Hi y’all

When trying to multi snipe on items labeled in different currencies, i get an error message.

Is there a way to force the possibility ?

Thanks for your help…

Greetings,

What would you expect the behavior of that feature to be?

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Hi

Well I’d simply llike to allow multi snipe even if items are not in the same currency, no special behavior requested here…

Hope this answers to your question

Thans again for this wonderful tool…

This would be a very useful feature, but I can see obvious problems.

The usefulness arises for people who regularly have to search for, and bid on, items from multiple countries. For example, if something is not readily available in my home country, Sweden, then I will buy from somewhere else in the European Union (in either pounds or euros) or from the USA (in dollars). If I am bidding on multiple items, then I end up using a spreadsheet to compare the items in some standard currency (which, believe it or not, in my case is Australian dollars, since that is the currency I will be paying in). I then have to work out what to bid for each item in its original currency, minus shipping costs. JBidWatcher allows me to automatically take into account the shipping cost, but not any other part of the procedure.

The obvious problem is getting JBidWatcher to do the currency conversions. Even eBay uses only “approximate” currency equivalences, standardising on the currency used by the site from which the items are being accessed. Is there really a way to get JBidWatcher to do currency conversion in a manner that the user could always rely on? Can eBay’s equivalences be accessed? Or are we opening up a can of worms that the program is better off leaving closed?

The currency conversion that ultimately matters is the one used when paying, of course, not the one used when bidding. So, I guess that any solution is just an approximation (as is the one used in my spreadsheet, which is an average of recent currency movements).

David

Well, I often pay in £ or $, from a €-zone country, I personnally don’t need JBidWatcher to make the conversion (somewhat simple as 1£ =1.5 € and 1 $ = 0.75 €)

And in my opinion, it’s our matter (for people bidding on multiple currencies) to deal with … because the implementation of a “exact” solution (maybe with the help of xe.com) would be very hard and also approximate (your local bank exchange rate is not the same as the interbank rate)

In fact I just suggested to allow this possibility rather than forbidding it :)

Cheers

Greetings,

That’s the reason I asked what the behavior would be… Some users might expect that it’ll do the currency conversion for them, some might expect that it’ll just bid that amount.

In fact I just suggested to allow this possibility rather than forbidding it :)

I can’t just ‘allow’ the feature without thinking about it’s impact on the end-users. It’s why I disabled it in the first place; a good solution is rather hard to come by, and at the time it was a rare need. I understand by the requests that it’s becoming a more common thing, but the solution is still not as simple as just allowing it.

The core issue is what happens when you think you’re bidding $10, and it bids that same amount (10) on all the auctions. One of those auctions is in £ instead, and you end up winning it for £9. Now you’re suddenly expected to pay $17.84, well over what you expected when you placed the multisnipe. This, in my opinion, violates the principle of least surprise.

The ‘xe.com’ solution is unfortunately not really very straightforward, because xe.com expects (perfectly reasonably) to be paid for their services. You can’t really scrape their site (they get really upset about that), and I’m not willing to pay them for their service in a free program.

There are tricks that can be done, using eBay’s on-page currency conversion, but they’re mildly complex. JBidwatcher already uses the USD approximation for sort-ordering. The other problem is bringing the feature to the end user in a way that’s intuitive.

I think there are a few feature requests and/or bug reports that go into this, where I’ve had much the same discussion at various points, and brainstormed a bit on solutions.

At the core, though, I really don’t know what the expected behavior would be, so it’s why I ask… And you can see that there are at least two distinct positions, ‘set the number to the same on all’, and ‘do currency conversion’ (there are others, like ‘prompt the user for all items’, and such).

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Hi, this is not a particular need of mine, but since I stumbled upon it, I will give my opinion (I can go further and technical if needed as I also build software).

Being able to set our own price for each auction in a multiple-auction feature, seem nice (even when it is the same currency!), and it is the smallest thing that allow any possibility (but is it supported by your model?). It is a feature that could find some use (is it a mainstream need I don’t know, but if it can be supported alongside the other options, e.g. “bid the same amount for all”, that looks fine to me and probably give more power to the user [and yes it can still stay simple]).

And then, with that possibility in your model (assuming it is there), you can offer multiple choice to the user when he bid on:

- bid the same price on all auction (and do not change currency)
- bid the same price on all auction (and adapt currency, “be aware that it is an approximation” [anyway after this, in the time we pay, the price might change, our bank might charge different price, etc. etc. etc.; so it will always end up being an approximation… and using that option the user accept to use ebay’s approximation (I will go with their approximation at first glance even I usually go to xe.com to really know the rate, when I pay with paypal, I am probably using ebay’s once!)])
- specify the price for each auction

Of course the “bid the same price” option, will just be a way to enter multiple snipe of the same amount (big chance are your model support it that way!).

We can always think further, but I think just keeping it simple, offering the power to the user to specify “anything he want” if he wants, and offer him “easy helper” like “bid same price on all option” seem the best choice the way the problem has been presented.

If someone is not happy with your assumption (conversion, shipping, etc.), he can always just enter all the amounts by himself.

// BTW Thanks for making me lose (spend) a lot of money and win a lot of auctions! :D

Hi Morgan and thanks for your answer,

I do understand your point of view, as there is no “final” solution, but don’t you think that the prompt forbidding the multi-currency multisnipe could be a prompt of warning (Be careful, multi currency and so on) ?

Anyway, thanks again for JBW and my offer for a french translation is still valid :))

Hi, thought I would just mention that instead of XE.com, you can use good old Google to do your currency conversion for free…

For example, type in “58 usd in gbp” into the search window (without the quotes) and hit return.

You get:

58 U.S. dollars = 29.1603821 British pounds

Personally, I think there should be an option to allow multisnipes in different currencies (default=disallowed), but instead of JBW doing the conversion, display a warning/advice message and force the user to adjust the snipe price for the “foreign” items.

Cheers.