Alert: Site Maintenance Mnnday, March 6

hello joe.
my pictures were down today,and the alert that i got yesterday said that it be moved today.i put a notice in all my listings that the picture server was down and that was why you couldn't see my pictures to my listings.is it going to happen again, and i need to leave the notices in my listings for the time being r can i now remove them,thank you susan

Hi,

When the move is made things will be down for a bit, but after that it should be smooth sailing. It's probably a good idea to leave the notice around until we're fully switched over.

Joe

Will buyers have problems completing transactions while the servers are down?

abcdogstore,

Yes, if you use Auctiva checkout, your customers will not be able to check out during the time when the site is offline.

-Mike

How can we add pictures through ebay to a listing. Hope all goes well but I just want to be prepared. Thanks, Mike

Just a heads up, not only will pictures be down, but some auction templates will not display correctly. Templates such as "garden box" use a .jpg in the background. If you are using custom text, such as white text on green background, your item descriptions may not be visible.

Good luck on the move on Friday night. I'm anxious to see the differences on Saturday.

what about a white text on a red background?
do i need to change that to a different color

most of my listings are ending saturday .Do you have a time table of when everything should be completed?

Did you get an answer to this? I have 4 auctions ending and NO PICTURES!!!!!!!

And by the way. It is not 9PM and my pictures are down! If it was down when you said it would be i wouldn't be in a panic. How can I get pictures up for auctions that end today?!

I thought I had a handle on the image down time-Last night I determined that 9pm pst- was three hours after my auctions ended so I didn't really have anything to worry about other than other auctions that had plenty of time on remaining on them- and could deal with losing images for the specified down time. After I loaded images onto photobucket for the auction that ended tonight- i decided i didn't need to add to my description ( i had bids) and went to bed with some peace of mind. Now I just checked on my auction thats ending in 6 hours and no images- I should've added the photobucket images just to be safe, but too late now. grrrrrr.! HOWEVER, i do appreciate auctiva and its "freeness" so I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me- just wanted to get that off my chest.

Ruth,,If your auctions are ending today, have bids or less than 12hrs I think you are in the same boat as me (& probably many of us).

Big Problems here..

Ebay in the UK is doing a 50% off listings today, so I thought I would take advantage and get some listings up using features or highlights, something I don't normally bother with.
It's now 18.27 here and only 10.27 PST but the servers are down already!!
I thought I would have time to load my listings to Ebay before the servers were supposed to go down at 21.00 PST. I've got over a dozen listings waiting to go and I can't get them

Anyone got any idea what's going on ?

However as has been mentioned - it's free - don't bite the hand etc. etc!

Hey StuggyStuff,

In anticipation of images being down, I've been uploading all my images for new listings to photobucket dot com (they are free too). '

As well as currently most of my autiva hosted images are down (even though it is only 1:15 PST), but my photobucket ones seem to always be steady. I just don't rely on them soley either!

Good luck

Hi Mystic,

I agree, I've used photobucket for a while and have recommended it in other forums. I always upload the same images as I do with Auctiva. I think the problem starts when Ebay has two image sources. I keep a second account on Ebay just so I can look at my listings as a buyer would and a lot of the time if you rely on two hosting services then the listings end up looking very untidy and not professional.
I'd love Auctiva to be up and available all the time but that will never happen unless they generate more money from somewhere. It's absolutely brilliant as a free service, but in the end it is free so what can you do ?

Regards, Stu

"unless they generate more money from somewhere" begs the question, do you buy insurance from them? If more sellers required insurance on their listings, they would have plenty of revenue and we would not have to wonder if they will start charging for the service. Besides insurance does give some peace of mind.

Auctive missed out on a resonable sum of insurance money from me this week purely because a. i don't have the checkout enabled as a lot of my sales are combined shipping which it can't handle and b. the completed transactions haven't been relayed from ebay to auctiva so i haven't been able to purchase the insurance for customers! I've had to got with usps or ups and i wouldn't be surprised if it was about $10 worth of insurance just this week alone. My completed transactions list is missing approx 40 items! Lost revenue is all i can say!

Hi Roamer,

No I don't buy insurance BUT only because I'm based in the UK. I've asked in another forum whether it may be available in the UK at some point.
I would love to buy insurance through Auctiva.
I don't know anything about the USA but postal insurance over here is totally restrictive.
You can have 'recorded' i.e signed for, but that only covers about $60 and that's if you're lucky AND you can be a***d to fill in all the paperwork AND the recipient is helpful.
The next one we have above that is the proper insured package but that STARTS at $15 per item.
PLEASE give me an insurance deal that I can use over here.
I've recommended Auctiva to loads of people but unfortunately all are UK based, so in a way we are using resources for free with no way of compensating for that.
As I've said, even though it's free it is really great to use and I'd love to help.

That's up to Auctiva management.....

Regards, Stu

Jeff - I can't imagine what you are thinking. My response in oh so slow thread was an attempt to get you to step back and make some tough decisions. Having been in the outsourcing business most of my life, I would have been fired for trying to do what you are doing. Programming 101, when you have serious problems, keep your head and do not make drastic, hasty changes. If you have doubts, what are too think? Your the CEO for godsakes! Don't air your doubts in this forum, get enough technical expertise to analyse the situation adn advise you, then make a decision and stick to it, good or bad.

Since you seem to be having trouble deciding, if I were voting (well I guess I am since I am taking everything off of auctiva like most others) I would follow the suggestions I had in the other post. Manage the problems you have now as you get your users to saftey. By that I mean an orderly shut down of your service, tell us all to quit using the service, hell our auctions can't be running for more than 10 days. If you prevented any new activity starting right now, in 10 days you could make this entire move RISK FREE. You would not have to be worrying if you were going to introduce more pain or not. I am having a hard time understanding why this is not the obvious path!

I hope other post but if you told me I needed to stop using the service for 30 days while you moved to your new data center and that you wouldn't let me back on until you were sure you had a service that could provide the stellar service you want to provide. Guess what, not only would I respect that decision, but I would think, wow, auctiva has my interest as their primary concern, you know, turn this into as good of thing as you can. I would be happy to come back at the point in time you let us all know you thought you had a handle on things and I would come back with little fear.

Making a move with all of us using the service and being so unsure, well I can't imagine not always being afraid that poor IT decision's may bite me at any time.

I hope others will share their views. Jeff, I am not trying to slam you, I stated that in my other post. I even invited you to email me personally, but I do feel strongly the current situation is not being handled in your customers best interest. I have a selfish reason to see that change because as I mentioned in my other post, I would really like to see activa survive however in my outsourcing experience, activa is making bad decisions on top of bad problems and I fear that might not be survivable.

Good Luck in whatever path you choose, I personally, as with your other customers, will be better served if your path works out!