441779 - eBay -- as a seller, I can't change from "fixed price" to "online auction"

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[Michael]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

Hello...I post a lot of items on eBay. The last time that I tried to post an item, I tried to change the status of my auction from a "Fixed Price" to an "Online Auction."  It would not switch.  I opened IE7 and tried it and it worked.  I never had this problem with Firefox 2.  There is a problem using eBay with Firefox 3.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log on to eBay
2. Try to change your selling preference from "Fixed Price" to an "Online Auction"
3. It will not switch
Actual Results:  
See Above

Expected Results:  
See above

Comment 1

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Where can I find these  selling preferences on ebay?

Comment 2

[Michael]

You can find them in the middle of the first page when putting up an item to sell.  I also noticed that the "preview" does not work properly at all on that same page when you want to preview your description you put up for the auction. 

Comment 3

[Michael]

Hi....If you need any help with this, feel free to phone me at 310-989-2851.  I love Firefox and have been using it for years and really need it for eBay (I hate having to use IE)and would do anything to help......Michael

Comment 4

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Michael, let's just try bugzilla for now (but thanks for the offer).

I feel a bit stupid, but I can't find this selling preference/"Fixed Price" thing.
Could you perhaps give step by step explanation on how to get there? And/or perhaps  attach a screenshot? (thanks for your help)

Comment 5

[Michael]

Attachment: First Firefox 3 eBay Problem

Comment 6

[Michael]

Attachment: Second Firefox 3 Ebay Problem

Comment 7

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Ok, thanks for those screenshots.

It turns out the "Fixed Price"/"Online Auction" is only visible for sellers have a feedback rating of 10 or more:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fixed_price.html
See under the chapter "limitations".

I'm not sure what to do about that. I can't really investigate it myself.

Do you see any js errors in the Error console when you try to switch your selling preference?

I filed bug 442030 for the Preview issue (I can reproduce that one).

Comment 8

[Michael]

For the "Fixed Price"/"Online Auction" issue, I have 336 feedbacks/ratings and it happens to me.  I guess you need to have someone who has an eBay account with at least 10 feedbacks look at it.  I do not see any errors when I try to switch selling preferences.

Comment 9

[Brandon Sterne (:bsterne)]

I can confirm the behavior that Michael is reporting.  In the Sell Your Item flow, the second page is called "Create Your Listing".  The auction format section of this page is broken in Firefox 3.

There are two tabs in this section which should, when clicked, allow the user to toggle between standard auction format and fixed price format.  In Firefox 3, clicking the "Fixed Price" tab does not change the content in this section of the page, as it does in other browsers.

The entry point to this code is:
<a href="#" onclick="ebay.run(this.id,'onclick');return false;" id="fixedprice">Fixed Price</a>

I ran that code in my JavaScript shell and it returns with no errors, so I am going to have to defer to the eBay Product Development team for further help debugging this problem.  I will send email to them shortly.

Comment 10

[Brandon Sterne (:bsterne)]

I just sent email to the eBay Product Development team and will update the bug when I have more information.

Comment 11

[neeraj]

Change format link makes AJAX calls to get the data for different sections on the page related to selected format. AJAX XML response on FF3 doesn't contain complete data for all the nodes. If we use the same request directly on browser we get the full response. on IE7 and FF2, we get the full AJAX response back. Is there any limitation on the AJAX response size, which might be causing this issue?

Comment 12

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Neeraj, thanks for the help!
I guess this might have stopped working when bug 362043 got fixed, like bug 442030.

Maybe the Ebay servers suffers from the same issue as mentioned in bug 392046, comment 23?

Comment 13

[neeraj]

Thanks Martijn,
How do we fix this for our sellers. I just tried and the issue still exist. It appears a bug in FF3 xmlhttprequest for xml responses, do we have to download a patch or something to make it work? Please let us know, it is a very serious issue.

Thanks.

Comment 14

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Neeraj, Brandon, here are tryserver builds, with the patch for bug 362043 backed out:
https://build.mozilla.org/tryserver-builds/2008-07-01_03:[e-mail]-xmlhttprequest_charset_backout/
If you could test one of these builds (depending on which platform you are), if it makes eBay work again, that would be great.

Comment 15

[neeraj]

Martijn, I tried running exe but it took me to following 404 page
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0.1pre/whatsnew/
Can I have your contact number to discuss this issue, you can email me directly. We are getting lot of complains from our seller community and we should resolve this ASAP. If there is anything we can do in our code to fix this charset issue, please let me know.

Comment 16

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

It would be great if we could get a eBay test account for our QA team to be able to test this more easily = neeraj can you help connect us with someone in eBay who can help with this?

Comment 17

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

(In reply to comment #15)
> Martijn, I tried running exe but it took me to following 404 page
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0.1pre/whatsnew/

Yes, no problem with that. Just go to ebay.com and do whatever you always have to do to reproduce this bug.

> Can I have your contact number to discuss this issue, you can email me
> directly. We are getting lot of complains from our seller community and we
> should resolve this ASAP. If there is anything we can do in our code to fix
> this charset issue, please let me know.

Well, first I would like to know absolutely sure this is a problem happening because of the patch for bug 362043. So if you or Brandon could try out the tryserver build to test this, that would be great.
If that's the case, then we at least know the ebay server can't handle the extra  charset info added in the content-type header. I don't know how that could be solved by eBay.

I'm CC-ing some people here with the question if it would be realistic to back out the patch for bug 362043? (if that's the cause for this issue)
It seems to cause quite some pain (apart from this issue, alone)

Comment 18

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Using the tryserver build noted in Comment 14, I can confirm on Windows Vista and Mac that using that build I am able to switch between Fixed Price and Online Auction.

Comment 19

[neeraj]

Great, thanks Marcia. What is the next step to make this fix available to our FF3 users?

Comment 20

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

neeraj, the fix for bug 362043 isn't technically wrong, and it's not clear yet whether we'll revert back to our more broken behavior or not, so I wouldn't count on that being fixed (I'm not saying it won't, I just don't know if it will, or when). The problem is that servers out there (including yours) are not properly dealing with the more correct data that's now being sent by Firefox. Read the bug for all the gory details if you want, but if I was you I'd go ahead and push to get your server fixed and you'll be set whether this issue is dealt with on our end or not. Same goes for other browsers out there too, they may follow us, hard to say yet though.

Comment 21

[neeraj]

Johny, can you please provide exact details on what needs to be fixed in our servers to handle the data being sent by FF3.

Comment 22

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Neeraj, FF3 now sends this in the http header for the content-type:
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
In FF2 it sends this header:
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;
Ebay's server needs to be able to handle both types.

Comment 23

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Comment 22 isn't quite correct, depending on what your XMLHttpRequest is doing.  If you're sending a string, then comment 22 is spot on (and we do have an existing bug report that claims that we should not add charset= in that case, for what it's worth; there were no sites reported actually broken due to it, however).

If you're sending a Document, then it might be that we used to send it as UTF-8 and now send it as ISO-8859-1.  That's a bug that we hope to fix soon (don't have the number offhand).

So exactly what needs changing on the server side depends on what you're sending and what your server is doing with the data.

Comment 24

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Just to make it clear, the ISO-8859-1 thing is definitely a bug, but we do NOT consider the "charset=UTF-8" in the string case a bug.

Comment 25

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Ok, well, I got the info from comment 22 when using liveHTTPHeaders on bug 442030.

Comment 26

[Pablo]

I am able to set auction style on ebay using windows10 and firefox release93
marking bug as resolved works for me