Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Feature Request: Sniping our own selling (To cancel the listing in the last minute of the pre-final day before it becomes impossible to do so)

Re: shill bidding, after the auction, if you goto the bid history, you can click on any bidder’s name e.g. a**b, and it will show you a 30-day bidding history of that bidder, including what category of items they are bidding on, and what % of their bidding was on items from the current seller. If you see something suspicious, you can contact ebay. It’s still not that great, and I still wish we could see the actual bidder’s usernames, but it’s better than nothing.

Re: feature request, I think what Zed is valid, but I’m not sure how many sellers would use that. If you are specialize in certain categories of items, you’ll have an idea about the level of buying interest and know whether you’re better off starting low $0.99 listings to encourage bidding interest or maybe you have fixed price is better for a low interest item. It’s really not a good business practice to yank auction listings. Maybe you are selling something where you don’t get alot of repeat customers, so it doesn’t matter, but buyers won’t like it if you end alot of your auctions early.

Topic: General Sniping Discussion / Failed Snipe

Snipe time of 1 second is very aggressive. Even if you have a very fast connection, it would be safer to use 3-5 seconds. I used to use 3 seconds for a long time, but I would have a problem about 1 out of 100 times where the auction ended before the snipe, so I upped it to 5 seconds to be more sure.

Even at 5 seconds, there is very little time for anyone to react to the snipe.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Perhaps Morgan should change to shareware?

In enterprise software, there’s many examples of open source software where the company makes money off the service and support, e.g. Redhat, MySQL, JBoss, etc. but that doesn’t work for jbidwatcher.

I’ve always wondered if Morgan could make some $$ off ebay’s affiliate programming? If we are always buying items using jbidwatcher, shouldn’t ebay be kicking back some $$ to Morgan? Maybe because we doesn’t use ebay’s API or other affiliate marketing tools, he’s not able to plug into that. But that would be the most painless way for jbidwatcher users to pay Morgan to keep this fine software updated.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / null price again?

I also have seen a few items added with null price still with the new version. It is like 1 out of 100. The last two times it happened was for Buy-It-Now items.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / ebay auction format change!! JBidwatcher broken

I noticed ebay has changed their item page format recently for some listings. The location the itemid has moved and some other changes depending on the category.

When I add these auctions with new format in JBidWatcher 2.5, I get a null(FP) added.

For example, check out this ipad3 listing

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-iPad-3rd-Generati…

Try to add Auction 110846828082 to JBidWatcher 2.5.
This is what I see:

http://i.imgur.com/hicT4.png

I have seen this for both Auctions and BIN listings.

It looks like it is related to some changes to the item listing page being phased in by Ebay.
See http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID…

Thanks,

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Snipe failed due to daylight savings time

It looks like I was wrong about it being a DST time bug.

The auction ended at 11:01:51 (ebay time). JBidwatcher attempted to snipe at 11:01:47 (my pc time). The time delta with ebay.com was -2337. My Time Information says page load time is 1006 msec. I have used 5 second snipe on many other bids on this computer, but this time there may have been some hiccup in sending the bid or ebay receiving the bid. I am increasing my snipe time to 10 seconds to see if that avoids further problems.

Also, I have General→Time Synchronization enabled, which I thought meant JBidWatcher would sync my pc time with ebay time a few minutes before the snipe. Is that not how it works? In the log it mentions the time delta, but doesn’t explicity say it is syncing the clocks.

Wed Mar 14 10:56:49 PDT 2012: Time delta with ebay.com is -2337
Wed Mar 14 10:56:54 PDT 2012: Time delta with ebay.co.uk is -498
Wed Mar 14 10:59:47 PDT 2012: XXX (XXX) – Preparing snipe.
Wed Mar 14 11:01:47 PDT 2012: XXX (XXX) – Firing actual snipe.
Wed Mar 14 11:01:47 PDT 2012: XXX (XXX) – Snipe apparently failed, as the auction cannot be bid on anymore: XXX

Thanks,

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Snipe failed due to daylight savings time

I had added an auction before daylight savings time begain (Mar 11 2:00 am), and the auction ended today Mar 15 11:00 am. Since clocks were moved 1 hour ahead, the auction closed 1 hour earlier.

JBidwatcher snipe never triggered. It looks like it was waiting another hour to trigger the snipe.

Is there a bug database to file bugs?

Thanks,

Daylight Saving Time (United States) began Sunday, March 11, 2012, 2:00am, and ends Sunday, November 4, 2012, 2:00am.
Except Arizona and Hawaii. Move your clocks ahead 1 hour in spring and back 1 hour in fall (“Spring forward, fall back”).

Topic: Announcements / [PreRelease] JBidwatcher 2.1pre4 is out

I installed jbidwatcher the latest 2.1pre4 on a new windows xp machine, and after running for a couple days, I noticed my hard disk was getting constantly hit and my computer had gotten sluggish.
I investigated by running FileMon and it showed that jbidwatcher was constantly writing to .jbidwatcher/derby.log. My derby.log was 4 GB! Which is very surprising because I only have about 60 auctions I was watching. I never saw t his behavior on older release of jbidwatcher.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Most auctions appear as FP

Richard,

Thanks for the CTRL+E tip. That let me enter a snipe. However, I’m not sure I trust it will actually do it. I have one auction which is at $10.50 but has a buy it now price of $29.99. When I hit CTRL+E it says the current bid is $29.99. It lets me enter a lower number, but in the watch list, it shows my bid in red, meaning it thinks the current bid is already above my bid. So, I’m wondering if it will actually perform the snipe when the time comes.

For straight up auctions which do not have a buy it now option, the CTRL+E workaround looks good, although I’ll have to wait until tomorrow when my next auction comes up I am bidding on.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Most auctions appear as FP

FP issue here also started happening in past couple days. If I add a new auction item, it is FP and I cannot bid or snipe the auction even though it is an open auction listing. 2.0.1-825 winxp.

I wonder if this latest ebay change affects only jbidwatcher or if it breaks other snipe programs.
Imagine how much extra $$ sellers and ebay lose if ebay breaks all sniping programs. Many of the auctions I watch, the main price action often happens in the last few seconds which I assume is from auto-snipers.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Does not import all bidding items

Hi,

I see the same behavior. Actually, I found if you click Page Options you can set “Choose the number of items to display per section on your summary page:” to 25 instead of the default 10, and then JBidWatcher will load 25 auctions instead of 10.

I agree, it would be really nice if jbidwatcher loaded all the auctions.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Only 1 auction shows up in "current" tab

webjon,

eBay->Get My Ebay Items is still working for me, after not working for awhile a couple weeks ago, except that it only returns the first 25 items in my watch list. Before it was returning only the first 10, then I figured out if you can change the setting ” Choose the number of items to display per section on your summary page” by clicking “Page Options” near top-right corner when you are on you My Ebay page.

One other thing you could try is click “Page Options” and untick everything except the Buying->Watching panel. It is possible that jbidwatcher is getting tripped by some new content on the page. By turning everything else off, it might help jbidwatcher.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Only 1 auction shows up in "current" tab

noahvehl,

I have some Buy It Now items in my ebay watch list, but some of them do load into jbidwatcher, so I”m not sure if it is that factor alone causing the problem. The Get My Items is very flaky now in 2.0.1 release. It wasn’t working at all for me, but in the past week it returns partial results.

I have also seen a number of other bugs mentioned elsewhere like my Max showing as $1.00 for completed auctions which I never bid on. I hope these bugs are reproducible for Morgan so he can fix them when he has time.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Only 1 auction shows up in "current" tab

eBay->Get My eBay Items now works again for me too. Must have been some change at ebay.
One thing though is that it only gets the first 10 items in my ebay watch list. If I view My eBay watch list in browser, the list is paginated. You have to click on next page to see more items. I guess that is what is causing the problem.
Is that a known limitation (only gets the first page of items), or should it have retrieved all the items?
Thanks,

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Only 1 auction shows up in "current" tab

peavy,

you have to bring up Search Manager, then click New button to create a new search. Set the search type to URL Load and then paste the URL Morgan mentioned.

Morgan,
The URL Load search worked but eBay->Get My eBay Items does not.

Thanks,

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Only 1 auction shows up in "current" tab

Get My Ebay Items stopped working for me. I’m not sure exactly when, since I use JBidWatcher infrequently, but I noticed last week that Get My Ebay Items no longer loaded the auctions.

I can add an auction by item number manually. And I can bid or snipe on an item.

This is with JBidWatcher version 2.0.1-825

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Feature Request: Different Views

I also don’t like the background.
I think we should just make JBidWatcher auction listing look like Ebay’s List View as much as possible. Ebay’s List View has plain background with a separator line between listings.
Mousing over the thumbnail should show the larger image.

I also would like to have something like Ebay’s Picture View which is item #3 in my first post. Ebay’s Picture View isn’t that great because it only shows two pictures per row. I think we could improve on that. Possibly, just by showing less text, that would allow more thumbnails to be shown per row. I use another program J River Media Center 12 which has a great thumbnail view for movies and pictures. It lets you customize the label text to whatever fields you want. Using the same paradigm in JBidWatcher, a user should be able to say they only want to see Time Remaining and Price for the label.

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Feature Request: Different Views

FYI

Browsing the backlog of feature requests on sourceforge, I see two people have already requested a thumbnail column be added to the view.
One person even attached a patch to add the feature.

[ 1764998 ] Thumbnail column in table views
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=d…

[ 1568800 ] Thumbnail Column
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=d…

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Feature Request: Different Views

Hi,

I like that we can see the thumbnails when we mouse over a row in the auction list table.
What I would like is to have some different views available:
1) current view
2) current view plus the thumbnail embedded as a column with user defined size of the thumbnail. (this will cause the row height to be very tall, so it might not look good)
3) a thumbnail view which displays all the auctions as pictures (if available otherwise a placeholder image)
along with a caption containing only time left and bid price. The size of the thumbnails should be configurable;
JBidwatcher should scale up/down the original image as necessary.

I found that JBidWatcher’s ability to import all the auctions based on a search URL very handy, and for certain
types of auctions, e.g. collectibles / jewelry, it would be nice to import a bunch of auctions into jbidwatcher
and then view everything as a thumbnail.

BTW – I am a software developer in SiliconValley with about 12 years of experience in Java, esp. multi-threaded
Java Swing applications. I used to work for Sun Microsystems when Java was just starting out. I may be able to
help make these improvements, although I’m already pretty busy with work and another side project I’m working on—
just like I’m sure you’re very busy with your real work. Email me if you get a chance.

Regards,
-Alex