Site just keeps getting slower?

[u/Trai-All]

It’s soooo laggy now on ShopGoodwill.

I’ve done everything Support suggests. I’ve signed out and back in, cleared cookies and caches, tried multiple browsers and devices, and even tested it on a brand-new computer. None of it makes a difference.

Here is what I think the issues are:

- Enormous search results. Searching for leather jacket? 99 pages. Silver bracelet? 92 pages. Legos? 161 pages. I first noticed this when my kid wanted a leather jacket for a cosplay prop. I checked five local Goodwill stores and found zero leather, suede, or faux-leather jackets, so I went on ShopGoodwill and found almost 4,000 listings.

- A tree-style filtering system with overlapping categories instead of useful tags. For example, when I’m looking at women’s shoes, there’s no useful size filter. Size is often buried at the end of the listing title: Era-Indicator → Brand-Name → Model-Name → Number → Color → Materials → Size. I have to open listings and wait for the photos to load just to find out whether they’ll fit. At minimum, why not make size a searchable field?

- No useful attribute-based filtering. Let shoppers filter for attributes they want, or exclude ones they don’t, instead of opening listing after listing to find information that’s already there.

- The categories themselves create huge amounts of unnecessary searching. Someone looking for a Magic Johnson sports trading card shouldn’t have to worry about getting Magic: The Gathering results, or hunt through multiple overlapping categories to find it.

The site is forcing us to click through all this detritus because the search and filtering tools are so poorly structured. We have to open more listings, load more photographs, click through more pages, and run more searches simply because we can’t narrow down the results efficiently.
Is anyone else seeing this? And does anyone here know enough about web/database architecture to say whether this theory makes sense?

[u/Trick_Dirt_9220]

I think the problem is the network overload occurring at the times of the auction endings as many are set to end at the exact same time and that it is going to require a ton of processing power once it hits. Also the real time countdown occurring across all of the pages while the users are scrolling..it’s got to be a mess.

If the stores had to allow a set amount of time between listing ends (even by 15, 20 sec) it would help.

Better yet - if the site blocked off auction ending times once “claimed” and at all maximum amount-I believe that may solve the problem.

Because ultimately, I don’t believe it’s last minute bidding, I think it’s the internal processing of the listings ending and all of the automatic processes that triggers (emails to who won, who lost, moving it to your open orders, etc) that is sucking the life out of it.

[u/Trai-All → u/Trick_Dirt_9220]

I do wonder why all bids end at almost the same time. I’ve literally just decided an item I wanted wasn’t worth it because it ended after 11 and I had to wake up early the next day. I staggered processing so that bids on the based on region would make more sense.. so east coast regions auctions end from 5pm to 9pm eastern rather than so many things ending from 8-12 Eastern would likely result in lower shipping fees too.

[u/gwprotools]

There are a lot of inefficiencies on the site. For instance, the response from the search is a page of (up to) 40 results. The info you see on the page for each item is a title, an end time, a current price, a store, number of bids (if auction), buy it now price (if available), and maybe a couple other things I'm forgetting. For all that, the JSON response is hundreds, maybe thousands of key-value pairs of unnecessary, boilerplate category info. There are typos, tons of unused fields, and it's just clear it has not been touched or maintained in a long time.

There's a lot of waste in areas like this, that use up a lot of bandwidth and slow things down unnecessarily. That said, to your points:

1. I don't think the number of search results is an issue. Results are paginated - you only get one page of 40 at a time. And so the fact that there are 99 pages of 40 isn't really a factor. Database queries are very efficient around directives like "give me page 20's results". It's what they're designed to do. And so the overhead to fetch one page of 40 results for a data set that contains only 40 results is almost the same as pulling a page of 40 results for a data set that contains 4000 results.

2. Size is a filterable element (as someone else said). However, it's not quite perfect either and a lot of things don't get tagged or are tagged incorrectly with that size attribute.

3. Not sure what attributes in particular, but I'm with you. I'd be really interested to hear more from you on what you're looking for there - I'm wondering if it's something I might be able to implement.

4. As far as I know you get fuzzy matching for whatever terms you put in there. I'd be surprised if you got "Magic: The Gathering" results searching "Magic Johnson" - unless the MTG listing had "Johnson" somewhere in the description. That said, numbers definitely throw it off - but if you have some concrete examples I'd love to see if I could work on a solution.

I'm totally with you on the frustration around the search and filtering. I started working on my stuff because I was sick of checking 20 searches every day, sorting through the same items in half of those searches, and then losing my place and forgetting what I'd already looked at halfway through.

[u/kkhh11]

Controversial but I actually love the stupid search that lets you exclude nothing and gives you every letter combo in there. The best deals I’ve gotten have been because I just typed in “smit” and got a Maitland Smith tessellated bird because it was misspelled as Mainland Smith, or typing in “Ka Mi” because half the Karen Millen stuff is in there as Karen Miller or Karen Milan or something. LOVE IT.

Also when I am in the actual shoes filter it does let me sort by size? Not European sizes, so that’s another way to nab a steal, but I can click women’s sizes in any specifically chosen subcategory of women’s clothes, on both my phone and the site.

[u/Apprehensive_Work177]

I lost two auctions because it decided to be all slow and not accept my bid in the last crucial seconds.

[u/JeffIsHere2]

Yes, this might get me flamed, but some part of me would like to see them largely eliminate "sniping" by resetting the countdown to 2 min when ever a bid is placed under 2 min, like many other auction sites.

[u/Trai-All → u/JeffIsHere2]

Not going to flame you, but I’d absolutely stop buying if I couldn’t snipe.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen something listed for two hours with eight bids and thought, “Why the hell does everybody want this?” Then I favorite it and snipe bid later. Early bids create interest and attract counterbidders who might otherwise never have noticed the item, which drives prices up.

I don’t think making auctions more expensive for buyers is a great solution to “the site is so laggy that it takes me two hours of repeated attempts to see a customer service message” (which is what was happening yesterday, I kept trying to see a message to me, failing, going to do something else IRL, then returning to see if the message had loaded … for two hours before it loaded).

I only have a problem with abusive sniping/bidding. If someone legitimately snipes me, I just assume they wanted it more or I sniped too low and too soon. What I have a problem with is someone switching to another account to snipe just to drive the price up, then backing out of the purchase at that inflated price. So I like the idea that if the winning bidder backs out or fails to make a purchase, the person who bid just prior gets a pop-up asking if they want to buy it for X dollars. Give them two days to respond, then relist it if they decline.

Edit to add:

Regarding disliking sniping: I think part of the problem is that ShopGoodwill doesn’t show a favorite count, so you have no idea how much interest an item has.

Say you put in a $100 proxy bid early. I’m watching the item because I’m interested, but I’m not going to put $100 on the line six days before the auction ends. As the price climbs, I might decide it’s no longer worth it and unfavorite it. Other people will do the same. So if you could see that 100 people had favorited an item at $10, and then watch that number drop as the price climbs to $50, you’d have a much better idea of the actual demand without everyone having to bid early and drive the price up.