Last night on the Auction Sidebar Tool support forum, a few users started a thread regarding issues they were having with retrieving feedback scores from eBay.  This problem is caused by Auction Sidebar Tool reaching an imposed daily limit on the requests it can make to eBay's Developer APIs.  This means you might be lucky enough not to have noticed the issue, depending on the part of the world you live in and the times of day you use Auction Sidebar Tool.  How do we know this is the problem?  Well, a few days ago I received an email from Zhuowei Yang, one of the staff at eBay Developer Support.  The email reported a large jump in our API requests and notified us of the restriction they were placing on Auction Sidebar Tool's usage allowances.

It's important to note that this issue will also affect eBay time synchronisation, so those users counting down the seconds for that final bid should be aware that AuctionST's time may not be accurate enough for sniping.

Read on for the contents of the email, our attempt to fathom the issue and our intent to resolve it.

Hello Andy,

We have detected that your application has increased your usage of GetMultipleItems API significantly in the past few weeks from about 1M per day to about 4.5M per day. Due to the impact on our Shopping API server, we decreased your Shopping API call limit to 1.5M per day.

This was rather surprising for us for a few reasons.  One reason is that we haven't noticed any increase in downloads of AuctionST, nor is there any reported increase in calls to other APIs.  The other reason is that during the summer, eBay activity quietens down a little (at least, it does with AuctionST).  What does this mean?  One explanation could be that some users are modifying AuctionST's source code to increase the regularity of item updating.  When the Shopping API was initially released, we saw this as an opportunity to use it in a way that supported the current methods of updating bidding, watching and selling lists and put an end to the complaints that AuctionST didn't update often enough.   We worked it out so that if a user left their computer on all day, they would use around half their personal limit call limit (2,500/5,000) and it would leave room for searching requests and feedback score requests as well as any future features we wanted to implement.  It's unlikely that this is the problem considering the number of increased number of daily users needed to make the calls jump up by 3 million.  This brings us back round to the point that their is no increase in the gadget's download rate or other eBay activity referred by the gadget.

If there are any users out there modifying the code, please be aware that we have asked eBay to look into this further and see if we can isolate the problem to a few IP addresses.  This could result in a backfire of what you intended to do; a ban on your IP would restrict the rate at which your eBay items update to once per 30 minutes.  We will also investigate this issue ourselves and see if we can restrict such activity for the protection of other user experiences.  This may result in a ban on your eBay token, meaning your eBay lists and messages wouldn't be retrievable at all.

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our users.  We are working as well as we can to reach a resolution for the problem.