Mark, I am just going to shut the shop down. Your site has way too many issues. Especially the sync and your style of search you created. I will give it a try later when all this stuff is fixed or changed. If the ideas are actually put in place you have promised.
This isn't a bug. In most cases, when you list new items on ebay, they will come over within a few minutes. However, this is not always the case, and in some circumstances, for some sellers, this could take a few hours or more. However, your new listings from ebay will always come over. Additionally, any items sold on ebay or HipStamp will always be removed from the other site within about a minute.
The search engine we've created at HipStamp was based upon input from our buyers, as well as how our buyers actually search for stamps. The results they see are significantly more accurate than any other website out there. A quick example of this (as I noted in another post) is a search for "United States #1". On Ebay this search will give you 66,000 results - and maybe a dozen of those results (somewhere in the 66,000 listings are acutally for a "United States #1"). Compared to HipStamp where you will see 86 results, 80 of which are actually for a "United States #1". Another common way our buyers, and buyers of stamps in general search is by ranges, which you can easily do here (and many of our searches every day from buyers use this). However, this isn't even possible on ebay.
To enable a great search experience for buyers, we do have some additional fields compared to ebay. Which means if you create your listings on HipStamp, you would never have any issues at all, since these are just fields you fill out, such as Country and Catalog Number. However, if you do sync your listings from somewhere else, such as Ebay, there's not a direct mapping, since we do require more information to provide a better search experience to buyers. In about 99% of the time, we are able to automatically fill in these fields for you.
However, in certain cases, we can't do this automatically - but we can show you what you can do to ensure we can (as we've done for you with your listings in question). Or you can manually update your listings to provide the additional fields we offer as well. However, note that if you make any changes on HipStamp, and then you close your store, and later re-open it, and re-sync with ebay, you would lose all of the changes you have made here
Same problem here - Items created on eBay since Saturday 24 about Midday (European time, that would be about 6AM US Eastern Time) still haven't appeared on HipStamp as of Sunday 25 (5PM Paris time, 11AM NYC time) - Moreover, all the items sold on eBay over the last 24 hour are still opened on HipStamp - I am going to have to close them manually ....
Exactly- My items were still not synced after 24 hours.. that is too long and indicates something is broken. I do understand all of this is evolving with changes and software updates.
The search idea is good but I do think there are things that were not considered when it was created. I also understand it is way too late to redesign or fix this now.
an example would be a search query for "Burma under Japan occupation revenue fiscal stamps" -at least one major area is not going to be covered in the style of search you have -- yet on Ebay all options would be covered if the word is in the title.
on ebay each or a combo of the any of the words would result in a search hit- not the case on this site. the result is that less views because your system has way less search results.
Also a lot of people like to search not considering a single stamp with a catalog number. I do think your system has a lot covered but not any where near what a search like on Ebay covers. Not getting on your case but if the items are not seen.. why bother listing? especially on a smaller site like here. no insults intended as i think we all know how hard you are working to make things nice here.
What needed to be done perhaps was to have two different searches? Even a third party search engine would be nice if it was added? they generally are almost free to install.
When a buyer enters a search into the search bar, if they enter a Country, or a Country and Catalog Number - we will search the Country and/or Catalog Number field. If anything else is entered, or in addition to the Country and/or Catalog Number the title is searched accordingly.
So if we had listings for a stamp from the country of Burma, which included "Burma under Japan occupation revenue fiscal stamps" in the title - they would show up in a search for "Burma under Japan occupation revenue fiscal stamps". While we do not have these specific items currently listed (with these keywords in the title at least), you can easily confirm this by searching for (example) "revenue fiscal stamps" and you will see all of the results with these matching keywords in the title: https://www.hipstamp.com/search?keywords=revenue+fiscal+stamps&parent_id=0
and you have two sellers here telling you the Ebay sync is broken. was 24 hours for me when i closed my shop. Just saying for the other guy at least look into it.
as for the search i will pass on further discussion and save us both a headache. :-)
thanks Jerry, but it's working again now - All sales have been synced around midday (US time) including, the ones that sold on eBay during the last 36 hours - I have noticed that this happens from time to time and generally lasts up to a 1 1/2 or 2 days -
I'm not convinced that it is not, in fact, a problem with eBay, as I used to see the same delays when my sales were synced between eBay & delcampe - As I understand it, the system works with eBay sending an email every time an item is sold, or a new one is created - if eBay does not send the email, or sends it with a very long delay this would be the cause for the problem, and eBay is known for having occasional problems with its mail servers -
By the way without wanting to go into all the details, I have to tell you that I had to stop syncing my sales from eBay to delcampe a while back because I had a nightmare with their category system - i had to modify 1000s of sales manually, and one by one, to adjust the categories as there was no match with the eBay categories - and also delcampe used to reinitialize the synchronization regularly, so I would have to do it all over again, I used to spend whole week ends modifying thousands of categories manually (to make things worse, I used to receive threatening messages from some delcampe "watchers" for not listing in the right categories, when in fact it was delcampe moving my sales to the wrong categories) . So, as far as I am concerned HipStamps is a massive improvement on that front, even if occasionally minor glitches appear, and I have found Mark and his team very attentive to these problems and always eager to fix them, which is a huge plus compared with other market places.
:-) JL PEZET - I assume after looking at their forums with the last posts a few months ago (at Delcampe).. that things are a little slow there? At least Mark has a great personality and doesn't get offended by a questioning post. that is a great thing for a site. On Delcampe if they do not like your post.. they boot you, ban you in forums and steal your gold member fees. :-) of course they are actually doing you a favor when they do it. LOL
Yes he is still running it. They are redeveloping the website with a completely new look, but they have had the two sites running in parallel (old and new) for months now, and it causes constant problems and frustrations - I have left it for the time being.
I think this is ebay in panic mode- with the sync they know your over here selling therefore watching there $$$ fly out the door not into their coffers.
I think the delay on the sync at times has more to do with with this disclaimer on Ebay's listing form (It's at the bottom of the listing)
Your listing may not be immediately searchable by keyword or category for several hours(up to 24 hours in some circumstances), so eBay can't guarantee exact listing durations
If Hipstamp is locating those listings by either keyword or category then it makes sense as to why Hipstamp can't find it right away. In that case it's not on Hipstamps end but on Ebay's. (I don't know how Mark has the sync set to find the listings on Ebay)
And just a guess that the times when it seems that the sync is taking longer then normal is also tied into Ebay's listing specials.
I believe eBay sends a confirmation eMail every time a new listing is created or any time a listing is sold or closed - these emails are directed to the Hipstamp servers that can then update the Hipstamp database - at least that is the way it worked with other synced systems I used in the past - If that is the case, the delays can happen from two sources - either the eBay email servers are very busy, or down, and delay sending emails by several hours, sometimes days ( and I know this happens because this is often the case for other ordinary eBay emails that I receive) - In this case, Hipstamp servers do not receive the emails in a timely fashion - Of course, at other times it may be that eBay send emails in a timely fashion , but the Hipstamp servers are too busy to process them immediately. On balance, though, I would guess that most of the time the delays are due to eBay delays.
All eBay syncing could be via the eBay API, not emails or searches. The delays would then be related to the frequency which HipStamp requests each sellers sale and listing information using the API.
Actually JL is correct - the way in which the Ebay Sync works (after the initial sync) is that Ebay does provide us with information every time a listing is created, closed, sold, etc. It's not based upon HipStamp requesting this information from Ebay - but Ebay sending this information to HipStamp when it happens. This is known as Ebay's "Platform Notifications". It's not an email - but it is data sent directly from Ebay's servers to HipStamp's servers when these events happen.
As a safe-guard, and simple sense check, every few weeks we also request a full list of listings per Seller from Ebay to make sure nothing has been missed for any reason.
Another part of that question should be When does Ebay actually send out the notification? Is it when the listing is submitted or is it when it becomes searchable on Ebay?
another great reason to get that feature of being able to turn off certain listings from Ebay. I am looking forward to that Mark :-) That would allow us to remove the listings from Ebay that we sent over here and keep them here at will. A great idea and new tool . Looking forward to it.
Comments
Mark, I am just going to shut the shop down. Your site has way too many issues. Especially the sync and your style of search you created. I will give it a try later when all this stuff is fixed or changed. If the ideas are actually put in place you have promised.
The search engine we've created at HipStamp was based upon input from our buyers, as well as how our buyers actually search for stamps. The results they see are significantly more accurate than any other website out there. A quick example of this (as I noted in another post) is a search for "United States #1". On Ebay this search will give you 66,000 results - and maybe a dozen of those results (somewhere in the 66,000 listings are acutally for a "United States #1"). Compared to HipStamp where you will see 86 results, 80 of which are actually for a "United States #1". Another common way our buyers, and buyers of stamps in general search is by ranges, which you can easily do here (and many of our searches every day from buyers use this). However, this isn't even possible on ebay.
To enable a great search experience for buyers, we do have some additional fields compared to ebay. Which means if you create your listings on HipStamp, you would never have any issues at all, since these are just fields you fill out, such as Country and Catalog Number. However, if you do sync your listings from somewhere else, such as Ebay, there's not a direct mapping, since we do require more information to provide a better search experience to buyers. In about 99% of the time, we are able to automatically fill in these fields for you.
However, in certain cases, we can't do this automatically - but we can show you what you can do to ensure we can (as we've done for you with your listings in question). Or you can manually update your listings to provide the additional fields we offer as well. However, note that if you make any changes on HipStamp, and then you close your store, and later re-open it, and re-sync with ebay, you would lose all of the changes you have made here
The search idea is good but I do think there are things that were not considered when it was created. I also understand it is way too late to redesign or fix this now.
an example would be a search query for "Burma under Japan occupation revenue fiscal stamps" -at least one major area is not going to be covered in the style of search you have -- yet on Ebay all options would be covered if the word is in the title.
on ebay each or a combo of the any of the words would result in a search hit- not the case on this site. the result is that less views because your system has way less search results.
Also a lot of people like to search not considering a single stamp with a catalog number. I do think your system has a lot covered but not any where near what a search like on Ebay covers. Not getting on your case but if the items are not seen.. why bother listing? especially on a smaller site like here. no insults intended as i think we all know how hard you are working to make things nice here.
What needed to be done perhaps was to have two different searches? Even a third party search engine would be nice if it was added? they generally are almost free to install.
When a buyer enters a search into the search bar, if they enter a Country, or a Country and Catalog Number - we will search the Country and/or Catalog Number field. If anything else is entered, or in addition to the Country and/or Catalog Number the title is searched accordingly.
So if we had listings for a stamp from the country of Burma, which included "Burma under Japan occupation revenue fiscal stamps" in the title - they would show up in a search for "Burma under Japan occupation revenue fiscal stamps". While we do not have these specific items currently listed (with these keywords in the title at least), you can easily confirm this by searching for (example) "revenue fiscal stamps" and you will see all of the results with these matching keywords in the title: https://www.hipstamp.com/search?keywords=revenue+fiscal+stamps&parent_id=0
as for the search i will pass on further discussion and save us both a headache. :-)
I'm not convinced that it is not, in fact, a problem with eBay, as I used to see the same delays when my sales were synced between eBay & delcampe - As I understand it, the system works with eBay sending an email every time an item is sold, or a new one is created - if eBay does not send the email, or sends it with a very long delay this would be the cause for the problem, and eBay is known for having occasional problems with its mail servers -
By the way without wanting to go into all the details, I have to tell you that I had to stop syncing my sales from eBay to delcampe a while back because I had a nightmare with their category system - i had to modify 1000s of sales manually, and one by one, to adjust the categories as there was no match with the eBay categories - and also delcampe used to reinitialize the synchronization regularly, so I would have to do it all over again, I used to spend whole week ends modifying thousands of categories manually (to make things worse, I used to receive threatening messages from some delcampe "watchers" for not listing in the right categories, when in fact it was delcampe moving my sales to the wrong categories) . So, as far as I am concerned HipStamps is a massive improvement on that front, even if occasionally minor glitches appear, and I have found Mark and his team very attentive to these problems and always eager to fix them, which is a huge plus compared with other market places.
Is SEB still running things there? :-)
Your listing may not be immediately searchable by keyword or category for several hours(up to 24 hours in some circumstances), so eBay can't guarantee exact listing durations
If Hipstamp is locating those listings by either keyword or category then it makes sense as to why Hipstamp can't find it right away. In that case it's not on Hipstamps end but on Ebay's. (I don't know how Mark has the sync set to find the listings on Ebay)
And just a guess that the times when it seems that the sync is taking longer then normal is also tied into Ebay's listing
specials.
As a safe-guard, and simple sense check, every few weeks we also request a full list of listings per Seller from Ebay to make sure nothing has been missed for any reason.
Mark, how frequently are the 'Platform Notifications' messages received from eBay processed by HipStamp?