posted on October 12, 2004 03:49:20 PM new
I have sent four email over the past 2 1/2 weeks asking for help with my marquee gallery. My pictures are blurry (my cache has been cleared, I do not use AOE, picures on eBay auctions listings are great). What would account for the difference?
Many of my items have red curtains around them. They all have images, what else would account for this?
I have a ghost box, rectangular, that appears below the gallery to the left.
Are there any real people at Vendio except the billing department? If I can't get help, I have to discontinue the service.
Did you write us from another email address? I checked your email address in our system and couldn't find any emails from you.
Red curtains means the gallery wasn't able to import your images. Looking in our system it looks like we were able to import them so please clear your cache and refresh your page to reload it, and see the images. If you continue to have problems with your gallery please let us know.
We have Personal Assistance which includes support calls (number based on the plan you pick) as well as usage of our Live Chat feature. If you do not want to sign up for personal assistance you may continue to email us for free, or you can post here as well.
Thanks for getting back to me. I sent all emails prior to posting in the Community from the icon of a mailbox on the contact support pages. In any event, I am finally reaching someone.
I have cleared my cache. Everytime I look at one of my auctions, the marquee is scrolling from the same first image, followed by many red curtains for auctions ending in 2-3 days from now. Why, if they did not import correctly on a certain day, would they continue not to update five days later? I pay to host all of my auctions on eBay and in my eBay store, approx. 485, yet I only see the same first 10 of them, never a different one.
I saw another post where someone mentioned that 72 is the current maximum images that can be displayed in marquee. Why would I be charged for all 485?
I have repeatedly asked about the outline of a rectangular box that appears directly below my marquee to the left side. Why? Can't you view a few of my auctions to tell me what you see and how many images go by?
If I can't get these issues resolved, I have to return to my previous gallery from another competitor.
Could you tell me why I have only one category on my marquee (stamps?) when I sell in many categories under First Day Covers?
posted on October 14, 2004 12:23:32 PM new
Hi, Sharon --
I took a look at your account, listings, and settings and it appears things are working smoothly for you now. To address some of your questions:
1) It looks like all your item images have now imported properly into our gallery db and are displaying without problems. I did not encounter any red curtains during my investigations on your listings.
- Red curtains sometimes result when we are unable to find an image for an item (sometimes the image hosting settings are incorrect, occasionally the image host itself is down when we try to obtain the image, or sometimes a timed-out connection to our servers can cause this).
2) In order to ensure a reasonable initial page load, the Marquee gallery initially loads and automatically scrolls through only a limited set of your items. This set can be eBay auction items, eBay Store items or both, depending on your Gallery preferences, and are always the closest-to-ending items for the selected category, to ensure relevance and encourage last-minute viewing/bidding on items.
- When a user interacts with the gallery (by clicking on the arrows), they will be able to access a larger set of your items. This larger set may be limited to 72 items per category, again to maintain a reasonable load & scroll-interaction time for viewers.
- Rest assured that, as your items approach their close-time, all of them will become visible in the Gallery as they bump up to the "top of the list", so to speak (i.e. they become the ones that are closest-to-end, and will be loaded into the gallery first). Since all item data is displayable and accessible at some point, gallery charges are based on the total number of your items whose data we import and store in our databases in a given month.
If you would prefer a gallery skin where all 481 of your items are available for browsing without having to click to advance each item through a scrolling display, you may want to use the "Basic" gallery skin. It's not as animated (no automatic scrolling), but buyers can page through all items or browse them via different categories.
3) The small white, rectangular box at the lower left of the gallery is a design error that appears when the gallery is placed on non-white backgrounds. It is in our plans to address this when we next re-visit the front-end design.
4) The category navigation bar at the top of the Marquee Gallery is based on eBay's full category tree.
- Note that, when the Vendio Gallery is automatically inserted into listings, we are able to detect the category for the current item, and can thus open up the gallery on the same (or most closely-related) category. Like, for example, in this listing for the "SP 763...Sable Souvenir Page" (
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=687&item=4169322573&rd=1), the Gallery was automatically inserted, which is why, when the page loads, the category navigation bar shows "All Categories > Stamps > United States > Covers > FDCs (1951-Now)" and all the items are from that category.
- However, when the Vendio Gallery is manually inserted into listings (such as in this one: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=687&item=5526240172&rd=1), it is not able to auto-detect the current item's category, so just opens up on the default, "All Categories". The pull-down should show the top-level eBay categories in which you have items (Stamps and Books), and then the sub-categories under Stamps can be found after selecting "stamps" and choosing appropriate categories from the resulting pull-downs.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions.
