Goldin Auctions Down?
 

Is it down for anyone else? won't work on my computer or phone

I can't access the site.

It's slow as hell. I wonder if their site is overloaded with too many folks trying to access it. Not enough bandwidth.

I can't get anything to load. Very unfortunate but I am sure they will make it right. I have had nothing but great experiences in working with them.

I just posted a max bid and it worked. We will see if it holds.

Sort of seems like more often than not there days an auction has to be extended because of some technical problem. Very peculiar, as last time I checked these folks aren’t selling toilet paper or Lysol wipes.

Site has been down. Up now and they are supposed to be extending time to bid, but many people reporting trouble bidding on items they did not bid on. They are working on an approach.

extended until tomorrow - sound familiar?

Goldin Auctions Down?
 

Yay, 20 more hours of extended bidding.

Guess I won't get anything. Damn

Goldin
 

We apologize for any inconveniences but we had issues with our servers. We are working on rectifying these issues. Thank you

I was able to get in and bid, but very slow. See y'all tomorrow. Rob

Sad way to run things...

I just got an email from them:

The server has been reset and bids are coming in. However, it is slow and some people have just been shut out

Out of fairness to everyone who has tried to get bids in, we are going to close tomorrow, Sunday, May 17th at 6:00pm Eastern

Extended bidding will begin Sunday at 6:00pm and we will go lot by lot close with the 30-minute rule at that time

We appreciate your bearing with us during this unprecedented response and traffic in our auction.

We were assured by our software provider they would be able to handle the unprecedented traffic we expected from this highly publicized auction, but the response overwhelmed them.

We suggest you use the extra time between now and 6:00pm Sunday to get in all your bids and use max bids if needed to protect your bids in case of system slowness as we approach extended bidding.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and are doing this our of fairness to all bidders and consignors so everyone has an equal chance.

Thank you!

why does something similar to the problems tonight keep on happening? Groundhog Day.

When this same failure happened with Heritage just a month ago (https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=281704), I suggested it was a platform failure and not malice, as at least one person strongly suggested. That didn't go over so well.

Tonight, different auction house and a different auction platform (the one that sent out passwords in clear text), same meltdown. I really don't think these auction houses are engaged in fraud that would be just stupidly obvious. No, they're just using inadequate platforms that can't handle traffic and transactions.

These guys make an awful lot of money with their 20% buyer <s>penalties</s> premiums. Maybe they can spend some of it on their technology.

I believe that the auction has been extended and initial bids will be taken until 6P EST on Sunday, 17MAY20. I guess the auction server crashed. Watcha gonna do? They have to do the right thing for the consignors so it is what it is.

Server Crash Simple Auction Site
 

Hello All
This is a highly publicized auction, and not only has a tremendous selection of vintage material, but also key basketball material that has taken the media by storm as it features Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.
I stayed in touch with Simple Auctions on almost a daily basis before and during the auction, to ensure they knew what to expect and could handle the traffic. i was assured on a daily basis that there would be no issues. As we hit 9pm i noticed a slowness in the system and contacted them. it got progressively worse and was told basically 'it is too much traffic for us to handle' You cannot imagine how frustrating it is to spend 9 years building a business to a level where our auction is scrolling on the bottom of ESPN during the pre NFL draft show, and then my provider cannot handle the traffic my publicity brings to the site.
you can rest assured i will be dealing with this in the future.
in the meantime, since we had not yet gone to extended business, the fairest thing to do was not to drive people crazy for several hours trying to get bids in and getting frustrated, but to let everyone get to sleep, and do extended bidding at a reasonable time during the day, so everyone could get a qualifying bid in the items they wanted. as a result, we are open for bidding until 6pm sunday at which time we go into extended bidding with the 30 minute rule , lot by lot.
Whether we limit the number of lots in the future, close on multiple nights, or find a provider who is able to handle our traffic, this will not happen again and we are sorry for the inconvenience. we are open for bidding
thank you
Goldin Auctions

Totally better tonight.

Not working for me ����

Down again...fun

it's deja vu all over again

he says in sarcasm font, or spoke too soon? :)

On top of page its says auction closed 01/01/0001

Let's hope for no BP and free shipping!!!

Goldin
 

I have been trying to get in since 6:05 EST this is not good.







Daryl Fraley

It'll be interesting to see if Goldin stays with SimpleAuctionSite.

Watcha biddin on Daryl? Hope it isn't what I'm bidding on.... :p

not working here

Only if they want to lose clients. SimpleAuctoinSite personnel told Goldin not to worry, it's all good, it'll handle the traffic.... what's that saying... screw me once, shame on you, screw me twice....

It looks like they closed the entire auction. All the "End Date" fields indicate "Lot Ended". All good, it's probably the prudent thing to do at this time.

Whether legit or not (I'm giving benefit of the doubt that it's legit), these outages and subsequent extensions to the auction seem pretty certain to inflate eventual sales prices.

Last night I bid an item thinking it was in extended bidding, based on the email I'd received just prior stating the extended period would start at 11pm sharp. As the site was slow and intermittently down, I figured I needed to hustle to get my bid through while the site would accept it before the lot by lot closing. Shortly afterward I saw the email saying the new closing time would be Sunday. In that time frame however I was outbid, and then I saw it had been bid up another 5 increments during the night. I'm guessing this may have been done by folks who also thought it was in extended bidding and needed to get bids in.

Guessing several other lots saw similar bidding activity last night and then repeated again today, just before or after 3pm for people who could get through.

ADDING: howling maybe not as much of an increase, since it seems some, including myself were not able to get in at all during today’s extended bidding

Goldin Auctions Down?
 

Nvm not worth it

Lets hope for no sellers premium too

Brent,

Not sure what else Goldin can do. They have server issues. Goldin sent out an email (and I'm sure it was a tough pill to swallow) that the auction site operators couldn't handle the traffic and that bidding would continue through the next day (Sunday, 17MAY20). In my mind that gave EVERYBODY a chance to put in bids and that the possibility of the site crashing again (like it did on 16MAY20) was there. The servers were pretty good until extended bidding started, an then the issue from 16MAY20 (should have anticipated that) occurred.

If Goldin says "hey, we're going to do it again for 18MAY20", then people's thoughts that they're doing it to get more money (I personally don't believe that) may hurt their business and then what, less bidders for the next auction.

I wonder if the contract Goldin with SimpleAuctions" has any damage clauses. If so, I wouldn't be surprised to see Goldin go after it.

Really not sure what else the Goldin guys can do at this point. Someone mention lower BPs. That would be nice but they'll have to figure out what's best in maintaining a good business relationship with their bidders.

Bent, I see you edited your post... I guess I'll have to edit mine so that people don't get confused with the reply.

Goldin Auctions Down?
 

I feel like this post is more than for me, as I said, I like Goldin and I have said they will make it right (and they will). It just truly is a very unfortunate situation. That's all. I will still do business with them, no doubt about it.

edit: I did edit my post immediately after I posted it, sarcasm on texts may not have been ideal on my end lol

Was definitely sarcasm.

Uh, a little sarcasm at this time is understood...! :p

I'd put odds of no BP squarely less than 1%, but I would certainly be pleased to see that.

Goldin Auctions Down?
 

I don't expect them to do that, just wanted to say it (just incase) lol. I am in the company it was out of their control and an unfortunate situation that happened.

HOLD ALL TICKETS!!! Now there's a message indicating LOT PAUSED. Maybe there's hope for those that want to continue bidding! Personally, I think they'd have been better off just closing it because this is just a train wreck now. What happens if/when the same thing occurs again (if they re-open for bidding)... :eek:

Hahaha! I appreciate it, my friend.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/8vDbvPMP3tGF2/giphy.gif

Can't speak to specifics of this auction or provider, but it's almost an epidemic in the online auction industry, not even remotely limited to sports. I left my first provider because they crashed with an hour to go, and even though I extended an hour I had complaints from every angle. Why did I extend, why didn't I extend more etc. I think part of the problem is that Cloudflare, who almost every provider uses, can't seem to tell the difference between a DDOS attack and the uptick in business an auction always sees at the end. It's one of the few advantages to being smaller, my auctions don't tilt the game, so to speak.

Paused til tomorrow :(

at least until tomorrow...

That's a pretty informative post - thanks!

Well, we can ONLY hope that WHEN they re-open, the auction service provider has their collective shit together and won't allow this to turn into a bigger mess than it has become.

Shoot, you are correct :(

Can you say Bullshit??

Per Goldin E-mail:

Will keep this message short and more details to follow.

The auction has been paused in extended bidding. It will NOT close tonight as the problem cannot be fixed tonight.

It will remain paused until we speak to the sever company in the morning and get a timetable to switch onto cloud servers.

As soon as we have this information we will give everyone ample notice of when extending bidding will begin, we hope it is within the next couple of days or sooner.

When the auction resumes, it will be in extended bidding with 25 minutes left on the clock. You will receive at least 24 hours notice prior to bid commencement

Extended bidding rules will be in effect.

We are sorry for this horrible inconvenience however for the sake of all of our bidders and consignors we cannot allow an auction to close when users cannot use the system.

Please note we will never be using a server based auction again so this will be impossible to occur in future auctions

Auction Paused due to Hardware overload and Failure- Details and Resolution
 

This email is going out from to all those who bid or consigned in the auction.

Hello to everyone who placed a bid or consigned in our spring auction.

The auction has been paused during extended bidding. Due to an unprecedented number of bidders the server failed. The auction will NOT close tonight as the problem cannot be fixed tonight. As such, you will be not be able to bid tonight. Do not worry, you are not locked out and it is not your system.

The auction will remain paused until we speak to the server company in the morning and get a timetable to switch onto a server system that can handle the volume we generate.

As you know we encountered the problem last night and were hopeful we would be able to resume the auction today, but obviously we were not able to do so and sincerely apologize.
As soon as we have this information, we will give everyone ample notice of when extending bidding will begin. We are hopeful that this will occur within the next couple of days.
When the auction resumes, it will be in extended bidding with 25 minutes left on the clock. You will receive at least 24 hours’ notice prior to bidding commencement and extended bidding rules will still be in effect.

I have been a collector and card/memorabilia dealer for 40+ years. I know how serious we all take our collections and how passionate we all are about these auctions. At Goldin, like you, we believe our auction are ‘events’ more than they are simply auctions.

We are again sorry for this horrible inconvenience however for the sake of all our bidders and consignors we cannot allow an auction to close when users cannot use the system. The system became unusable at approximately 6pm EST. at which point I received many panicked emails, calls and texts from bidders who were worried about losing out on their key item because the system would not take their bids.

This “pause”, and fix is the only way to keep the integrity of the auction.

My commitment to you is that this server failure will never happen again in a future auction as we will we be migrating to a different cloud server system with unlimited user capacity.

Please note that ALL ORDERS FOR THIS AUCTION WILL SHIP FREE OF CHARGE AND THE COSTS ABSORBED BY US. Applicable insurance cost will still apply.

We have built this company from a startup in 2012 to an industry leader i today, and this is a tough growing pain for all of us at Goldin Auctions. I assure you again this will be dealt with and we will be better for it as user experience at Goldin is paramount to us.
We will provide an update as soon as possible by email- stay tuned.
Thank you for your efforts, understanding and consideration, it means the world to us
Very truly yours
The Goldin Auctions Team

Ken Goldin
Chief Executive Officer
Goldin Auctions
160 E. 9th Avenue Suite A
Runnemede, NJ 08078
856-767-8550

The auction has been running for a month. End it and move on.

agree
 

unless Goldin is going to pull a rabbit out of a hat and he prob will....end it.

Well, there are 4 items ive been waiting on to try to win. This auction needs to be open and follow the normal closing rules. I can't recall any other industry leading auction house ever expierencing this. How do you not run it on a large server and inticipate this or even have a back up plan? I'll wait and see what they do.

Goldin isn't at fault here, unless you want to argue that they should've found and migrated to a better auction platform a long time ago. They were told that the hosted site could handle a high volume of traffic and transactions, but it clearly could not, now they have to rectify a huge mess.

This idea that shutting down auctions is somehow "good for business" is just weird. If you ask Ken Goldin (or Heritage last month or REA last year) if they'd rather have an outage or finish the auction as expected, no one's voting for an outage.

SimpleAuctionSite failed here, Goldin has to deal with the consequences. That's it.

Really? It happens a lot. Heritage just last month.

100% agree. There's NOTHING worse, as an auctioneer, than a platform failure. It is impossible to please everyone when something like this happens so you are stuck pissing off someone. I know NJ doesn't have auctioneer licensing so I don't know if there's any laws on the books, but here in PA (where we are licensed, tested and bonded) we are a fiduciary for our consignors, so that's the side I would have to err on.

Same crap happened the last Goldin auction. They had the same server issues when extended bidding began.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I sold my collection of Twins bats, plus some others, in the VSA auction 3 weeks ago, and they went down a couple times during the final evening. They extended it an hour and everything finished up that night.

So it seems a lot of auction houses are experiencing this problem.

VSA is another SimpleAuctionSite customer (the logo is in the footer on the homepage). This is the same platform that Goldin uses.

Reminder: don't blame the auctioneer, blame the platform.

Don't blame the auctioneer? Ever? Really? Do they have an IT Department? Does the IT Department study and stress test different platforms? Maybe I'm naive, but I think if you run an online business and your stems falls on its face you've dropped the ball.

Goldin sent out an email early Friday that said please don't wait to long to bid as they system might experience slowness near 10pm? Isn't this called being on notice that there are problems coming?


QUOTE=bcornell;1981850]VSA is another SimpleAuctionSite customer (the logo is in the footer on the homepage). This is the same platform that Goldin uses.

Reminder: don't blame the auctioneer, blame the platform.[/QUOTE]

Q: Do they have an IT department?
A: No

Q: Does the IT Department study and stress test different platforms?
A: See previous answer

Every auction house tells you to bid early every time they run an auction. That doesn't mean they anticipate problems, it's that they're trying to get more bids.

That’s weird. My wife runs a small consulting business on line bringing in annually a minuscule fraction of what a single high ticket auction item brings and we’ve had an IT consultant under retainer to assist with her website.



UOTE=bcornell;1981861]Q: Do they have an IT department?
A: No

Q: Does the IT Department study and stress test different platforms?
A: See previous answer

Every auction house tells you to bid early every time they run an auction. That doesn't mean they anticipate problems, it's that they're trying to get more bids.[/QUOTE]

Goldin doesn't have the expertise or the resources to do stress testing of the auction platform. And if he doesn't have it, what about smaller customers? Lee Behrens? Scott Brockelman? Are they supposed to do stress testing?

Does Simple Auctions even allow their customers to do stress testing?

Ford crashes a bunch of cars to find out the weaknesses of their cars, the individual owners don't.

Interesting reference from a guy named Studebaker... I have no idea if I have a point :confused:

Sounds like SimpleAuctionSite is NOT the company to trust in the auction business. AHs pay to have this service done for them. Not sure what percentage use them, but I'd be curious to what that number is. I do like the navigation of their site. However, not being able to perform when it counts, is HUGE!

This is correct. SimpleAuctionSite is incompetent, but site owners currently don't have any other choice besides CreateAuction.

Someone is going to come along with a better auction platform and eat both of their lunches. It won't require knowledge about sports collectibles; they'll just need to know how to build and maintain an auction platform.

There are many auction platforms besides those two. Just not utilized by the sports collectible houses. And yes almost all of them have had crashing problems, some much worse and affecting hundreds of auctioneers. You guys realize what a tiny percentage of the auction business is sports right?

I see the point here. If an email was sent indicating possible issues and not to wait to long to bid, then after the first train wreck on Saturday maybe the next notice should have been, better bid now (before the next extended bidding period on Sunday) because if the thing crashes again, we're going to just call it a day (auction over). Instead this is in limbo.

If anything comes from this, you would hope that all AHs will learn from this mess and come up with a plan B that doesn't lead to plan C. I think that's where the frustration is.

There are people that probably bid early on Sunday in anticipation of another mess occurring and now they're just going to get bumped on their high bids and push the bids towards their max ceilings.

In hind sight, it might have been better to open the Sunday bidding as normal bidding for two hours and then start the extended bidding. As far as the extended bidding is concerned - what ever happened (close clean or shut down due to server issues), happened. Finality on Sunday, period.

Bidders would have had more than enough time to put in initial bids and perhaps larger ceiling bids if they really didn't want to get shut out prior to the close of the auction.

It's easy to play armchair quarterback...

So if you are high on a lot now you say CLOSE it down, auction over. If you are under bidder and ready to snipe and wait to the end, you say follow your rules for closing procedure. Goldin should open up for one day which includes regular bidding and then extended time. This will make consignors feel good, and allow all bidders a chance. No one should lose/win because of technical issues.

When are we going to hear what the plan is? We have been in pause mode for over a day

People make plans. An auction house can't publicize a closing date, then start changing things because they aren't paying to have an adequately powered company service their auctions. There was an item I really wanted in the Heritage auction 2 weeks ago. They had lots divided into three groups, some closing Thursday, some Friday, some Saturday. My lot closed Friday and went smoothly (and I won my lot,) leaving the rest of the weekend free for other plans, which was important because I had an invitation to my buddy's fishing cabin in Wisconsin that weekend.

My point is, had the auction house delayed closing for another day, or two, it would've tied me up the entire weekend. That just isn't acceptable.

You can blame the people who run the auction software, and I get that, but bottom line, if it is YOUR business, then take the responsibility to come up with a game plan that works. Do what Heritage did, by closing lots on different days. Maybe divide it by sport (baseball one day, basketball the next, etc.) or category (cards one day, memorabilia the next.) Have smaller (but possibly more frequent) auctions. Hire a company with more robust servers.

It's happened enough times to enough different auction houses that all should be aware of the problem. In my opinion, it's the full responsibility of each auction house to be able to run and close their auctions on schedule. Otherwise it isn't fair to bidders or consignors, or their families.

And the bidder on the Trout card thought he was getting a steal at 525K (excluding bp) :)

The inconvenience of having an auction end while you have plans.. the nerve of some people!

Online auctions are great, just put in your highest bid and hope. Imagine way back when, like a whole 20 years ago when you had to go in person or use the telephone. A landline at that!

[QUOTE=Snapolit1;1981853]Don't blame the auctioneer? Ever? Really? Do they have an IT Department? Does the IT Department study and stress test different platforms? Maybe I'm naive, but I think if you run an online business and your stems falls on its face you've dropped the ball.

Goldin sent out an email early Friday that said please don't wait to long to bid as they system might experience slowness near 10pm? Isn't this called being on notice that there are problems coming?

If Goldin sent out an email saying to bid early as they might experience a slowdown really sounds like they were expecting a problem...just saying...

The heads up on slowness leapt off the page to me, because I have never heard an auction house say that before:


We strongly recommend that you do not wait until 9 pm to place initial bids. Despite our best efforts, the system may get slow due to volume right before 10 pm
– So please bid now!





[QUOTE=chalupacollects;1982101]

On the bright side, saying our auction was so record breakingly popular it broke the system is not the worst publicity in the world for an AH.

If you have bid in the auction, check your email
It was sent yesterday at approx 740pm
As a back up, a mail merge is being sent from our controller frank Dinote to all bidders and consignors in the auction this morning .
It details closing procedure,
If you are not a bidder with a current bid in the auction, you did not get an email as you are not eligible for extended bidding. We are limiting traffic to the website during extended bidding. For anyone who says “ but I wanted to get an initial bid in” the auction ran for 36 days And was extended Saturday night Just before extended bidding was about to begin. An email was then sent out explaining it would be delayed until Sunday and once again told people they have 19 hours extra to get initial bid on, and emphasized do it NOW. If someone with all of that going on still decided to wait until 5 minutes before it entered extended bidding to try to get an INITIAL BID IN Sunday unfortunately that was bad planning and against our advice.
Please check your email if you have bids placed in the auction. If you did not, we are taking drastic steps to reduce all traffic to the website during extended bidding period so the bidders in each closing session can bid quickly and seamlessly without any slowness or delays . Thank you

The real beneficiary here is Hunt Auctions, now relieved of their laughing stock status.

How's this for timing, while I was chuckling at this comment, I got an email from Hunt saying their June auction is open.

Looks like Simpleauctions is owning up to their inaffectiness for handling traffic to their web platform. Don't think I've ever seen an AH try to limit the amount of people coming to their website. Goldin was put in a bad situation from this, which was out of their control, it sounds.

Ha! Strike while the iron is lukewarm.