eBay makes nice with MercExchange

and while they are making nice...

It appears that they may also be artificually inflating their auction counts to look better...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mePI-UWDGOE

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=2000527568&start=0

Anom, cause they may be hunting people reporting this...

application snafu?

To AC, the videos suggest that ebay are inflating their ratings with unbiddable listings, a large percentage of which start with "sdc_" followed by numbers. A thread on the ebay forum has a support rep stating that sdc entries are shopping.com entries which are showing on ebay by mistake. Nobody is accepting that and are all going on about "DNS is different" and the like.

To me this looks like a simple application cockup. Ebay own shopping.com and it appears that the same back-end is being used to store the entries for products on ebay and shopping.com. It looks like each sdc_xxxxxx 'user' entry is a product set for shopping.com.

If there was a mistake with the way this data was handled, it could indeed cause these 'users' to appear in normal ebay auction searches. It has nothing to do with DNS - a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I'm not sure I fully believe ebay aren't up to something, especially as the snafu has conveniently filled in some of the gap from the boycott, but this does look to me like a back-end cockup rather than outright perversion as many are claiming.

Of course many people have already made up their minds and will seek out anything which supports their beliefs. So this was just my 2 pence bid.

Patent Application

My patent involves the placing of physical goods into a basket made from wire (or similar substance) which is then taken to an unpacking point whereupon the value of the goods is tallied and payment is made.

Look out Tesco, Asda etc. coz my lawyer wants a word.

same AC as above

Many poeple have attempted to get ebays stance on this, the thing is that the auctions go up, and if you look at the user ids, not all have been sdc_ .

In some cases, where the usernames were not "sdc_" they showed up as random names but then "sdc_ " in the "my ebay" areas (but not all did).

Also, if they were some kind of cockup in the systems, why would ebay just delete the forum postings (over 10 removed threads so far) rather then just saying what it was.

Not to mention, even if you are running the same backend, for mutliple style sites, who would be stupid enough to allow the database systems from one, to be able to interact with another?

I run multiple sites myself, all using the same backend, and at no point can one "read" the others database.

At least not without someone doing a bofh on the system.