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.

walkerspostcards · ‎12-03-2019

Same issue...sale won't end and it's been over 12 hours. I had a previous experience with this and they NEVER went off sale. That time it was only 1,500 of my 19,000 items, and when I put on any type of additional sale it just further reduced the price, not even recognizing that they were already on sale. I just lived with it because of the amount of items it was affecting. This time it is 10,000 items and I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Customer service is certainly aware of the problem, but if it ends up like last time there was no solution, besides me manually adjusting prices or relisting them (and of course absorbing the fees). This is really frustrating and certainly makes it hard to make a living.

thevintagesilvershop · ‎12-03-2019

@autopiacarcare wrote:
Mine finally actually ended at 8:48 AM Pacific, so over 9 hours past the scheduled end time.

Lucky you! Mine are still "processing" 12 1/2 hours after they were supposed to end.

csacom · ‎12-03-2019

@thevintagesilvershop wrote:
@autopiacarcare wrote:
Mine finally actually ended at 8:48 AM Pacific, so over 9 hours past the scheduled end time.
Lucky you! Mine are still "processing" 12 1/2 hours after they were supposed to end.

Same here, 50+ promotions to end at 3 AM PST, and at 11:23 AM PST they are still PROCESSING!!

monstertoybox · ‎12-03-2019

New issue! My sale finally came through, and all my items were marked down. But now, they are falling off the sale, just randomly. Right now almost half my items dropped off my sale. What are we supposed to do with these kinds of issues?

Have you ever had any of your items just drop off a sale? Maybe everyone needs to look through their items? Or maybe I'm just the only lucky one with this new glitch. I am super frustrated.

autopiacarcare · ‎12-04-2019

@monstertoybox wrote:
New issue! My sale finally came through, and all my items were marked down. But now, they are falling off the sale, just randomly. Right now almost half my items dropped off my sale. What are we supposed to do with these kinds of issues?

Have you ever had any of your items just drop off a sale? Maybe everyone needs to look through their items? Or maybe I'm just the only lucky one with this new glitch. I am super frustrated.

@monstertoybox - So sorry that is happening to you and yes, I have had something similar happen before as well back in October (here's the post in this thread about it).

I had one weekend where one of my promotions would launch and then randomly end after a couple of hours instead of running through the whole weekend as scheduled. Once I saw that it had ended, I would start the promotion again, it would run for a few hours again and then just randomly end.

I provided screenshots and reported the issue to the "blues" here and also called CS about it and was told they would report it to the tech team for review. I never got a follow up or confirmation it was fixed, but it hasn't happened again to me since then.

mcdougle4248 · ‎12-05-2019

@autopiacarcare

Indexing must have a power boost this morning. Two markdowns launched in less than 10 minutes this morning

autopiacarcare · ‎12-05-2019

@mcdougle4248 wrote:
@autopiacarcare
Indexing must have a power boost this morning. Two markdowns launched in less than 10 minutes this morning

@mcdougle4248 - Nice! I have some to launch later this afternoon. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

autopiacarcare · ‎12-05-2019

@mcdougle4248 wrote:
@autopiacarcare
Indexing must have a power boost this morning. Two markdowns launched in less than 10 minutes this morning

@mcdougle4248 - I had 1 with a scheduled start time and 1 as start now - both of them started within about 10 minutes as well.

mcdougle4248 · ‎12-05-2019

@autopiacarcare

Guess today is a good day to do markdowns

kartingwarehouse · ‎12-05-2019

So, the last few days the promotion manager has been spotty for us. Sometimes, sales are applied almost instantly and other times, I've had products that have taken over 3 days to apply (if at all now). I'm curious if this has to do with certain listings having a large sales history and/or lots of multi-variant options?

One of the issues I'm having is some products being in an indefinite "pending markdown" status. Not only does it not apply the sale to the item, but I cannot remove it, change it, move it to another sale, cancel it, or anything unless maybe I try ending the whole sale by removing all the other products in the sale, but I'm pretty sure any item that's in "pending markdown" status can't be changed.

Another issue I'm having is certain products being added to a sale, saying their active, but not applying the sale at all. A simple $20 off sale just simply wont apply to some of the products I've added them to, even though the promotion manager says they're active and for some reason I still have to wait like 1/2 days for me to try moving them to another sale, which also doesn't seem to work. There's no pending offers or anything to get in the way either.

I'm not exactly sure what's going on with the promotion manager for us at least. Some days it's fine with no issues but most days, it's a big time waster trying to get it to work correctly.

salebolt · ‎12-09-2019

It's unusable. We've removed all the markdown promotions and just discounted the listings prices.

Volume discounts seem to process quickly and get some results. But we normally use those on single items.

One item per promotion may be the faster way to get the processing done, but it would be tedious to set up.

autopiacarcare · ‎12-10-2019

We had better luck over the weekend. The markdowns we had running were scheduled to end at 11:30 PM Pacific Sunday night. One ended about 40 minutes later and the other one was almost 2 hours. The two hour one was still not great, but definitely an improvement over the 10+ hour delays we were seeing before.

Anyone else seeing better performance?

autopiacarcare · ‎12-11-2019

I tested out running shorter duration promotions for yesterday starting at 1 PM pacific and scheduled to end at 11:30 PM pacific. Looks like both start and ends times where within about 10 minutes.

I don't want to count the chickens before they've hatched, but it definitely seems like something may have happened to get things back on track where they should be.

@mcdougle4248 - How are things going for you?

mcdougle4248 · ‎12-11-2019

@autopiacarcare wrote:
I tested out running shorter duration promotions for yesterday starting at 1 PM pacific and scheduled to end at 11:30 PM pacific. Looks like both start and ends times where within about 10 minutes.

I don't want to count the chickens before they've hatched, but it definitely seems like something may have happened to get things back on track where they should be.

@mcdougle4248 - How are things going for you?

I launched one as a start now this morning and it went active in 1 min 43 sec! Everything that I have scheduled this week has been right on schedule (within 10 minutes) for both starting and ending.

Funny how nothing was "broken", but after all of the complaints now seems to be "fixed".

It is a real shame so many sellers were caught off guard for Black Friday thru Cyber Monday and did not get their promotions up in time to do much, if any, good to boost sales.

autopiacarcare · ‎12-11-2019

@mcdougle4248 wrote:
@autopiacarcare wrote:
I tested out running shorter duration promotions for yesterday starting at 1 PM pacific and scheduled to end at 11:30 PM pacific. Looks like both start and ends times where within about 10 minutes.

I don't want to count the chickens before they've hatched, but it definitely seems like something may have happened to get things back on track where they should be.

@mcdougle4248 - How are things going for you?
I launched one as a start now this morning and it went active in 1 min 43 sec! Everything that I have scheduled this week has been right on schedule (within 10 minutes) for both starting and ending.

Funny how nothing was "broken", but after all of the complaints now seems to be "fixed".

It is a real shame so many sellers were caught off guard for Black Friday thru Cyber Monday and did not get their promotions up in time to do much, if any, good to boost sales.

Glad to hear it is working better for you too and I agree 100%. Hopefully it continues to be "fixed" and can be a useful tool for everyone in the final push for the holidays.