Automatic out-bid notification?

mopardmc · Guest

Question: if a real bid comes in on a scheduled snipe which is higher than the snipe value, will Gixen generate any notification that the snipe is now invalid? This doesn't seem possible without an e-mail address.

I'd gladly submit my e-mail address to Gixen if it had this feature. Yes, I know how maximum bids are supposed to work, but usually I am conservative, and it would be nice to have a chance to re-evaluate my sniping bid if someone is overeager, without having to check the auctions every day.

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7240

I completely agree with you, and I thought the same - it's not critical, but it would be a 'nice to have' feature. A slight issue with this is that Gixen would have to check prices periodically, which might dramatically increase bandwidth usage, but I might solve that by offering it only to 'premium users' (users who backlink to Gixen).

Notifications themselves are not a big deal to implement, and there are two ways to proceed with this:

1. Pull email addresses from ebay accounts of users who consent to this.
2. Ask for users to provide an email address and store it someplace.

I'd like to hear further comments on this from interested parties.

donglejack83 · Guest

Yes, it would be a very nice feature Very Happy

And yes, this situation often happens!

But in order to keep functionnality of Gixen, IP traffic intended to place a bid (a snipe) on ebay is by far much more critical than sending a mail to tell us that a snipe is not valid.

Hence, you could have several choices of implementation:

1- use prioritization of tasks, i.e. do not send mails and do not practice checking if a bid is in progress. I'm not sure however that a DB software is able to handle that.

2- do only a check once for all, or once a day, thus freeding bandwidth. This saves lot of bandwidth, but this new feature could be of no avail...

3- separate IP traffic for sniping and for checking status. A huge developpment, and this is of course not free ...

A trigger would be perfect, but it could be fired only from ... eBay! Wink

Note that you could be 'polluted' by some premium users: imagine I am a professional who wanna buy a lot of merchandise at a cheap price. I may place 100's of snipe, and if I win one or two each day, this is perfect for me.
Meanwhile, I have fully loaded BW with useless price checking, no matter if other people needed to snipe Crying or Very sad

Another 'nice to have' feature in the same line than this one: a 'Refresh' button in the scheduled snipes web page, avoiding thus to use the 'Refresh' button of our browser, leading to the message 'Sorry, this item is already present', coupled with a delay of 2 seconds before triggering a refresh (someone could easily overload both Gixen's web site and BW for snipes...)

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7240

I pretty much agree with everything you said here, and since I'm quite busy these days, all this will have to wait... And remember, there are other priorities as well (e.g. French translation Smile

)

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Crusty · Guest

[quote="mario"] I'd like to hear further comments on this from interested parties.[/quote]

Can I be the lone voice of disagreement here?
No offence guys, but I think that this feature misses the point of sniping. The trick is to carefully think about your maximum bid before you schedule it with Gixen. It is easy to imagine that someone is going to place a manual bid higher than your snipe. Consider then, before you bid, if you would like to up the bid in this case, then put in your maximum bid above which you do not want to bid. Then you can safely forget about this auction until it is over.

I think, Mario, your time is better spent on other things.
I really like the simple no nonsense user interface, and that you do not need my email address.

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7240

> No offence guys, but I think that this feature misses the point of sniping.

Good argument, thank you for getting involved in the discussion.

My take on this is that many users still expect to get more than complete silence when price goes above their bid (or they are outbid, or something else happens). But for now, I think it's good as it is - and you don't have to worry - if I ever introduce notifications, it will be only for users who request it.