frank_newman

Still getting this:

So I have to go back to the list of my bids and refresh to see if my bid is now high or not.

Just imagine if this site had customers who had actual standards of quality. I guess there is some romance in bidding in a Haitian bazaar.

Agreed on Collector's. I hope this experience leads people to them, I think they put a lot of work into producing a modern auction experience. There are still some issues with the flow of their interface, but I have bought a handful of books from them in these auctions and I have been happy with their communication and service.

Put in a bid for the first time since the downtime and got this:

God bless.

Not a mention on the home screen or I think anywhere of the downtime and its possible impacts, just business as usual, just "We are the ONLY firm...". A class act. That doesn't mean I won't bid, but I sure as heck won't consign.

The selling issue is serious. Recently Heritage froze for about a half-hour, and then just started up again. I would guess a portion of bidders gave up and didn't come back. Anyone selling after the freeze has a good case that Heritage's IT issue cost them money. In the past I have seen ComicLink auctions hang up for awhile, then just be restarted with no explanation. Again, if I had been a seller I would have felt that ComicLink's IT issue cost me money. ComicConnect has had issues too (it has been a few years since I have noticed such problems with either ComicLink or ComicConnect), but in that/those cases ComicConnect has stopped the auction and made a point to indicate that it would need to be started afresh the next night. While no IT failure is a positive for sellers, I think that ComicConnect's approach is about the best you can do. Luckily (I guess) the ComicLink was down before the Tuesday round kicked off, so they will be forced to start afresh. For the sake of the sellers they should send a comforting email to all bidders and prospective bidders explaining what happened and why the issue(s) is/are solved.

They should have issued a statement within minutes of going down. Their competitors must be happy to see their lack of professionalism.

Thanks DavidTheDavid for renewing this topic. I thought everybody had just given up.

I have been too lazy to try GoCollect but I will get there. At this point I am not only unhappy about everything that was done last month, but now I am unhappy about a) no apology to users for implementing unwanted changes, which clearly many users find to be in the wrong direction, and b) no sign that there is work being done to fix all the problems. I think my efficiency has dropped about 50% even after having a month to adjust. A particular problem that hasn't been noted specifically in the recent responses is the frequent forced log-outs and very slow logins to get back in. What is the excuse for this behavior if many other pay sites that I have access to (newspapers etc.) don't do this to me?

On 12/12/2019 at 5:36 PM, GACollectibles said:

I keep a tab open and not use it for a couple of hours, start to use it again and I get two to four clicks into my next search and then I get logged out.  Anyone else run into this?  I can understand if it did that when I made my first new click but it allows a couple of valid clicks before logging out.

Yes I have this problem. I also get logged out more than I used to. Two of the many irritating changes.

7 minutes ago, BronzeBruce13 said:

So, please consider giving George and GPA a littler bit of a break here. He's not perfect, but he's been providing us with an invaluable service and only had the best of intentions in trying to give us more.

Lastly, those of you who sent him horrific, nasty, personal emails... you are POS's. One guy said he'd run George over in the road if he saw him. Some emails were so beyond nasty his team wouldn't let him see them. What a world we live in.

I said I was giving up but I want to give my response to this one:

1) This is not a personal issue for me. I have nothing against George, this is about a product and my dissatisfaction with the replacement. This goes exactly to my earlier post. We need to divorce the personal from the commercial. Just as those personal attacks are completely unacceptable, George should not take attacks on the product as personal attacks, and should react to them as valid customer dissatisfaction issues.

2) If this is a "labor of love" I think the whole community should reassess. For better or worse, GPA's accuracy and usability affects my pocketbook. If it is not a profitable and commercial enterprise that will be reliable for the long term, it is going to affect my approach to my investments. Everyone with a significant financial stake in comics should think about this situation. It is bad for everyone to have key man/key site risk significantly impacting the value of their holdings.

38 minutes ago, gpanalysis said:

As for not seeing the same information, putting aside the design elements (like removing the live icon and adding a universal grade icon) all that information you post from the old site is in the new site. Every row of every issue shows the grade,, notes, Averages for the past 12 months, the previous year and the year before that, as well as the most recent sale (and its sold date). 

I am pretty much giving up at this point because I and others have clearly laid out the problems and the response seems to be "live with it". I will for the time being, but if I find a suitable replacement I will grab it.

This response ignores 90% of the complaints, which have not been that the data is not available, but that it is far, far harder to use than before. Imagine being handed a million index cards, each with one sale for one issue written on them, and being told "all the data is there". It is of course not that bad, but the data access is far, far worse than it was previously.

GPA has taken a defensive stance through this episode. Clearly they are emotionally invested in what they spent a great deal of time developing without any user input. That is not a commercial attitude. GPA can get away with it for only one reason, which is they have a monopoly on the data. Instead of providing apologies to their customers, they seem to be taking offense at being called out for their amateurish mistakes.

As I said in a previous post, I think the real message is to the the volume dealers/auction houses that this amount of lost goodwill is an opportunity to shift to something better and more reliable for the market, that can be used to enhance their business through adding transparency, reliability, and further legitimacy to the comic market.

1 hour ago, gaz973 said:

OK, I'm curious as to whether anyone much ever looks at the GPA graphs? I never have done, I'm just interested in the figures and everyone that I've ever spoken to about GPA is the same. Who here uses the graphs and if so, how much?

I use the graphs all the time and I would say that they are indispensable. The only part of the new interface that I love (not just like) is the interactive graph. Because the price data is now so hard to use, I am adapting by scrolling along the graph and reading the data points at the bottom. If I were king, at this point I would go back to the old interface but keep the interactive graphs. I would then look at the ergonomics of the old layout and try to reduce the need for clicks and navigating away. The new interface has gone in the other direction (more clicks and more navigating away). Not being able to directly compare prices for different issues of the same title (particularly adjacent issues) is just one of many downsides of the new interface.

We should chip in and send GPA a set of Edward Tufte's books (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and subsequent volumes).

40 minutes ago, RedGiant said:

I’ve been testing gocollect this month, long time gpa user, and continue to be. I understand people aren’t thrilled with new GPA site, but I like it just fine. Is it perfect?  No. Was it perfect before?  No.  Does it give me the info I need?  Yes.  

 

To me this is an unacceptably low expectation for a major product change. Users spent years getting comfortable with the old interface. Of course it was not perfect, but the only excuse for changing it is improvement. Most comments above instead significant losses in functionality. There are some improvements but these are greatly overshadowed by the reductions in usability. Yes I can learn to eat with a knife if you take away my fork, but I would not choose this progression. The treatment by the vendor and the subsequent response by the vendor to the many reasonable complaints should give everyone pause before continuing to rely on the product.

As an individual I don't have much leverage and for the near term I will be forced to continue to use the service. However I think the larger players (particularly the auction houses) should give a good bit of thought to how this product impacts their business and how they should interact with it or a similar product. I think that expanding data availability and the transparency of access to that data would benefit the overall market and enhance the dealer/auction business by driving transaction volume. Margins on dealer transactions here and there would be hurt, but I think the overall net margin would increase due to buyers/sellers being more comfortable that transactions are on-market, leading to more transactions.

1 hour ago, misterrmystery said:

You can always use Overstreet. . GPA seems to be working. Takes more time to navigate as there are no instructions provided.

Maybe somebody has some old CBGs lying around for additional reference?

The check box adds that issue/grade to "My Comics". If you want rid of it you can go to "My Dashboard", select "My Comics", find that issue, expand it, and uncheck it. If you don't use "My Comics", whether or not it is checked it is irrelevant. This same functionality was in the old GPA. That inability to uncheck except by navigating away to "My Comics" was similarly annoying, although I can understand that people didn't want to uncheck by mistake if they used the feature. Better would have been a popup "are you sure you want to deselect" rather than forcing you to navigate away.

5 minutes ago, ygogolak said:

Damn, must be important for a 1 post / 18 months user to show up.

Everybody's $$$ are at stake, so yes.

6 minutes ago, adampasz said:

It looks like they did a full ground-up rewrite of the software, including migration to a new database. No small feat.

They were probably at a technological dead end, and were stuck with no way to add new features or grow their platform and business. This just happens in tech, and eventually, if you want your company to survive and progress, you need to bite the bullet and update.

The UI definitely a bit rough, but this can improve over time. I would encourage customers with UI complaints to bring them to their attention.

Rewriting the back end is no excuse for changing the UI, particularly without any UAT.

Amen jimjackjett and NewWorldOrder. Please contact GPA directly as I think it will be more effective towards remediation if they accumulate a pile of customer complaints.