I’ve been having some troubles recently with launching listings using the Scheduler, as opposed to launching them with the Launch Control system.
I know the technical cause of the problem, which I have no easy way to fix: my ftp image server at pair.com really doesn’t like it when there are 100+ ftp logins from one account when I schedule a bunch of listings to launch. Or maybe it doesn’t like it when a single ftp session is left open for an hour. I don’t actually know which. I have no control over these security settings on the server, which is a cheap but reliable commercial hosting company I trust.
The symptom is that when I use the Scheduler, after 40+ listings, I almost always start to get ftp access forbidden responses from the server. These last for a while (about the length of time you’d expect a “cool down” setting to run, like 10 minutes) and then things work fine after that until we hit the wall again.
The bad consequence of this symptom is that these are image upload failures to my server, which do not actually stop the listing from being launched on eBay (since I use their service as well). So every time a listing is marked in GS as "failed” it is in fact running on eBay, and I have manually find it, kill the running version, and then re-launch each one manually.
The thing I’m wondering about is: this never seems to happen with Launch Control. Now I admit I do not often use Launch Control with a delay turned on between launches. That (and the ability to delay until later) is what I want to use Scheduler for.
GarageSale has honestly always had this problem with my ftp server, and I’ve learned to work around it (mainly by using the Launch Control more). But I really do want to start using Scheduler for night-time listing starts, and I can’t seem to trust it.
As an example, I just now launched 219 listings in LC with no hesitations or errors reported. Last night I tried to launch 100 with Scheduler, and ten of them (it always seems to be multiples of ten?!) failed to upload an image, and were therefore marked in GS as being “failed”. First thing this morning I had to search them out manually in eBay and kill them, because of course the eBay version was not present in GS, and I do not want to download them from eBay and lose all the technical information I store in the User Properties, or the original images saved in GS.
The thing I wonder is: Are LC and Scheduler using the same dynamics for uploading images? They behave so differently that it almost feels like a symptom. Even if I turn off “use multiple threads” in LC, and launch 100 listings consecutively in LC and Scheduler, I can be 90% sure the Scheduler ones will include some failures.
Caveat: yes, of course, I could use GarageSale Image Service. But I don’t? I do keep some old-fashioned web counter analytics running on my personal server that GS doesn’t provide.
Later Also, I wonder if maybe a bug fix (from my perspective) would simply be to stop marking GS listings as errors when they fail to upload images to my personal ftp server, but do upload correctly to eBay. eBay image service is a good fail-over for my personal server, and I rarely have more than 10-12 images for a listing.
The ideal business logic seems like it would be more like “If ftp upload fails but the same image uploaded to eBay, it’s fine, carry on but warn the user. If ftp upload fails and eBay upload fails, cancel the launch (don’t launch this listing on eBay!) and also produce an error.”
The next-most-ideal would be “If any image upload fails, do not launch the listing on eBay even if you have to cancel it afterwards.”
But I think it’s a few months? Probably, educated guess, 90 days, since eBay really likes to use 90 days for so many things. I had some seasonal stuff I stopped and a month or 2 later, I was still able to do a proper re-list. But 6 months later….I had to start the listing as if it were new.