eBay

autopiacarcare · ‎10-10-2019

I posted in the weekly chat yesterday about an increasingly common issue we are running into with Markdown Sales where there is a delay between scheduled start and end times and actual start and end times. @Anonymous asked for some examples, so I'm starting this thread to provide examples and hopefully anyone else who is experiencing this issue can provide some examples as well.

This issue has been going on for months, but as far as examples, I'll start with some from yesterday.

Item 253490280974 - This markdown sale only had 9 items. When I created it, I set the start time to "start now" at 1:02 PM Pacific Time. You can see from the revision history that the sale didn't actually start until 1:23 PM Pacific Time. It may sound like I'm being really picky to complain about a 20 minute time difference, but when I asked about it in the chat, I was told "most of the time, these promotions will go live immediately", so I am giving an example of a situation where a sale with a relatively small number of items did not go live immediately.

Yesterday I also attempted to start a markdown sale that had 500 items in it. That sale was scheduled to start at 11:30 AM Pacific Time and was scheduled to end at 11:30 PM Pacific Time. The idea was to test a limited time "Flash Sale" to drive a sense of urgency and see if that resulted in a mid-week bump in sales (where we usually fall off during that time of week).

As far as I can tell, that markdown sale never actually started. When I left the office last night at 5 PM Eastern (2 PM Pacific), it was still in "pending" status. Out of curiosity, I checked a few of the items from home last night around 9 PM Eastern (6 PM Pacific), and none of them were showing the discount sale. When I came in this morning, that markdown sale shows in Promotions Manager as "ended", so I can only assume it changed status at the scheduled "end" time, even though it never actually started. Item Number 253567659047 would be an example of a product that was supposed to be included in that promotion and you can see from the revision history shows no markdown sale starting or ending on 10/9/2019

Just to test, I attempted to copy that promo into a new one to start this morning. That was scheduled to start at 5:28 AM Pacific. It is now 6:17 AM Pacific and the new one is still in "pending" status.

mcdougle4248 · ‎11-01-2019

@autopiacarcare

Two promotions that were scheduled to end last night at 11:30 ended this morning around 7:45 am, according to the revision history on the listings. However, both are still displaying as "Processing" on the manage promotions page.

This is getting so old.

brian@ebay any update yet?

purple-rain-store · ‎11-01-2019

I ended up going in and changing the "BIN," price and it kicked them out of showing on sale. But most likely since I just changed the price it won't allow a sale to start correctly right now. I'll just wait till later this evening and try and put them back in a markdown sale.

brian@ebay · ‎11-01-2019

@mcdougle4248 wrote:

@autopiacarcare

Two promotions that were scheduled to end last night at 11:30 ended this morning around 7:45 am, according to the revision history on the listings. However, both are still displaying as "Processing" on the manage promotions page.

This is getting so old.

brian@ebay any update yet?

Thanks @mcdougle4248! We're still sending examples to the developers and they are still working to get this resolved. I'll send these newer examples to them for review. Thanks!

Brian,
Community Team

mcdougle4248 · ‎11-01-2019

brian@ebay

Thank you!

monkeystein · ‎11-01-2019

I tried starting 6 Markdown Manager sales today, 11-01-2019.

The first one is stuck in PROCESSING for 5+ hours, other 5 are stuck in PENDING.

All are showing -- or 0 for number of items selected.

Should be 7 to 124 items selected per markdown sale.

twogreatadventurers · ‎11-01-2019

Had a promotion sale set to start at 1:30PST and it is now 4:50PST and the sale has not started yet.

autopiacarcare · ‎11-04-2019

Weekend promos scheduled to end at 11:30 PM pacific last night, ended at 3:35 AM Pacific today.

myoasisjewels · ‎11-04-2019

i started a markdown sale earlier this morning, to start immediately...it is still stuck in "processing" hours later....is it really so difficult to make this tool work properly???

autopiacarcare · ‎11-04-2019

@myoasisjewels wrote:
i started a markdown sale earlier this morning, to start immediately...it is still stuck in "processing" hours later....is it really so difficult to make this tool work properly???

@myoasisjewels- I know that delays like this have been reported off and on for a while, but in the past for us any way it was always a rare one off occurrence where if you just waited a bit and tried again, it would be fine. It's only been the last couple of months that it has become a big issue for us.

I've never seen it this bad, so consistently, for this long before, which makes me wonder what changed and why don't they roll back to before that to get it working at least somewhat stably again?

myoasisjewels · ‎11-04-2019

@autopiacarcare

for me, the markdown manager before was even worse.

now the only constant issues are that it wont start....and once it starts, i will not end....;-)

before, a few years back, a sale would end, and but it would not revert your prices back to regular pricing.

instead, now your items would be advertised with the amount used as the sales price as the new regular price.

the only way to fix this was to manually redo all the pricing, which was a mess when dealing with variation listings with multiple price points.

i just dont see why all other sites can make their selling tools so they work without incidents. only on ebay you have glitch after glitch after glitch.....it never ends.

these other sites, that work without interruptions, they must be using witchcraft....

purple-rain-store · ‎11-04-2019

Here's mine, back to not ending again as well. Also have one that won't start!

jmr82 · ‎11-05-2019

Two stores, both scheduled to end yesterday, 11/4/19 at 5am PST. As of now, both are still "Pending", almost 24 hours later.

reviveretro · ‎11-05-2019

We are also experiencing a problem too. It started with our sale we tried to put up on October 31st, we had one set to go up and when it was supposed to go live it didn't. We called CS 2 hours after it was scheduled to go up, and it wasn't. They of course said they didn't have any idea why it would have delayed it, but is wasn't even in processing, just pending status. We then piggy backed another exact sale over the top of that to go up later, and when that was scheduled to go, all the sudden the earlier one went into processing, and the other was in pending. We also have it set that our other qualifying listings should go into that same sale when listed. Typically it lags a few hours, but yesterday, NONE of our listings we put up that day went to the sale. One example is listing 184022831121. This should have gone on sale later in the afternoon/evening and never went. We have 58 listings from yesterday that have not gone on sale. This really has to stop. It is very confusing when you don't know if the hard work you have done goes up correctly.

purple-rain-store · ‎11-05-2019

I kept hitting the report and still nothing was fixed. I'm tired of ending listings and having to relist items because Sales Manager will not work like it's supposed to. I just spent over an hour changing prices on all the stuff stuck in these sales that won't end to kick them out of the glitched sale. I double checked each one opening up revised items in separate tabs and they'd changed and then when I went back and refreshed my active listings page a few of them reverted right back, so I had to go in and revise price again. Not sure how long the prices I changed them to are going to stick. But now I fear because these items are stuck in a sale that won't end that when I go to try and run another Promotion sale that they'll be messed up again! There is most definitely some major programming issues going on. Almost makes me wonder if they weren't intentional! IT leaving or knowing they about to get kicked to the curb possibly thought they'd **bleep** some people off on the way out. If so f them, they are hurting the wrong people, us sellers!