Thank you for the update.
The promotion I set up this morning, with a scheduled start time of 7:30 am, finally started at 11:49. The things we go through to try to increase sales 
@mcdougle4248 wrote:Thank you for the update.
The promotion I set up this morning, with a scheduled start time of 7:30 am, finally started at 11:49. The things we go through to try to increase sales
Well that blows a hole in my theory about scheduling working better than "start now".
My other thought was possibly something to do with the timing of when they are scheduled. It seems like the promos I have that get hung up for a long time are usually ones I try to start either first thing in the morning or just before I leave for lunch.
For example, the first one I tried this morning at 5:30 AM Pacific, that's early out on the West coast, but where we are on the East coast that's just about the time everyone is getting to work and getting the day started. In the past when I've tried starting them at 12 PM Eastern, sometimes they still aren't active by the time I leave at 5 PM. 12 PM Eastern would be 9 AM Pacific, just about the time many people on the West coast are getting into the office. I know those are broad generalities and I'm sure a lot of people don't go by a 9-5 kind of schedule, but I would bet at least a lot of bigger accounts that are being run by established, professional businesses do run things on a typical office schedule.
The one I started at 1:30 PM Pacific (4:30 PM Eastern) yesterday only took about 15 minutes to go active. And the one I started today at 10 AM Pacific (1:00 PM Eastern) was just shy of an hour - not great but better than 4 or 5 hours.
Conversely, my ending times are usually scheduled for 11:30 PM Pacific, which I would guess might be a fairly popular time for people to schedule promos to end as it's the latest option, and many times it takes 5 or 6 hours past then for them to actually end.
If true, that would make this more of a technical limitation, ie. more activity than the servers can handle at certain peak times, but in the weekly chat I was specifically told it was not a technical limitation and was instead most times related to "site security."
Now that I think about it....maybe those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. Who knows all of the ways things on the back end at eBay may be connected? If too many promos trying to go live at once put a big load on the servers and caused them to crash or negatively impacted the operations of other parts of the platform in someway, that could certainly be considered a "site security" issue. And if that were the case, limiting or throttling performance at peak times could be seen as being in the best interest of over all site security.
To be honest, I could understand the reasoning if that is what is going on here. I wouldn't like it, and would still think that eBay can and should do better, but it would at least be understandable and would be a lot better than simply being shuffled off to a less visible section of the message boards with no answers.
