Another Auciton Bug!
 

Chuck,
Last week we started running an auction for one of our sponsors. I am the one who listed the item for him. I put in the reserve price at $2400, and the starting price as 0 or best offer. Here is a link to the item:

Fikse Profil Series Wheels - Classifieds

We currently have 20 bids on the item, the higest bid is $1900, short of the reserve, but there are still 8 days left to go.

HOWEVER, look at the listing, there is a "Buy It Now" price listed of $1900, the same as the current high bid.

I NEVER put anything into the input box for buy it now when I listed the item.

WHERE did this come from and how do we get rid of it??? It is causing havoc with the auction because the high bidder is thinking they can just buy this item now for $1900 when in fact they haven't even reached the reserve yet!

PLEASE HELP!!!!

well I dont know if I could classify that a bug. The user can not buy it because there is no buy it now button right. Thats actually safety code in the showproduct.php file to ensure that if the price on the auction is higher than the what they placed for the buy it now price that we convert the buy it to the higher price so they get that price. Something customers actually wanted

You could try changing it to something like this

Chuck,
It is correct that there is no buy it now button, but having text that says "Buy it Now" with a price that is lower than the reserve price is certainly confusing to would-be bidders. I'm not sure I understand what you are saying about the safety code, the simple answer is that if the person who lists the item for sale does not put in a buy-it-now price, then the buy-it-now text should simply not be shown, there shouldn't be any value there at all, no display at all because the person listing the item didn't want to use that feature.

Ok I made the change and now it displays the buy it now as "Best Offer" which I can live with if there is no way of removing the buy-it-now box/display altogether when there is no buy-it-now value entered.

well the auction buy price is the current price of the auction and must be shown we are now getting into really code hacking discussion as your hiding the ability to show the price of the auction.

Chuck,
THat's not what i'm saying, the auction price is whatever the high bid is. Let's run the scenarios.

User lists item with NO buy-it-now (BIN) price. No initial listing price. Reserve of $100.

Initially the current price for the item should be "best offer"

Once the item receives bids then the current price should be whatever the high bid is, but there still should never be a BIN price shown.

I think the problem here is that you are using 1 cell (Buy it Now) in the display to show 2 different things, EITHER the current auction high bid, or the BIN price. My suggestion is that you keep those 2 things SEPARATE because they truly are separate things.

All auctions would have a "Current Price" box showing whatever the current price is, either Best Offer or the high bid at the moment. ONLY auctions with a BIN price would have a box showing the BIN price.

Otherwise using 1 box to display both items, and always with the label of "buy it now" price is just too confusing and unlike any other auction system out there.

Hope that helps...

You can try editing your showproduct template and change this

to this

Chuck,
There are different places in that template with that code, are you saying change all 3, or just the one that comes before the auctionbuy prhase?

And of course if you don't integrate these 2 changes into the product then anytime I upgrade in the future these changes will be lost and I'll have to do it all over again. :)

You only change the first two the ones that have to do with auctionbuy

ok done, check it out with link above, seems to work for this auction, will have to set up one where there is a buy it now price.

If there is a buy it now price one will be shown

Cool, so can we get this integrated into the codebase from this point forward, both the showproduct.php change and the template change? Please! :)

should not be an issue