#1084 local shipping on .co.uk being reset to US shipping figures

[Laurence Passmore]

I'm using JBidWatcher 1.0.1 on ebay.co.uk. Every now and then I would notice that all my snipe values were completely different from my original values because all the shipping values had changed (upwards, usually by a considerable amount).

It looks like that at some point when the information for an auction is updated, jBidWatcher does not go back to ebay.co.uk to get the information but looks at ebay.com instead. It then sees shipping figures for UK -> US shipping rather than local UK -> UK rates and updates the auctions accordingly. This explanation of the behaviour is further supported by the fact that the information summary for some auctions may also include insurance figures quoted in US dollars.

For example, my bid here is based on a maximum total outlay of £4.00. £4.00 - £2.50 shipping = bid of £1.50. [Something happens.] The snipe bid is still correct but the shipping has reverted to US shipping (£5.00) and JBidWatcher now calculates my total outlay to be £6.50, not the £4.00 I initially entered. Note also the optional insurance is shown in US dollars, although both ebay.co.uk and ebay.com both quote the figure in GBP (albeit formatted differently):

JBidWatcher:
Sniped for £1.50
Shipping £5.00
Insurance (optional) $10.00

eBay.co.uk:
Postage costs: £2.50
Postal insurance: Domestic: £10.00 Optional

eBay.com:
Shipping costs: To United States -- GBP 5.00
Shipping insurance: Domestic: GBP 10.00 Optional

[Francis Chin]

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This bug looks like a dupe of mine (1595297). We'll have to continue to work around this by setting the shipping figures manually...

[Morgan Schweers]

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Greetings,
*sigh*

You're absolutely right... If you're viewing some items from the US site, the shipping is shown as the price to the US, instead of the normal local shipping amounts. :(

JBidwatcher ALWAYS hits the US site, in order to eliminate the translation problems with hitting whatever local site is appropriate, and that's always worked because the data on the ebay.com site has been identical to the country-specific site, but with text that I can search for. This breaks that.

There's nothing I can think of to do about this, unfortunately. In the case of the UK vs. US, it's not much of an issue because most of the text is likely the same, but for all the other sites supported by JBidwatcher it would involve substantial work to find the actual shipping amount, mainly figuring out what the appropriate translation for 'Shipping costs' are, and hitting an additional page for every item...no, I can't really do that, even if finding the right field was easy. It'd be nearly doubling the apps traffic.

Errrrgh. :(

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

[Laurence Passmore]

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I assumed that's why you were hitting eBay.com but I think this is fixable because the flip to US prices isn't permanent. If I leave JBW running long enough it will reset to the correct UK prices and you don't need to restart it either (although it does speed that process up). So JBW is obviously capable of doing the right thing, we just need to work out why it's suddenly decided that the information has changed. e.g. Incomplete page download; a race condition; two auction update methods which don't quite do the same thing. It's a shame it's not consistently replicable as then we'd have something to go on. I'll keep an eye on it. For the most part JBW does the right thing so it's not all bad! :)