Hi,

I unfortunatelly have an auction, where I have not received my parcel and the seller is not responding. If I try to open a case I’m routed to the US ebay side, because “I was bidding on an american side”. I live and bid in Germany. Can I switch this to bidding-on-a-German-side?

Eric

Greetings,
The short answer is: No, unfortunately.

To explain, in order for JBidwatcher to do what it does, I have to parse the responses from eBay, and pull out phrases that mean successful bids, underbids, or other problems. I also have to do the same to find the right fields to parse on their item pages (‘Quantity’ vs ‘Stückzahl’) and many other places.

Right now I do this for ebay.com and ebay.co.uk because it’s straightforward and useful; there are very few language differences between them, and supporting ebay.co.uk gets access to all the items which are visible only to Europe, which is significant. If I were to support all the language potentials, it would be an explosion of complexity that I’m simply not able to handle. Given that eBay’s constant terminology changes and web page tweaks are what keep breaking JBidwatcher in the first place, multiplying that by the dozen-ish country sites with unique languages which I don’t read would make it impossible for me to maintain the software.

You’ve run into the #1 problem with my approach; that when things go wrong, eBay are jerks about where you can resolve it. This is, thankfully, a rare case, however. I know it sucks pretty badly for you, being in the circumstance, but vastly more transactions go right on eBay than go wrong. This means that the huge amount of one-time and ongoing work to support many language sites has to be weighed against the rarity of things going wrong.

I can’t support going in that direction. I wouldn’t be able to manage the software anymore at that point, and it would be constantly breaking, as multiple language sites are constantly updated by eBay.

I try to emphasize this on the eBay configuration page. If you pick, for instance, ebay.de in the ‘Country site’, it very clearly says:

Bidding happens on ebay.com or ebay.co.uk, even if neither is your local site. If you have a seller dispute, it will need to be made on one of those sites.

I feel terrible for your situation; I do believe they’ll handle the dispute even though it isn’t your local site, it’s just a major pain to deal with eBay support in a language other than your native one.

I wish you the very best of luck with your future auctions.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Thanks a lot for your long response. I will try to solve my case on the US side.

Regards

Eric

Just a question: if you’d externalize all the response fragments that you parse for, into a text (e.g. properties) file, including a concise description where the fragment needs to appear in the html text, how much effort would that be? Maybe the community can then provide a repository with localized responses files, and you can still clearly state that you don’t provide support in these cases. Since they might not follow the changes as quickly as the original, it would be clear that the user might have to solve minor issues on his own, but we could write a how-to for that case. You’d still only hand out one (or two) english file(s) with the JBidwatcher download.

I know that it’ll be quite a number of strange text fragments to look after in each local ebay site, but still this number should be finite and the work doable if it’s not one person doing it for all languages.

I’ve done a similar thing for German and English for a multilingual browser game client before, so I know what I’m talking about in general.

Hello,
I also had the same error when trying to add a auction from ebay.de, i live in Belgium and buy only from ebay in Germany (much more stuff to buy @ better prices)…
I tried the methode from kltxfm :
adding “ebay.non_us=true” & “ebay.alternate=ebay.co.uk” before the “=” in the JBidWatch.cfg file
Also do not forget to change (if necessary) the “ebay.us_only=” to “false”
THIS WORKED FOR ME !!
This should be adjusted in the next update !!