As many of you know, eBay, and virtually all of the companies that
support eBay, were bombarded yesterday during eBay's Free Listing Day.
Every major player in the industry was overwhelmed by sellers taking
advantage of eBay's Free Listing Day. Unfortunately, eBay was unable to
accept all the launches being sent its way and had serious problems with
its image hosting and listing services as well.
As a result, the Auctionworks system was stretched to its limits.
Auctionworks launched a record number of auctions yesterday. In addition,
a number of seller auctions queued up to launch were not able to launch
prior to the end of Free Listing Day. [b] On average, each user launched
10 times what they would normally launch. [/b]
This overwhelmed our system.
For this we apologize.
We are taking several steps to ensure that the difficulties experienced
by some of our sellers yesterday will not be repeated. We are
undergoing a series of specific technology enhancements that have been
identified to increase the speed, efficiency and scalability of our entire
platform. As we deploy specific improvements we will continue to keep you
informed of these developments.
posted on June 30, 2001 05:15:23 AM
We have had some reports of the Auction Works meltdown. Despite their posting, they are the ONLY site we have had reports of a failure on. We have also heard unconfimed reports that they prioritized the uploads to ebaY to favor their bigger sellers rather than on a first come first served basis. If that is true - something is REALLY wrong at Auction Works. We have also heard of them kicking off sellers who complained about the poor service. We have emailed them to see if we can get any info on these claims. And as to claims of 'record' launchings - since ebaYs own numbers do not show a significant increase in listings - Approx 5.14 mil auctions inflated by approx 10% for double category listings since double cats were free - yielding approx 4.63 mil auctions. On 22 Jun 2000 ebaY had approx 4.44 million auctions - how could Auction Works have launched a record number? Unless they got a much larger part of the market share of the same stagnant rate of listings. We have not seen any evidence of that either. -Rosalinda
