auctionace
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posted on April 22, 2003 09:08:10 AM
Rather strange. As Desi would say to Lucy on many occassions you got some splaining to do Lucy!
Are ioffer items listed on Froogle? I couldn't see any of my new store items listed.
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bonecollector
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posted on April 22, 2003 11:09:39 AM
Looks like the bidville items are listed again. I chalk it up to the beta phase.
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auctionace
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posted on April 22, 2003 01:40:29 PM
When i enter the word bidville in the Froogle search box I get 28,000 plus results.
If you look at the urls you'll see everything but www.bidville.com --- including like link www.alaskanauctions.com 
Is that an acceptable BV beta testing glitch? Still looks like Bidville lost it's listings on Froogle to me. The bidville on Froogle results only can act to steer buyers away from the actual Bidville site.
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toollady
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posted on April 22, 2003 02:26:18 PM
Maybe they were removed because the datafeed included regular auction listings in addition to fixed priced listings.
It's my understanding Froogle is for fixed priced listings only.
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blairwitch
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posted on April 22, 2003 02:33:30 PM
I read about this problem on other boards, but there is no offical word yet as to the cause. auctionace 32,000 ioffer items are listed. 
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mandm50s
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posted on April 22, 2003 06:34:38 PM
Items submitted to Froogle can only be fixed price items and have to be updated every 30 days or they will be deleted. I sent a update for my website yesterday and the changes were showing 2 hours later.
mandm50s
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auctionace
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posted on April 22, 2003 07:42:33 PM
That makes some sense because I did see a few Bidville auctions that listed on Froogle and many of them were closed auctions. As long as the auctions were auto-relisted they would be valid items but the many closed BV auctions appearing on Froogle may have given the Froogle brass a reason to no longer accept BV auction feeds.
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mandm50s
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posted on April 22, 2003 07:50:24 PM
Froogle appears to be running a "tight ship" at the present. I tried to tell sellers on Ioffer to use as much of the 50 spaces allowed in titles as they could because Ioffer is only submitting titles and prices. So the more info you get in your title the better the chance of buyer finding you. If you submit your own data you can submit your description. At present they are getting about the first 2 sentences but expect them to expand that in the future. I think they will finish testing soon because other searches are applying pressure on them. I also think Google Adwords are great.
mandm50s
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auctionace
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posted on April 24, 2003 09:16:46 AM
It appears that Froogle will have a competitor in the title of Yahoo Product Search as detailed in the recent Yahoo Auctions newsletter.
http://auctions.shopping.yahoo.com/phtml/auc/us/newsletter/april.html
edited:
forgot the / in the url USBB protocol
[ edited by auctionace on Apr 24, 2003 10:01 AM ]
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mandm50s
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posted on April 24, 2003 09:34:35 AM
I disagree it appears to only be items from Yahoo stores. This would be a very small percentage compared to Googles ability.
mandm50s
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auctionace
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posted on April 24, 2003 10:06:57 AM
new tool designed to help you find a comprehensive listing of products available on the Web. It lets you search through millions of items from thousands of merchants,
I don't think there are millions of items loaded on Yahoo Stores.
There is much talk on other message boards of more than one site beta testing these Froogle-like searches. There may be others besides Google and Yahoo that are getting ready for this new era of web product searching. You can be sure of one though .. Yahoo will screw its product search engine up.
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mandm50s
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posted on April 24, 2003 10:33:49 AM
I just looked at Yahoo's product search and all I saw was Yahoo store items. I also didn't see where you could submit your website products like Froogle. I think Froogle has a jump on the rest if they will get out of this "beta testing" and get on with it.
mandm50s
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bonecollector
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posted on April 25, 2003 07:32:58 AM
Update on Froogle and Bidville
BidvillePrez Posted 4/24/2003 10:42:09 AM
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Valued Members,
For the past few months, Bidville has been working diligently to get our items listed on the Froogle search engine. We currently have over 700,000 auctions that qualify to be posted.
At this time, Froogle is still in "beta testing". During the testing period, Froogle has required that Bidville submit only a small number of items through the "data feed". They are limiting the feeds to around 30,000 items and will not post any feeds larger than that.
We have been assured that this limit is imposed on all websites that provide "data feeds" during the beta testing period. The limit will be lifted once Froogle comes out of beta testing.
All we can do at this point is wait for Froogle to be completed. We are at their mercy and assure all members that we will do everything possible to post all auctions as soon as we are allowed.
Thanks for continuing to grow with us.
Ed Orlando
BidvillePrez
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auctionace
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posted on April 25, 2003 10:05:22 AM
Bryan could have signed the letter with the Prez and we'd never know.
I believe the Froogle gambit for BV will be much more of a failure than a success. There are so many deterrents.
Does the buyer have to register at BV just to buy the Froogle listed widget? Why are some many items ended? Why are the photos just small red x's on so many entries. Potential buyers might vist the BV message center and see the many " Beware of this seller " threads and leave the site permanently. There are a million things that could go wrong.
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mandm50s
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posted on April 25, 2003 10:20:13 AM
I believe all these problems with Bidville need to be address with Bidville. I had items on Froogle missing pics and was so sure it was Froogle. As I went thru my feeds I saw it was my typos. It could be Bidville sending data feeds from items that never had a pic to start with. Is Froogle going to accept all those 5 cent cards I hear about.
mandm50s
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mandm50s
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posted on April 25, 2003 10:31:55 AM
I just looked at Bidville items on Froogle. I never knew there were so many hot wheels. Bidville is doing the same as Ioffer by submitting only titles. So the same thing applies to bidville sellers as Ioffer sellers. They need to cram as much info in title as possible. On Ioffer that is limited to 50 characters so you need to make max use of your 50 characters.
mandm50s
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bonecollector
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posted on April 25, 2003 11:31:35 AM
You get a whopping 75 max allowable characters for your auction titles at bidville. Thanks for letting us know about the titles only submissions. I guess the number of nickle cards being listed on Froogle would depend on whether or not they are take it priced.
Auctionace, there are millions of things that could go right too
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auctionace
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posted on April 25, 2003 12:23:11 PM
Yup, it might work out good for sites like BV and ioffer.
I believe the much-larger-than-most 75 character title limit may have been created to help compensate for an uncorrectable oversight of not including a description search in the BV search engine when it was constructed. Nice to have the 75 character titles but not so nice to not have a description search on the site.
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mandm50s
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posted on April 25, 2003 01:09:09 PM
Someone should post on Bidville chat boards about improving their titles. I'm not a user of Bidville but I did post on Ioffer but they were more interested in recommending each other whatever that is worth. I would rather get a sale than have some seller recommend my items so I'll recommend theirs.
mandm50s
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bonecollector
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posted on April 25, 2003 03:13:37 PM
Bidville customer service stated at the time of the character increase that it was to compensate for the lack of a description search in the search engine. It's not new news, and it works out well for Froogle.
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mandm50s
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posted on April 25, 2003 03:25:10 PM
I just wondered if ALL bidville members were aware of the additional benefit of using this to improve their chances of being located on Froogle. Oh I found 32,000 Bidville items on Froogle today. About 1 out of 10 were missing pics. Ioffer had 32,000 results.
mandm50s
[ edited by mandm50s on Apr 25, 2003 03:29 PM ]
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bonecollector
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posted on April 25, 2003 07:27:06 PM
Don't know why all the red x's unless it has something to do with outside picture hosting sources being used. That makes the premier member package even more attractive at five bucks a month. You get unlimited picture uploads, free gallery, and credits to use for featuring, banners, or bold. Pretty good deal in my book.
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auctionace
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posted on April 25, 2003 07:44:11 PM
The vast majority of those little red x's instead of photos are the result of BV's image hosting service failure. The only way to correct those BV related x's is to resubmit the photos and most of the auctions are on an endless relisting journey or their sellers no longer care about the photo maintenace of their myriad of auctions. Sellers tend not to care about very low STR warehoused auctions. They apparently care enough to pay BV $5 every six months though.
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mandm50s
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posted on April 25, 2003 07:53:17 PM
Now that sounds more beliveable. I believe Epier has same sorta problem. My buddy had some stuff on Epier and after a couple of auto relists his pics vanished. He would have to go in end the auction, fix pic, then relist. Or something stupid like that.
mandm50s
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bonecollector
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posted on April 25, 2003 08:16:42 PM
Such venom auctionace. Where did that come from? Your mild interest in Bidville seems to have mutated into something ugly. Anyone who didn't recognise you before, does now.
After the beta bugs are worked out we'll see what happens with Bidville.
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auctionace
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posted on April 25, 2003 08:35:17 PM
Happy Birthday Dream.
I still can not see the senseless bringing up of BV's sell thru rate by a poster or two here and other message centers. So what if the official rate is only 1% or 2%. That is only the auctions that went through the auction process. There must many, many items sold there that are from a 'seller's inventory' that never go through the bid and win process. The BV sellers are not foolish sellers! They know a great place to use as an internet store for only $10 a year. Of course the era is now almost over with the free and full-featured ioffer stores that are worth at least $20 a month. BV now has a serious non-ebay competitor with a golden carrot to lure sellers away.
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blairwitch
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posted on April 26, 2003 01:54:10 PM
auctionace looks like you blew your cover again lol.
Happy Birthday Dreamgirl/bonecollecter. How many credit cards do you guys have?
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uaru
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posted on April 27, 2003 06:05:23 AM
You get a whopping 75 max allowable characters for your auction titles at bidville.
Since Bidville's search feature only allows for searches of the title and not the description that's the least they can do. Never let it be said that they aren't doing the least they can do.
If I was bidding on Bidville's search feature and a bucket of warm spit I'd place a higher proxy bid on the bucket of warm spit.
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bonecollector
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posted on April 27, 2003 07:54:00 AM
There is obviously no easy way to correct the problem, or they would have done it. Increasing the title character limit to 75 was a good solution.
Bidding on a bucket of warm spit isn't too bright when you could just as easily not bid at all. To each his own.
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auctionace
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posted on April 27, 2003 08:36:36 AM
In all reality the only damage the lack of a description search is for sellers selling many items in one auction. If a seller were to have a lot of 15 Hall of Fame baseball player cards in one auction then searchers would not find the players listed in the description. On the plus side --- there is no keyword spamming in BV and it may work out actally for the better because some sellers list hundreds of player names in one auction and those auctions would apear in a lot of searches if the description search were allowed on BV.
Also if a BV seller is using the site mainly as a low cost store for repeat non BV buyers then the lack of a description search has no effect on these sellers.
There, I made some lemonade out of lemons or anti-venom out of venom.
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