Author: Scott

Some upcoming changes at Auction Request that may impact you:

eBay will be discontinuing their old API on Dec 31st, which Auction Request has been utilizing. We've finished converting our code to the new API, which has necessitated some workarounds for features that are no longer available. While we were able to overcome most of the incompatibilities, a few remain:

• If you have a feed that searches a seller name only (with no keywords or categories), you will need to add a category to this search. While you can use the AR feed generator for this, you can also add "&categoryId1=" and a category number to your existing feed URLs. This is annoying, but thankfully most sellers' items will be covered within a single "root" category. If needed, you can add up to three separate categories to cover a wide spectrum of items.
• the filter for TopRatedSellersOnly has been removed. If present in your feed, it will now do nothing.
• the filter for "Buy It Now" auctions has been removed. There are now only three choices here: Auction, Fixed Price, or Everything. If present in your feed, it will now revert to Fixed Price.
• the filter for items that accept PayPal has been removed (as PayPal is no longer part of eBay, and they're trying to get rid of the payment option entirely). It has been replaced by the "Credit Card" payment filter, which we do NOT recommend you use as very few items on eBay are payable with credit card.
• the sorting option of "Most Watched" is still present, but it may not work correctly. In test searches we've run, no data has been returned that show a Watch count. This could be because the feature is broken, or that nobody actually uses the Watch function on eBay anymore.

So that's all the bad news. Some good news:

• Feeds will now return up to 400 items (increased from 100)
• Priority Listings (those items eligible for 50% higher commissions payable to you) will be displayed at the top of your results regardless of your sort choice. Within this group of Priority Listings, they will be sorted only if you selected as your sort option Highest Prices First, Lowest Prices First, or Most Watched (eBay does not return start & end times to us on most items now). Non-Priority listings will be listed after the Priority Listings, and will sort according to your choice (the option to sort via start & end times works for these listings, since eBay is doing it on their side). It's complicated and confusing, but the takeaway here is that Priority Listings will always be at the top, giving you an optimal chance to make a higher commission. With that said, only certain ePN members are eligible for this higher Priority Listings commission, though who is eligible is not made clear. 🙁

The new code will go active on Friday, December 31st, and the transition should be seamless (fingers crossed). If you experience any unusual behavior, please let us know immediately. The old code should work for a month or two longer, so we can swap it back in if problems are encountered.

Thank you for your continued support and patronage!

We've implemented a fix for the Facebook issue identified in this eBay Partner Network post: https://partnerhelp.ebay.com/helpcenter/s/article/Mobile-Deep-Linking?language=en_US#facebook_app . It involves correcting attribution when a user opens an ePN rover link from with the Facebook app. Note that the fix only affects the iOS app; there is no fix at this time for the Android app.

…and apparently I didn't have it quite right. Non eBay.com clicks (to www.ebay.de, for instance) needed to have the siteID parameter correctly coded. That has been fixed now, so all clicks as of 18:30 GMT this Saturday should now be tracking.

Apologies for that. 🙁 The siteID parameter was an undocumented feature of the new links, which I only picked up on by playing around with the SmartShare browser extension.

Scott

ePN just notified everyone (you should have received an e-mail from them today) that as of March 31st, the rover link format is changing.  I updated the Auction Request rover links to this new format just now; please advise immediately (in reality, tomorrow morning / Saturday morning when your ePN earning stats will reflect the new link structure) if your rover links do not appear to be working correctly.  I think they'll be fine, but who really knows at this point.

The old link structure looked like this: 

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.de%2Fitm%2F184659519294&campid=0123456789&toolid=10001

The new link structure looks like this: 

https://www.ebay.de/itm/184659519294?mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&siteid=0&mkcid=1&campid=0123456789&toolid=10001&mkevt=1

Note that for eBay domains outside the US, the new links will correctly go to that eBay domain (www.ebay.de, for instance) where the old rover links were always rover.ebay.com.

Why did ePN do this?  I do not believe it has anything to do with Auction Request specifically, as this would have had to have been in the planning stages for some time.  Publicly they're saying it's to bring the rover links up to "industry standards", which is software-speak for "the real reason is something else but everybody likes to hear about industry standards".  In this case, the new structure avoids a redirect on eBay's side, which was probably the main reason for the change.  The second reason for the change was to purposely break all third-party tools and scripts, many of which are old / will not be updated, so they'll get to pay out less affiliate commissions.  Just my wild guesses here of course.  :/

Lastly, the new (hidden) front page for all subscribed users is here: https://www.auctionrequest.com/welcome-to-auction-request-2/

Scott

Due to two users who felt the need to publicly post that ePN had told them to stop using Auction Request, we expect ePN to make the public announcement that Auction Request (and any other third-party feed) is no longer allowed. To date, we still have not been contacted directly by eBay, and the only indications that we are running afoul of their terms is via three users who were audited by ePN in recent weeks:

— The first user never contacted us; he cancelled his Auction Request account and then posted on the ePN forum that Auction Request was now banned.

— The second user did contact us, and we told him that removal of link cloaking (rover links going to auctionrequest.com instead of rover.ebay.com) may have been the root of the problem. He told ePN that his links had been changed to remove Auction Request (which was the truth), and they were apparently fine with that; his usage of us continues.

— The third user contacted us and said he told ePN he was using Auction Request, and ePN repeated the boilerplate response that Auction Request is not allowed. We advised him to discontinue using us, and to re-enable his feeds after a month or two. He did not respond, and instead decided to post on the ePN forum, which will now force ePN to declare a public policy on the matter.

Our guess is that the central issue in all this was the link cloaking, which has been discussed at length. But "Auction Request" is a bad word at ePN right now, and it's a lot easier to just declare that we're "banned" rather than work with us on a solution that benefits everybody.

Therefore, in light of all this, we took a few steps today:

— The Auction Request home page now just displays a message that the service has been discontinued

— No new users will be accepted

— Our service, for the meantime, will continue. This obviously is subject to change at any time. If we do decide to shut down completely, all yearly subscriptions will be refunded at a pro-rated amount of time left

— As a current subscribed user, you can access a new (hidden) front page: https://www.auctionrequest.com/welcome-to-auction-request-2/

Moving forward, this is the deal:

— Yes, this is scary, and if you want out, we'll refund any yearly subscription with a pro-rated amount at your request, no questions asked. Whether monthly or yearly, it's best to cancel your subscription yourself within PayPal for this.

— If you receive income from ePN that is separate from the RSS feeds, you will need to weigh the risk of continuing with us versus cancelling and thus salvaging your other income streams. If Auction Request represents the entirety of your ePN income, you really have nothing to lose by continuing; whether Auction Request is shut down or your ePN account is terminated, the end result will be the same. Do not count on getting a warning from ePN that you need to stop using Auction Request, as the previous three users did. Since we assume it will shortly be a public policy, they can and will terminate you immediately if they suspect you're in violation. ePN is somewhat famous for such heavyhandedness.

— With that said, we do not believe eBay is able to detect that you're using Auction Request to get your feeds (unless you tell them!), as your rover links now look identical to the ePN Link Generator ones. Indeed, the 2nd user mentioned above is proof-positive that ePN is oblivious that he did not stop using us.

— If you post anything regarding Auction Request on the ePN forum, your account with us will be terminated. Zero tolerance policy on this. In order for our service to continue, eBay cannot suspect that we're still serving feeds, or they will come after us with legal action.

— If/when you are audited by ePN (they do this periodically on everyone, so it eventually will happen), avoid any mention of Auction Request. One of the standard questions they ask is "describe how you generate traffic for eBay". You're manually posting auctions and you obtained your rover links via the ePN Link Generator tool. If you state you are using Auction Request, your ePN account will be terminated by eBay, possibly now with no warning.

As an aside, ePN never originally approved the Auction Request business model; we didn't approach ePN. There was absolutely zero chance that they would permit a service to replicate the RSS feeds that they were in the process of shutting down. While they certainly were aware we existed – we advertised on the ePN forum! – the higher-ups most likely took a blind eye, because the actual impact to their servers continues to be negligible, and we're also keeping several hundred ePN afffiliate users in the program (which benefits everyone). While we can argue the merits of this, the point is that eBay – and ePN – have been on a very public crusade to slowly chip away at their own business model and userbase for years now, with head-scratching business decisions and reductions/eliminations of affiliate commissions. Auction Request was an attempt to salvage the affiliate program for hundreds of users from eBay's own idiocy. Their idiocy may have caught up to us.

If you have any questions, concerns, or just want to vent, please reach us at [email protected]. If you decide to cancel your service, we thank you for your support these past few months. If you decide to continue, we wish all of us the best of luck in surviving this.

Regards,

Scott & Rhys

As a follow-up to our recent blog post regarding steps we've considered to avoid the downtimes & outages we've experienced, I'd like to update you on where we currently stand.

This past weekend, we switched the Auction Request service over to a new dedicated server. This server is faster than the old one, and has additional resources to manage increased load. While the load on the old server did not cause any of our outages, we felt it was a good investment to make now, with an eye towards future expansion.

This past month, several of our high-throughput clients were being mysteriously blocked from accessing our service. While this took us a number of weeks to diagnose, we did eventually discover that our old server's hosting company was behind the blocks, as they saw the high-throughput API requests as a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. In order to mitigate this, we're now incorporating Cloudflare's proxy service. It's important to note that Cloudflare does not enable us to survive a server outage at our host; since we provide an API service that interfaces with eBay, not a static website, viewing a cached copy of Auction Request doesn't work. Cloudflare does enable us to engage their more sophisticated firewall to survive outside attacks, as well as a DNS failover service that can instantly redirect auctionrequest.com to another IP address should our current IP address not resolve.

What this means in layman's terms: we're going to utilize our old server as a backup server. Should Cloudflare detect that our current (new) server has gone down, they will automatically switch the service over to the backup. Theoretically, this will occur relatively quickly (within a few minutes or less), and again theoretically, should largely eliminate any further downtime. The odds of both servers being down at the same moment is mathematically pretty low.

The backup-redirection mechanics have not been enabled yet, but will be in the coming week, once we're satisfied that the new server setup is performing optimally.

We thank you all for your continued patience as we overcome these technical challenges. Your business is very important to us, and we continue to make investments to provide the fast, reliable, professional product you deserve.

As we've now been "live" for about 50 days now, with a sizeable user base that's provided much better real-world usage than we were able to simulate in testing, we've implemented a number of things in order to regulate how the service is used.

This article may get slightly technical, so a brief summary before we start: if your API call usage gets too high, you'll receive an e-mail warning to that effect.  An increase much beyond that level of usage will result in another e-mail, and the system will temporarily block you.  We'll also be notified, and will work with you to figure out the reason for the high usage.  To date, we've had a handful of users who've hit the "warning" threshold, but in each case, we were able to bring them down to "safe" levels without too much trouble.

For Premium users, you can view your recent API call usage and click-thru statistics via the "Your Stats" page, off the main menu.

So now the more technical parts:

The true "load" on the system is actually not how many calls we're sending and receiving to the eBay API, but how much RAM and CPU resources are consumed on our server to process a single call from a user.  This was a bit of a surprise to us, and necessitated some extensive code optimization in order to minimize disk access and server database queries.  We're comfortable with the limits we have in place now, the server load has calmed down, and thankfully we've been able to assist the (very few) users who had overly high throughput.  We're also very happy with the performance of the WP eBay Product Feeds plugin, but users who have either modified the plugin, are using a different CMS solution, or most importantly, are utilizing a feature where an end-user can search eBay through our service (which ends up getting exploited by bots), have in some cases been causing issues.  As mentioned, should this occur, we'll work diligently with you to examine your usage case and hopefully implement some code additions on your side to help mitigate and get you below that critical threshold.

When viewing your Stats screen, some things to keep in mind.  Because we have a cache system in place (a 5-minute cache for Premium users, and a 30-minute cache for free users), identical calls received by our system within that cache window will be served the cache result stored here, without needing to query the eBay API.  Any of these "cache hits" don't count towards your API call usage.  Additionally, most error messages you get were caught by us before querying eBay, and they won't count either.  Lastly, we have bot-filtering algorithms in place to cut down on the number of search-engine bots, or crawlers, that are viewing your feeds and causing API calls.  All of these strategies have dramatically reduced the actual API calls you're making, and may be quite a bit less than what you would expect.

(Incidentally, this experience in monitoring usage real-time has revealed what I believe is the primary reason eBay shut down the RSS service.  Without any ability to filter bots, regulate usage, or serve a cache, their RSS would have been hammered by literally tens of millions of queries per day.  The resources to handle that would have been quite formidable, and costly.)

The usage metric we're looking at is your calls to the API over the last thirty-minute period.  We check this every five minutes, in order to better catch a sudden massive spike.  The API call stats you see on your Stats screen will be five minutes or less "behind live", so if you make an API call and then run over to check the stats screen, it may take up to five minutes to reflect.  The click stats are live.  The click stats also require you to have enabled Link Cloaking in your Profile, as that's the only way we're able to track your clicks.