Again with late listing

I canceled and you posted them anyway. I am livid, if I wanted them on at 9:30 I'd list them at 9:30.
Thanks, Thanks Thanks
When do I list when there is no problems?

Listings stuck in limbo!!!! So today Ebay offers free listings before 12 midnight. Thanks to Auctiva I'm sure I'll be paying for these! Not to mention they'll probably post at 4AM. Seriously - Get This Fixed!! Will you compensate me for the wasted time and fees?

I am so upset with AUCTIVA! Trying to take advantage of Ebay's free auctions today & I've already wasted about an HOUR of reposting failed listings! WASTED PRECIOUS TIME, ENERGY & MONEY!!

I just checked again. This will be my THIRD time reposting at least 15 listings!!! I wanted these auctions to begin at a reasonable time so that they end at a time when more people can tune in for last min bids!! Auctiva SUCKS!

2ND night in a row. Seems to be a time waster and time is $$$$.

Auctiva, honestly, this is absurd!! We can't plan anything as far as listing goes anymore. Lately seems like never ending issues one after another.

Mine show confirmation that they were listed and then when I heck *'s are next to the listings...stuck there. . no indicator that they did not list yet.


This game of does it list, does not now, well maybe it will, maybe it won't is craziness!!

Holidays are coming and we simply can't afford to still be having these problems. This needs to be fixed.

Auctiva please do something before it get to the holiday or we will all be in a mess. This happens more times than I care to think about. If your server can't handle the traffic than fix the server!!! This is not fair nor good business to your paying customers.I could understand once, but this is a growing problem for me.as I said I don't list on Sunday cause you could not fis late listings, yes I did email you the situation, to no avail.I can not be available when my listings go off next week.I will be having a 16 hour infusion. See people set times and time is important.
I have no idea what I will do about this problem but I know so friends have left due to this

I could have posted many more auctions during this one day sale if not for Auctiva's problems! Do you realize how much time is wasted to check what failed, re-post INDIVIDUALLY, then go back to scheduled list to CANCEL so that it doesn't post twice. I've spent more time going to Ebay selling list to delete a few duplicates that went through anyway! How are you going to compensate your paying customers? Time is money & you've wasted much of our valuable time! I'm going to research your competitors..this is maddening!

As a technical geek, maybe I can add some info to help you all understand...since Auctiva doesn't seem to be responding....

When we schedule an auction to post, it gets placed in a special "bucket" on one of Auctiva's servers. The piece of software responsible for handing that bucket over to eBay is SQLServer. SQLServer has a nifty scheduling feature, which allows us programmers to tell it to do things, at a particular time, and then we can walk away, and trust it will indeed get done, at that time.

Well, you can imagine how many of those buckets full of auctions to be handed to eBay, Auctiva has to create. Every minute of every day, SQLServer is handing those big buckets over to eBay, and telling eBay to post this bucket full of auctions.

The problem is, eBay only allows Auctiva to hand over buckets of a certain size. If too many of us jam our auctions in those buckets, the bucket overflows, and Auctiva has to move the overflow, to the next bucket. That's why Auctiva asks us for a window of time that we are willing to post our auctions within.

Bottom line is....I'm not so sure the problems we are all experiencing, is gonna be an easy fix for Auctiva. There's just so many of us, filling up those buckets, that eBay limits the size of. Things spill over to the next bucket, and the next bucket, and here we go, over and over.

Actually, I suspect that this issue will only get worse, as Auctiva's popularity only grows.

Another solution would be for eBay to allow Auctiva to give it larger buckets....but getting eBay to change anything, is pretty remote, since we all know eBay certainly doesn't cater to its user base. eBay limits the bucket size, because they don't want to overload their site. They'd rather limit the auction count, and keep response time high, then to slow down, with too many auctions.

Thanks for the explanation of what you believe it happening.

This is part of auctiva note tonight which leads me, a non techie, to believe auctiva is taking responsibility for this and that it is problem with their posting service NOT ebay.

quote:

We are currently experiencing a backlog with our posting service that is causing some listings that users are attempting to post to appear stuck in "Posting" status on the Scheduled Listings page instead of posting to eBay immediately.

Our engineering team is currently monitoring the situation and will make sure that as many of these listings as possible successfully post to eBay, but it is likely that some of them will fail due to "Not Posted in Time" errors.tiva has posted last night and tonight."

Last night 12th note says it is a problem they are having also.

Obviously, if ebay were the problem they would sure give this one to them. Especially since it was last night also.

As far as ebay, yes, could be, however, I have used auctiva for many, many, many years and this has not been a huge problem until recently. I find it hard to believe that auctiva has just taken OFF with soooo many customers that ebay can't handle their buckets. Especially since a lot of people having commerce stores from what I understand no longer use ebay.

IF that is the case and this is going to continue to be a problem and is going to get worse as auctiva grows, I would sure LOVE to know this from Auctiva. I would assume that there is money somewhere exchanging hands between ebay and auctiva and we all know MONEY talks!! If auctiva has so many customers that ebay can't keep up, I would assume it is in ebay best interest to give auctiva a larger bucket, at a cost of course.

Holidays are coming and if buckets is the case auctiva needs to let us know so we can dual service between auctiva and ebay and get our listings on.

Again, I am not a techie, but seems auctiva would have dumped this bucket on ebay if they could. Most people do not take responsibility for something that is not their problem.

Dirk. If your bucket theory were true, then auctiva could add buckets.

i have longtime experience in data networking and here is my analogy; when there is too much traffic on a highway and there is a bottleneck every day then the city or state improves the infrastructure by adding additional lanes and expanding the highway. Magically additional lanes allows more traffic to flow.
A few years ago it seems Auctiva managed the traffic much better. Its no secret to those of who have been here a while that the user base seems to have diminished substantially (as evidenced by the lack of participation on forums and the disappearance of many forum activists).

What concerns me and may legitimize what you say, Dirk, is that since the acquisition by Alibaba some servers may have been retired and/or perhaps the network itself was downsized. Those are tremendous cost savings measures for Auctiva.

The question is (much like the post outage feedback and requests):
Auctiva how is this to be prevented from happening again? What measures is Auctiva taking?

Dirk, just a thought. WHY in the world would ebay want to limit the bucket size? For EACH listing that is put on they make money whether it sells or not. Just throwing that puppy on there and they get paid. Would you want to limit the money you made by not furnishing a larger bucket? I can't imagine the thought process behind a company doing that? What would the strategy behind this? Ebay is prepared for HUGE quantities of listings to go on. They also do not have the quantity of listings they have had in past due to limiting numbers of fixed price duplicates, muti-variation listings, lots of sellers have abandoned ship and even more have been thrown off of the ship. So bucket's should not be a problem for them on a routine basis.

If I were ebay I would be like bring it on, if you have buckets to fill and dump on my site, I can get you a huge bucket. Most companies are in it to make $$$$ so they would not limit their intake. I have NEVER EVER heard of such.

Also, as far as ebay changing anything, they change all of the time. Gosh, I wish they would sometimes give us a break from the changes, good or bad ones (just a little one).

As far as ebay catering to user base I am finding ebay a much easier pill to swallow lately than I ever have. Their customer service has become GREAT. You can actually talk to a human normally in less then 3 minutes. And shockingly that person seems to have removed their bucket head and can respond with some type of sensible answer.

Again, my claim to fame is for sure not a techie, however, I do have enough business and common sense to know that most companies do not limit their buckets so that people can't use them when each person that hits the door throws money at them.

Now. . if auctiva is willing to put out money for larger buckets, if this bucket theory is correct, that is different story.

Auctiva do we need larger buckets? Is the bucket theory correct or is this an problem on auctiva end as auctiva note on boards implied. Does auctiva need a larger bucket? From ebay, from other sources?

Thanks for your input.

quote:

Originally posted by itsjustme:
Dirk. If your bucket theory were true, then auctiva could add buckets.

i have longtime experience in data networking and here is my analogy; when there is too much traffic on a highway and there is a bottleneck every day then the city or state improves the infrastructure by adding additional lanes and expanding the highway. Magically additional lanes allows more traffic to flow.
A few years ago it seems Auctiva managed the traffic much better. Its no secret to those of who have been here a while that the user base seems to have diminished substantially (as evidenced by the lack of participation on forums and the disappearance of many forum activists).

What concerns me and may legitimize what you say, Dirk, is that since the acquisition by Alibaba some servers may have been retired and/or perhaps the network itself was downsized. Those are tremendous cost savings measures for Auctiva.

The question is (much like the post outage feedback and requests):
Auctiva how is this to be prevented from happening again? What measures is Auctiva taking?

Well... I am leaning towards the above reply as the truth of the matter.

I launch each listing one by one from the SAVED screen... so I KNOW it is posted to ebay at the time I do it. Yes it takes longer but then I KNOW it is posted correctly.

I would schedule listings for 9:30-10PM east coast time and MAYBE it would be listed by 11-12PM or maybe not... or maybe not at all. I just do not use this SCHEDULE feature as it is broken.

I suspect Auctiva has less developers doing coding or else this would be working within 30 days of detection.

Overall... Auctiva is the only game in town for me. I need EASY and professional looking listings on ebay... and I don't need to know HTML.

If I get stuck, then I usually get a same day HELP reply from Auctiva.

There are more glitches it seems... such as weird things going on with photos not showing up on ebay. And then a while back I had Media listings not showing up with the catalog so I was charged full price for the listing by ebay. But they seem to fix issues like these in a reasonable period of time.

What is annoying is I like to launch at around 7PM ebay time weekdays... and the screens are slow loading.... very slow loading some nights and it drives me nuts. I have a fast cable connection so I know it is not me. I had to add some photos the other night and I just gave up.

I don't remember having a slow loading page problem when Auctiva was a FREE service... so what has changed? Less servers? Most every seller on ebay was using Auctiva when it was a FREE service... and there was seldom a server problem.

Another thought is that these servers are now OFFSHORE and Auctiva has no control? We get what we get... for scheduling... and that is it?

So I am happy with Auctiva most of the time... but I wish they would FIX all the features I am paying for in my monthly fee. It would be nice to use the Schedule feature on these specials.

Maybe they need to hire a new developer that can fix that section of code for Scheduling? Or maybe they need some more servers? They need to at least NOTIFY us when there is a problem or is going to be a problem.

very well said tiger and some provocative questions that maybe auctiva will answer.

we are unlikely to hear an answer about downgrading the network or using fewer and fewer servers.

i also use the scheduler so that i am offering my items at peak times. it is useless if those times deviate by more than a few minutes.