Re: ICON CONFUSION: Buy It Now Icon versus Buy It Now with BEST OFFER


Cliff wrote:
Hi. As a seller on eBay, I often keep track of my current auctions with
a page such as this...(I might also email this type of link to those
wanting to know my latest sales)...

http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&userid=YOURE
BAYIDHERE&include=0&since=-1&sort=3&rows=50

Lately, some of my auctions have been Fixed Price auctions with Best
Offers accepted. Yet, SOMETIMES (not always), when I look at the page
above, some of my Best Offer auctions show up, mistakenly, with a FIXED
PRICE icon...NOT...the FIXED PRICE with BEST OFFER icon.

The auction in question actually is a BEST OFFER auction, but multiple
auctions are displayed in a list, sometimes the icon graphic is wrongly
displayed.

I contacted eBay and, at first, they could say nothing other than that
this much a cache problem. (For many reasons, I don't think this is
possible. First of all, I know how to refresh a page, and how to clear
the cache, plus I actually run without any cache anyway...slower, but I
always get up-to-date pages.) ALSO...a cache problem, I would think,
could be the cause of why, if eBay happened to change an icon, and I
was cache an icon of the same name, I might see an older icon instead
of a newer icon. But, in this case, I am seeing the WRONG icon...an
icon with a different file name, and thus, a caching problem should NOT
be relevant.

When I mentioned this to eBay, they finally said the problem was that I
was using Firefox on a Macintosh, and eBay is designed to work on a PC
with Internet Explorer!!!! They say many other browsers (Firefox,
Mozilla, Netscape, Safari, etc.) cause such problems. Even this
explanation doesn't make a lot of sense.

I believe eBay must be sending down incorrect pages, or information on
different eBay servers are NOT in sync.

Anyway, has anyone else seen any of this kind of behavior? I'm
curious...

THANKS!

Yeah!! Originally (about a month ago) what I was seeing was the wrong
icon PICTURE -- buy-it-now instead of buy-it-now/best offer I
complained and a few days later this thing with the icons actually
alternating when you did a screen refresh started to happen.

THESE PEOPLE HAVE COST ME A LOT OF MONEY. This is obviously
programming-101 -- (1) either the condition statements in the
programming are wrong or (2) they're having a problem with keeping the
replications on their servers synchronized.

I complain a couple of times a week and get the
THERE-THERE-little-customer thingy and nothing gets fixed.

One day I tried bulk-editing all my items to add the BEST OFFER feature
AGAIN. That worked for about four days. Tells me that it's a
replication problem.

I don't know WHY they won't fix it. Maybe they don't have anyone with
the capability to fix it. After all, over the past 15 years, all of
the "computer experts" in their 40s and 50s have been let go. There's
no one out there with the skill and expertise that's needed.

This is an ABSOLUTE OBSCENITY coming from a company with this amount of
daily revenue. They're costing themselves money. Customers that don't
want to pay top dollar are NOT going to actually edit the item to find
the BEST-OFFER button. So they buy NOTHING.

I tried putting a note on one of my custom pages. What I'm going to do
now is actually put something under my store header to indicate that I
accept BEST-OFFERS.

This *IS* ridiculous.

Moi

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