eBay

4minionmama · ‎11-15-2020

Many of my auctions the last few weeks have been ending very late at night and wee morning hours even though I started the listing in the middle of the day or early evening (I don't stay up late creating listings). I've been selling for a couple of years and the auctions have always ended at the same time that I published them. Has something changed? I need to know how to prevent this because I don't want all my auctions ending when no one is awake. (I know there were perhaps changes related to daylight savings, but the differences here are many hours later, not just 1 hour).

pjcdn2005 · ‎11-15-2020

Nothing has changed as far as I know. When I looked at a few of your sold listings they ended 7 days later at the same starting time shown. The one exception was when the buyer used the BIN option. But if you weren't up doing listings at 1 a.m. CST I wonder if the time isn't starting until some of the listings are indexed? You definitely aren't scheduling the listings to start at a certain time?

reallynicestamps · ‎11-15-2020

North America has five time zones and eBay works on Pacific Time.

Atlantic Time /Eastern Time /Central Time /Mountain Time/ and Pacific Time.

Plus Newfoundland Time/ Alaska Time/ and Hawaii-Aleutian Time.

This is why so many auction bidders prefer to use a sniping service.

a_c_green · ‎11-15-2020

@pjcdn2005 wrote:
But if you weren't up doing listings at 1 a.m. CST I wonder if the time isn't starting until some of the listings are indexed?

No, the listings start immediately, unless you actually have plugged in a starting time for some point in the future. (I do all my auctions that way, starting in 15-minute intervals up until 10:00 p.m. Central time.) You can specify a starting time down to the minute, although eBay chooses the exact second within that minute for it to start, presumably to spread out the load on the system among all the other listings scheduled for that same minute. However, I have never seen a requested start time get pushed to a later time; it's always within the requested minute.

The listings are indexed after the fact, since, well, that's what an index is for. There must be something else going on with how the OP's start times are getting handled.

duncanvr · ‎11-15-2020

I use the scheduled feature for auctions so they end when I want them to. Its a small fee and I space them to end two minutes apart and always run 7 day auctions. Some listings can also take a while to activate depending on the category.