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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 2444719, member: 27832&quot;]I&#039;m interested in your ideas about managing item numbers, but as a Web application developer, I don&#039;t think you&#039;ll have much luck getting eBay to implement them.</p><p><br /></p><p>Any time you start <i>encoding information</i> into an ID, you run into a couple of problems:</p><p><br /></p><p>What if someone doesn&#039;t <i>want</i> that information revealed to everyone who can see the ID? As a seller, I may not want my buyers to know that I&#039;ve been trying to unload this dog for 24 months.</p><p><br /></p><p>What if the encoding field overflows? What happens when somebody has already relisted 999 times, and tries to do it again?</p><p><br /></p><p>If you have a uniform and <i>opaque</i> ID format, you don&#039;t have to worry about these questions. It also makes it a lot easier to generate new IDs, especially if you need to do that on multiple systems at once (and eBay, with its traffic levels, certainly needs to do that).</p><p><br /></p><p>You make an excellent case based on your workflow, but I wonder how many eBay sellers face the same issues you do. I&#039;m not sure what you mean by &quot;changing the item number on your coin&quot; -- do you mean that you physically write the eBay number on a 2x2, or something? If you&#039;re trying to keep a spreadsheet updated, is that a task that could be automated? I&#039;m guessing the <i>really</i> large sellers use automated tools to keep track of everything.</p><p><br /></p><p>Me, I&#039;ve never had more than a few items listed at one time, so I&#039;ve always been able to get away with doing everything by hand. So, as I was always taught in my usability courses, I Am Not The User -- or, at least, not <i>every</i> user. Your needs are different, and because you understand what you need and do a good job of explaining it, eBay won when they picked you to get surveyed. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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