com/catindex/tickets.html
http://pages.ebay.com/catindex/travel.html
Send feedback to online-@ebay.com

On 30 Oct buy.com announced it was teaming up with Half.com.
To sell New and Used Movies & CDs. Every CD, DVD, and VHS
listing from Half.com will be available for sale on the buy.com site.
Additionally buy.com consumers will be able to sell CDs, DVDs, and
movies they no longer use through this Marketplace. Half.com will
also promote buy.com as a featured seller of new products throughout
its site. The co-branded marketplace is expected to launch in Q1 of
2001.

There is an interesting article about defects in Sun servers. ebaY
uses Sun servers, and this article makes the current prognosis of
site stability on ebaY, questionable.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/1113/6613068a.html

Approx 4.98 million current listing
MedVed 5.1 mil
http://www.medved.net/cgi-bin/cal.exe?EIND
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml
* * * * *
Yahoo Auctions has an extrapolated calculated listing number of
3.9 million auctions. Yahoo is allowing sellers to turn their feedback
ratings on other sites into credits to pay for special features on
Yahoo. They give $1.00 in credit for every positive feedback point.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/phtml/auc/us/promo/ratings_featured.html
TAG has been seeing many posts by sellers who are moving at least
a percentage of their auctions to Yahoo.
Yahoo site map.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/phtml/auc/us/promo/sitemap.html
http://auctions.yahoo.com/
* * * * *
Amazon Auction users have reported 3 days of problems. The site
appears to have been down for approx 7 hours on 27 Oct from approx
00:00 to 07:00. During that outage Amazon did the cross link cut, and
also managed to take down auto relist, and the One click payment system.
Bidders are making payments but sellers have no way to know about the
payment. Sellers are not receiving payment emails and payment history
pages show up blank. There are also isolated reports of open auctions
disappearing.

Basic site information http://www.auctionguild.com
Go to OAI Site Basic Details from left side toolbar.
Amazon listing numbers for 26 Sep, 12 of 19 categories actual
counts, 7 of 19 extrapolated counts. Total listings 1,094,439
http://www.amazon.com
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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.
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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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THE AUCTION GUILD
and eTRADERS GUILD
www.auctionguild.com
Not just a venue
877-SAFETAG
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