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TAGnotes Mon 2 Apr 2001 Vol 3 Number 45 Issue 306
 

The Auction Guild Notes for Mon 2 Apr 2001
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1 April Time Problem Overview -
On 1 April ebaY had a major system glitch that caused problems
with auction closing times for the entire day. To start with ebaY's
clocks were set forward two hours instead of the requisite one.
They then starting ending auctions early based on the incorrect
clock settings.   By 12:12:20 PT ebaY Glitch Time (eGT), ebaY had
stopped ending the auctions early, but the times were still off.
Search was on eGT, but the auctions were on Pacific DaylightSavings
Time so would disappear from all the search systems an hour before
the auction ended.

At 06:53:46 eGT users reported the ebaY clock was off by one hour,
and what should have been 05:53:46 PDT was instead reading
06:53:46 PDT, which was actually mountain time. At 07:51:53 eGT users
reported getting messages reading "Internal Error If this problem
persists, please notify Customer Service" when trying to view auction
pages. At 09:49:28 eGT users reported cgi 3 errors on the boards. At
10:11:20 eGT Jerry@ebaY posted that, " FYIOur operations
department is aware of the time problems. Unfortunately I don't
know when it will be fixed; but it should be soon" At 10:12:25 eGT
ebaY posted that they had temporarily stopped sending End-of-
Auction notices as the generation of the notices was responsible for
ending auctions early. They also posted that they were also aware
that some pages of the site were displaying incorrect times, such as
search results, listing pages and the chat boards.The ending time
listed on the actual auction page was correct. At 11:12:25 eGT
ebaY posted the same information again. At 13:21:31 eGT users
again reported the inability to view auctions. Seller search was
reported down at 14:38:24 eGT. At 14:55:17 eGT Katy @ebaY
acknowledged that there WERE problems at ebaY causing all the
internal error messages, and said, "Thanks for the help, folks. We
have located a bad machine and will resolve the problem. In the
meantime, you should be able to connect to another one by reloading
the page", yet nothing was posted on the ebaY status board, and all
the lights on the status board stayed green. At 17:22:28 eGT ebaY
posted that they had determined the time glitch was caused by a
bug in the Visual C++ Runtime (CRT) program. "This program
contains a function called "cvtdate()," and that is the code which
determines how dates and times are handled in the database. The
bug, as published by Microsoft, impacted auctions running during the
change to Daylight Savings Time. If you would like to read more
about this bug, please visit the page below:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/headlines/2001.asp" What ebaY
failed to note was that this bulletin had been published by Microsoft
in 1999. ebaY was only 2 YEARS behind on their service bulletin
update. ebaY also noted that they were again sending End-of-Auction
(EOA) notices. Though the auction would have ended at the correct
time, the EOA would reflect eGT. ebaY posted that they intended
to fix the glitch and synchronize the times on all ebaY pages,
including the EOA notices. Users also started to report items sold
on the second listing via BIN were NOT refunded their relist fees
again. At 20:01:26 eGT users reported the site slowed down to a
crawl. This was the last problem reported for 1 Apr, after a completely
disastrous day.

ebaY posted on 2 April at 02:02:22 PT that sellers who have items
listed with end dates between 02:00 on 1 April 02:00 PT on 8 April
will have ending times that are one hour less than expected. For
example, if an item listing was scheduled to end on 7 April at
12:00 noon, it will actually end on April 7 at 11:00 am PDT. The
glitch also caused time discrepancies between Listings, Search
Results and View Item pages. All listings with end dates after
02:00 PDT on 8 Apr display the correct time; items with end
dates between 02:00 on 1 Apr and 02:00 on 8 Apr are the ones
impacted by the glitch. ebaYs fix caused some auctions to end
prematurely and promised to credit all associated fees for
prematurely ended auctions. Also due to the bug, some listings
with end times between 02:00 and 07:00 PDT on 1Apr were ended
prematurely. ebaY will credit associated fees for any listings that
were prematurely ended. At 02:20:49 PT ebaY posted that they planned
to do the site fix between 03:30 and 05:30 PDT. At 05:11:18 PDT
users reported all Me pages missing. Users continued to report that
they had not received credits for relisted items that sold the second
time around. At 06:08:34 PT users reported receiving connection
reset messages whilst trying to access ebaY. At 18:07:52 PT
ebaY again posted that sellers who had auctions ended prematurely
ebaY will credit all associated fees for that auction. If your auction
was affected, this credit will appear on your Account Status as an
"Outage Credit" before the April 15th billing cycle. At 18:34:20 PT ebaY
acknowledged that My eBay and Sell Your Item were
intermittently down. ebaY reported at 18:52:20 PT that all the
problems were fixed.

TAG strongly recommends that ALL sellers TRACK your auctions
and record what credits, refunds and rebates you feel you should
receive for outages, relist credits, Billpoint rebates etc. ebaY is
NOT doing this sufficiently well enough for sellers to risk ebaYs
accounting. Many third party service providers and programs might
already accomplish this for you.

To request refunds from ebaY go to
http://www.auctionguild.com/generic.html?pid=33

Pink Quote of the Day in a flash of understatement, that only emphasizes
the incompetence of ebaY, Josh@ebaY the ebaY debugging expert when asked
why ebaY was running the older version of C++ said," haw! no, we're
still on VC5 for a number of reasons, such as stability. We're probably
changing soon to VC6; today, I wish we had done it last week." TAG
wonders if he or ebaY can imagine how the sellers who lost thousands of
dollars due to ebaY not planning for a problem that was widely
publicized in 1999 feel. Service bulletins were out, articles were
written, but somehow ebaY failed to notice.

ebaY has extended Buy It Now as a free feature through the second
quarter of this year.

To make sure your HTML works BEFORE you finish your listings,
test your HTML at a site such as this one. This will be of great
assistance to avoid problems with tables and td tags, along with
other HTML problems -
http://watson.addy.com/
It will catch all of the common mistakes like unmatched tags.

ebaY is planning on opening Storefronts. ebaY wants to set up
standard online stores to sell products with fixed prices in addition
to auction-based listings, to catch more of the sales made off ebaY.
Currently this is projected to happen in 2 to 3 months. TAG warns
that this move may be followed by the shutting down of all outside
of ebaY links. For an article on this go to
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/010401/nysu002.html

For sellers who feel they have not had their refunds or other situations
dealt with to your satisfaction, you can file reports with
The Attorney General of California and also in your home state
http://caag.state.ca.us/piu/mailform.htm
The Better Business Bureau
http://www.bbbonline.com
The Federal Trade Commission
http://www.ftc.gov
The Office of Consumer Affair, US Department of Commerce
send email to - Caff-@doc.gov
The FBI's Internet Fraud Units
http://www.nipc.gov/contact.htm#arrow,
National Fraud Information Center
http://www.fraud.org
eComplaints http://www.ecomplaints.com/

If you have access problems on ebaY try one of these anonymizers
Masking servers list http://webveil.com/matrix.html
http:safeweb.com
http://www.surfola.com/
http://www.iprive.com/index.shtml very
http://www.dis.org/erehwon/anonymity.html
http://www.cyberarmy.com

TAG strongly recommends ALL users read the new User and
Privacy Policy Agreements (UA/PP).   
For a summary of the revisions to the UA and Privacy Policy, go to:
User Agreement: http://pages.ebay.com/help\basics\uarevision1-faq.html
Privacy Policy: http://pages.ebay.com/help/basics/pprevision1-faq.html
To view the entire revised User Agreement, go to:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/png-user.html
To view the enter revised Privacy Policy, go to:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/png-priv.html

ebaY has added an interesting clause to their user agreement "You agree
that this Agreement and all incorporated agreements may be automatically
assigned by eBay, in our sole discretion, to a third party in the event
of a merger or acquisition." This is in section
19 of the User Agreement.

For workarounds to ebaY's email system and attempt at exclusive
agency go to http://www.auctionguild.com/generic.html?pid=50

ebaY Contact Information, analog mail and email addresses and
phone numbers, regular and toll free, refund info and insider
trading info go to http://www.auctionguild.com/generic.html?pid=17
* * * * *
Amazon Auctions, zShops and Marketplace
Amazon User chat board
http://amazon.remarq.com/amazon/threads.asp?g=discuss%2
Eamazon%2Eseller%2Econnection&nav=LAST

Amazon owned Bibliofind.Com is free for the
bookselling community.
http://www.bibliofind.com/joiningbibliofind.htm

Amazon live telephone customer service 16 hours a day Toll-free
in U.S. and Canada: (800)201-7575
Approx 815,000 with an unknown number of duplicate listed items
based on 11 categories actual counts, 9 categories estimated counts.
http://auctions.amazon.com
* * * * *
Yahoo Auction
Yahoo announcement board
http://auctions.yahoo.com/phtml/auc/us/promo/announcements.html

Yahoo site map.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/phtml/auc/us/promo/sitemap.html
http://auctions.yahoo.com/

Yahoo Contact Information
http://www.auctionguild.com/generic.html?pid=38
Yahoo PayDirect phone number
1-877-521-1458

Actual auction count 21 Mar 267,761 of all auctions available via
the Yahoo category page. Spot check yields a 10% bid rate and an
approx 1.5% daily sell through rate including take it now sales.
http://list.auctions.yahoo.com/
* * * * *
Online Auction Users Association
Live chats -
Thursday 12 April 21:00 ET - Chat with Ewanted
Monday 16 April 21:30 or 22:00 p.m. ET - Trivia Night with
Trivia Master Steve
Thursday 19 Apr 21:00 ET - Chat with OAUA President Jen Hassler

Interested in volunteering and serving the Online Auction Community?
Check out http://www.auctionusers.org/volunteerop.shtml
http://www.auctionusers.org
* * * * *
Online Auction & Trading Site Co-op
Interested in an OAT Site Co-op?
Interested in getting involved?
Information on co-ops -
http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/rbs/pub/cir55/cir55rpt.htm
http://www.wisc.edu/uwcc/
Ideas for co-ops continue to develop
To participate in weekly live co-op chats go to
http://pages.zdnet.com/labellebooks/OnlineSellersCoop/
Every Sunday Night at 8:00 PM EST.

Vintage Items Co-Op info can be found at
http://www.ali-baba.org./ and
http://pages.zdnet.com/juststuff/vintmarket/
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***PLEASE NOTE: Many long links we post in TAGnotes must be
copy/pasted into your browsers URL/Address box in pieces, with no
extra spaces, to get them to work due to HTML limitations****
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If you would like an Auction House or Service Provider added to
this list, please email us at ta-@theauctionguild.com
Have any information for us? email us at ta-@theauctionguild.com
TAG Subscribers have often contributed to information reported on in
TAGnotes. Visit their auctions.
         TAGassist Contributors -
http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/customer-glance/
A5TGMPMTNX03S/104-1323617-7144715

http://www.dandelionfarms.com

http://www.pcalton.com/beanies.html

http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand=
ViewListedItems&userid=bllamb&include=0&since=-1&sort=3&rows=200

http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand=
ViewListedItems&userid=env13&include=0&since=-1&sort=2&rows=200

http://www.marknliz.com/ebayonly/mygallery.htm
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