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.

gracieallen01 · ‎10-10-2019

Yes, it can be very frustrating.

It is all nice and wonderful that there are the various boards, and to be able to place a problem, suggestion or comment in a specific category. However, if there is an all-inclusive type of category like 'Selling', where most sellers will consider stopping first, perhaps it should be used more, since it is frequented by the general population. I haven't noticed that there is all that much use of the tech. board, except by the technical oriented sellers, among themselves and great and very helpful people like shipscript. It seems that a frequent reply by the staff is that they will get it to 'the team', or an update that the team hasn't gotten back, yet. Not that there is anything that they can do about something, themselves, it is understood.

Personally, I think your question(s) and post of the example is quite helpful and, hopefully, others will add to it.

Not saying 'NO' doesn't mean 'YES'.

The foolishness of one's actions or words is determined by the number of witnesses.

Perhaps if Brains were described as an APP, many people would use them more often.

Respect, like money, is only of 'worth' when it is earned - with all due respect, it can not be ordained, legislated or coerced. Anonymous

autopiacarcare · ‎10-10-2019

@kartingwarehouse wrote:
We also are having issues with the markdown sales. Some of our sales are taking over 2 - 3 days to apply and remove. For multi-variant listings if you want to add additional options, you must take it off sale, add your changes, and re-apply the sale, a ~30 minute task now taking over 5+ days.

Pending markdowns/sales also don't cancel when you apply a new price on a listing and will apply the sale a few days later, causing many pricing issues and needing constant monitoring of listings because of this.

This issue started happening about 2 weeks ago and is becoming increasingly frustrating.

Thanks @kartingwarehouse

Questions for anyone experiencing these issues:

About how many items do you typically have in a markdown sale?

Do you use the option to select listings (limited to 500) or do you use the option to create rules using categories (up to 10,000 per promotion)?

If you use the first option, do you select the listings individually or do you use the option to input a list of skus or item numbers?

I'm just trying to think of any relevant information that could help eBay look into this issue. If anyone else has ideas for data points to share, feel free to add them!

kartingwarehouse · ‎10-10-2019

Under this account it's just a few items but there's about ~250 items on another account, both are experiencing similar issues.

On both accounts we use the option to select listings and select the listings individually.

mcdougle4248 · ‎10-10-2019

@autopiacarcare

I usually use select individual listings.

One sale from this morning went active and one is still pending. Very strange because they were done as "Start Now" about 10 minutes or so apart.

autopiacarcare · ‎10-10-2019

As another test, I created a new markdown sale and selected the individual products, instead of copying a previous sale. I created it at 1:15 PM Pacific but instead of "start now", I chose to schedule the start for 1:30 PM Pacific. That was about 10 minutes ago and as of now, the sale is "processing". I'll keep an eye on it and report if/when it actually starts.

autopiacarcare · ‎10-10-2019

@autopiacarcare wrote:
As another test, I created a new markdown sale and selected the individual products, instead of copying a previous sale. I created it at 1:15 PM Pacific but instead of "start now", I chose to schedule the start for 1:30 PM Pacific. That was about 10 minutes ago and as of now, the sale is "processing". I'll keep an eye on it and report if/when it actually starts.

That one is now active as of 1:45 pm Pacific. Same products as the previous attempts.

mcdougle4248 · ‎10-10-2019

@autopiacarcare wrote:
As another test, I created a new markdown sale and selected the individual products, instead of copying a previous sale. I created it at 1:15 PM Pacific but instead of "start now", I chose to schedule the start for 1:30 PM Pacific. That was about 10 minutes ago and as of now, the sale is "processing". I'll keep an eye on it and report if/when it actually starts.

Yes, please let us know if this test works. I still have one promotion that has not started from this morning. I called

concierge customer service and the rep told me it can take up to 24 hrs to start. While I understand this may be true, until recently this long delay in starting or ending has not been my experience.

mcdougle4248 · ‎10-10-2019

@autopiacarcare wrote:
@autopiacarcare wrote:
As another test, I created a new markdown sale and selected the individual products, instead of copying a previous sale. I created it at 1:15 PM Pacific but instead of "start now", I chose to schedule the start for 1:30 PM Pacific. That was about 10 minutes ago and as of now, the sale is "processing". I'll keep an eye on it and report if/when it actually starts.
That one is now active as of 1:45 pm Pacific. Same products as the previous attempts.

Thank you for the update. Guess I will give it a try, too.

mcdougle4248 · ‎10-10-2019

@autopiacarcare

Now this is just wonderful...I can not end the promotion that was supposed to start this morning because it has to be active for a day before I can end it. Guess now I will have to wait until tomorrow morning to see what I can do with this promotion.

mensoddsntrends_2 · ‎10-11-2019

small 200 store... same big issues

My sales that were scheduled to end at 4:30am are stuck in either processing or pending for almost 2 hours now! this is getting worse and worse! It is taking hours to do 2 minutes of work. Please eBay, fix this... it seems to me the common thing is in the "schedule" portion, a lot of times I change the end date and push it out a few days and that works fine. But letting it end itself or ending it is always the problem.

Also to use start now and I use the 500 option to select listings and select the listings individually, the sale takes forever to show up too.

autopiacarcare · ‎10-11-2019

@mcdougle4248 wrote:
@autopiacarcare
Now this is just wonderful...I can not end the promotion that was supposed to start this morning because it has to be active for a day before I can end it. Guess now I will have to wait until tomorrow morning to see what I can do with this promotion.

@mcdougle4248- Sorry I didn't see this last night. I've run into that issue before as well. Usually when that happens, I delete all products from that sale except 1. Leaving 1 item in that promo seems to satisfy their 1 day requirement and then it frees up all the other items to be able to be added to a new sale.

It's not a perfect work around because it still leaves 1 item hanging in limbo, but I figure that's better than having hundreds of listings held hostage in a promotion that won't start but eBay won't let you end it either. Hope that helps!

autopiacarcare · ‎10-11-2019

As another test, I have copied a previous markdown sale, but instead of "start now", I have scheduled it for 5:30 AM Pacific today, which is in about 15 minutes. I'll post results later.

mcdougle4248 · ‎10-11-2019

@autopiacarcare wrote:
@mcdougle4248 wrote:
@autopiacarcare
Now this is just wonderful...I can not end the promotion that was supposed to start this morning because it has to be active for a day before I can end it. Guess now I will have to wait until tomorrow morning to see what I can do with this promotion.

@mcdougle4248- Sorry I didn't see this last night. I've run into that issue before as well. Usually when that happens, I delete all products from that sale except 1. Leaving 1 item in that promo seems to satisfy their 1 day requirement and then it frees up all the other items to be able to be added to a new sale.

It's not a perfect work around because it still leaves 1 item hanging in limbo, but I figure that's better than having hundreds of listings held hostage in a promotion that won't start but eBay won't let you end it either. Hope that helps!

Thank you for the work around suggestion.

I hoped @Anonymous would have followed up yesterday. I almost don't want to do anything with the one promotion that is stuck in pending so there is an example for him to look at ( 193113467475, one of 15 items).

autopiacarcare · ‎10-11-2019

@mcdougle4248 wrote:
@autopiacarcare wrote:
@mcdougle4248 wrote:
@autopiacarcare
Now this is just wonderful...I can not end the promotion that was supposed to start this morning because it has to be active for a day before I can end it. Guess now I will have to wait until tomorrow morning to see what I can do with this promotion.

@mcdougle4248- Sorry I didn't see this last night. I've run into that issue before as well. Usually when that happens, I delete all products from that sale except 1. Leaving 1 item in that promo seems to satisfy their 1 day requirement and then it frees up all the other items to be able to be added to a new sale.

It's not a perfect work around because it still leaves 1 item hanging in limbo, but I figure that's better than having hundreds of listings held hostage in a promotion that won't start but eBay won't let you end it either. Hope that helps!
Thank you for the work around suggestion.

I hoped @Anonymous would have followed up yesterday. I almost don't want to do anything with the one promotion that is stuck in pending so there is an example for him to look at ( 193113467475, one of 15 items).

@mcdougle4248 - Thanks! I appreciate you trying to help with this and I too hope that @Anonymous follows up soon. But please don't feel like you need to hold off on trying to get those promotions running just so he can have an example. We've all got to do what ever we can to try to make it here and I certainly would not hold it against you for not leaving that promotion in limbo if you feel like the best thing for your business is to get those items running on an active markdown sale.

I'm still perplexed by the answer I was given in the chat about it not being a technical issue, but instead being something related to "site security". Given that answer, it's entirely possible we're all spinning our wheels here trying to figure out something on the technical side.

We won't know anything until/unless someone from eBay gets involved here and sheds some more light on what that answer meant. Until then, I think the best we can do is keep documenting the issue as best as we can and providing any insight we have into what seems to be working and not working, but we all also have to do what is right for our own businesses in the mean time as well. Thanks again for being willing to jump in and trying to help!

autopiacarcare · ‎10-11-2019

@autopiacarcare wrote:
As another test, I have copied a previous markdown sale, but instead of "start now", I have scheduled it for 5:30 AM Pacific today, which is in about 15 minutes. I'll post results later.

This one is still "processing" as of 6:05 AM Pacific. I forgot to mention that it has 358 items in it.