posted on October 17, 2000 07:48:00 PM new
This is from the eBay announcement board, their most recent post:
"We also received questions about extending auctions during an unscheduled downtime. If we had gone back into the database to extend auctions, our total downtime would have been extended by at least another 30 minutes. Our primary goal will always be to bring the system up and to make the site available as soon as possible."
Okay, but at least why not CREDIT the final value fees for those auctions you are NOT extending? A great number of them would obviously be hurt by not getting bids in the last hour or minutes.
posted on October 17, 2000 08:08:41 PM new
I for one would much rather have the extension and have the site down for the extra 1/2 hour or even an extra hour or 2!
posted on October 17, 2000 08:27:16 PM new
I thought it was a stupid statement too.I would sooner have another day of bids than be down another 30 mins.
I had a dutch auction that got 30 bids in the last few mins as it ended just as ebaY came back up.How many others did I loose.
I started the items at 1c each hoping they would reach at least 1.00 as they normally would.I got close at 95c but ebaY being down cost me a little money.But another day of listing would have been even better.
posted on October 17, 2000 08:29:45 PM new
Lemme see if I have this right:
EBay institutes the watch feature so that people can easily track our auction without actually bidding on it until the last minute,
This results in w-a-y too many auctions lingering with NO bids until the last moments, thereby depressing prices.
THEN we get random outages that, with eBay’s revisionist history, always fall short of the magical two hours.
===============
There is a great little antique shop about five hours from where I live. Whenever I was in the area I would make a point to go there. Then the owner started having “random hours”. You know, closed on Tuesdays, “back in fifteen minutes” note on the door that turned into 3 hours, closed half a day here and there...
The result is that I no longer have the desire to make the effort to go there.
I think a lot of people feel the same way about eBay as the result of “functionality” problems. There are a lot of folks who have better things to do than hit the refresh button for two hours. Unfortunately, they are called buyers.
