As from today (Friday 24th Oct 2008) my JBidWatcher no longer displays anything in the “Shipping” column. Is it just me or have eBay gone and changed something again?

Hoddy

Well, here too – eBay Germany that is. I guess eBay again changed something in there system. They are anyway kind of back and forth with their new interface design right now. ;-)

Same for ebay UK. My shipping is down, and I’ve just had an odd glitch that meant I wasn’t able to run a search, or even manually enter auction numbers. A reboot took care of that, but the shipping is still up the spout.

Greetings,
They’re doing fine, because they’re all web sites, not applications, so they can make a change and it propagates to everybody instantly. Also, they don’t really care about shipping, so they don’t generally parse for it. In fact, most of the commercial sites don’t (or at least didn’t last time I looked) offer any kind of auction monitoring/view, just snipes.

It’s a bit rougher for a standalone application, but the exchange is that you don’t have to give your username and password to anybody.

It’s also rougher for me, because I don’t make my living off this, so I have a lot of demands on my time. (Right now it’s trying to list some items on eBay to help pay for some back taxes I’ve discovered I owe.)

The humorous thing is that eBay’s upcoming major view-item format revamp is much more explicit about the cost of shipping, for example, so it’s easier to parse than their recent small change to the view items pages. I don’t know whether to laugh or be sad about that…

Extracting shipping is going to be distinctly harder in the interim; I’m poking at an algorithm to get it out, but until I do, it’s not going to work, probably not even with the next beta, which I’m hoping to release soon…

— Morgan Schweers, Cyber*FOX*!