posted on August 22, 2001 12:41:57 PM
In the event someone from Meg's Minions is here, here's something I really wish ebay would offer:
The ability to specify when an auction ends. They could still constrain it to 10 days maximum, no problem there. But sometimes I'd like to run my auction 6 days and 12 hours, because I got a late start on something. But I still want it to close on a Monday night, Sunday night, whatever, instead of doing a 7 day and having it close Monday morning or Tuesday Morning.
Charges could still be the same -- anything over 7 days (168 hours) would be an extra 10 cents, etc. But it would really make it easier to schedule auctions.
I know if I do them in advance with AW, I can scheduled when they start -- but that's not always good enough.
So in other words, I could launch an auction NOW, but it would still end at Sunday at 8:00pm PT or whatever. It seems the longevity of the auction isn't as important as the end time anyway -- not for bidders anyway.
posted on August 23, 2001 11:39:36 AM
Great idea! I listed a few auctions on yahoo and really liked that feature. Seems like it would also take some of the strain off the Ebay servers if people could list at various times throughout the day and still have their auctions end in the evenings. Also free up some good TV watching time! LOL
posted on August 23, 2001 11:46:01 AM
Almost two years ago, eBay told me they'd gotten this suggestion a lot and were looking into it. But here's the url to the suggestion page if you want:
http://pages.ebay.com/community/suggestion/
[ edited by sadie999 on Aug 23, 2001 11:46 AM ]
posted on August 23, 2001 01:44:55 PM
Thanks for the link - I may fire away to them.
It seems odd to me, that in general you have to be there in front of the computer either 72, 120, 168, or 240 hours from when you want a given auction to end. Auctionwatch makes this a little easier, but then you cannot just list and get it out there, you have to pre-schedule them -- so they sit for several hours when someone COULD buy them.
I guess they may want the strain reduced on many, many, many auctions ended at the exact same time. Right now, if you listed manually, you'd close them about 3-5 minutes apart -- which helps. But if everyone closed them at the same exact minute/second -- the strain might be too high.
posted on August 23, 2001 02:44:28 PM
peiklk ...... eBay has been asked for this by sellers for as long as eBay has been eBay.
Quite frankly I doubt you'll ever see it come to pass as their servers most likely couldn't handle the load. [they can barely handle the Sunday night load as it is] Just imagine 4 million sellers dumping all their listings at once on prime time Sunday night. Can you say CRASH?
posted on August 23, 2001 08:18:09 PMkiawok I used to think that too, but how about all of the sellers who are listing their auctions on Sunday evenings to replace their last batch of auctions. They could be uploading their auctions on a Tuesday morning to end on a Sunday and, in effect, reduce some of the load on eBay's servers. I would venture to guess that the busiest nights for uploading auctions are Sunday and Thursday.
I've also asked eBay about this, and they never give a reason for not implementing that feature. Just that it was something they've looked at and decided against.
posted on August 23, 2001 11:49:27 PM
I know I could easily triple my listings if ebay had this feature. I have dead time during the day and wait until night to do listings which really limits how many I can fit in. There's no money in it for ebay that's why they haven't offered it, but they would get extra commission by more sales.
