Ebay is stupid

[danphoto]

OK Vernon, I say Ebay added an hour to the duration of the auction.

Ebay says they added an hour to the duration of the auction.

You say they didn't.

Fair enough.

 

[cisamcgu]

e-bay did not add any time at all; we, the UK, changed our time zone, so e-bay compensated for that by altering the time at which the auction finishes so it still runs for the correct amount of hours (120, 240 whatever...)

 

[danphoto]

I'm out of this

 

[Panter]

I'm out of this

You tried your best

 

[Cardiac]

No, they have extended the duration of the auction by one hour - as they say. Their start and finish times are local times, not GMT.

The key point is this. The start time was when we were on GMT. The end time was after the clocks changed, so was in BST.

Although the apparent end time changed, Ebay did not change anything, since they operate as a global business, and as commented above, to an outsider the auction ran for the correct duration. If I was a buyer in (say) Hong Kong, where the clocks don't change, then start and end time would appear to match as normal.

Ebay have added to the confusion by saying that they have added an hour when they haven't. If they had done so, then a auction starting at 9am in GMT would have ended at 11am in BST which clearly is not the case.

 

[User169]

I wondered why the item I was watching last night suddenly got an hour added to the auction! Quite an interesting item - if genuine could have been worth well into six figures. More likely though, it was worth only 200EUR, but sold for 550. Somebody presumably felt it was worth a punt.

 

[Over The Hill]

***Effective change from GMT to British Summer Time (BST) on 27 March 2011***

22 March, 2011 | 09:38AM GMT


On Sunday 27 March, clocks will be springing forward once again, going ahead one hour at 1:00 GMT to 2:00 BST. The necessary adjustment to the eBay official time will be made to reflect this change.

As a reminder, all items that are listed before the time change will still run for exactly the same length of time of 1, 3, 5, 7, 10 or 30 days. This means that if an item begins at 1:00PM before 27 March and ends after the time changes, the ending time will be changed to 2:00PM instead of 1:00PM.

Regards,
The eBay Team

 

[jnb]

Ebay says they added an hour to the duration of the auction.

Where do they say that they've done that. I've an auction running at the moment and I can't seen anything saying they've extended the auction durations. (not saying they haven't said that just that I haven't seen them say that)

 

[philipbh]

Where do they say that they've done that. I've an auction running at the moment and I can't seen anything saying they've extended the auction durations. (not saying they haven't said that just that I haven't seen them say that)

Something here http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/sell/duration.html

Though not the actual message above

 

[Fnaar]

I think they took an hour off, myself...

 

[Maz]

All this confusion could have been avoided if you just had a 'Buy it Now' option, then the "extra hour" wouldn't matter.