Merchant Archive

I have a vendor in the my friend's house who also has a vendor in there. I have two characters. When my alternate character checks his vendor, he does not get any xp at all from it. We've already proven this by my alt running that vendor macro for hours and he gets no experience at all, and no it doesn't ever get updated in chunks like I've seen in other posts. Ifmy altcharacter checks my vendor,I get the XP. If my regular character checks his vendor, he gets the XP. What's odd is that we have tested this with other friends we have in the game and he doesn't seem to get XP from them either (we have accomodated for the once per ten minutes rule). It doesn't seem to matter which of his 5 vendors I check either. At this point, he is 23K XP behind me when I have two characters checking his and only one checking mine. Something's obviously not right, anyone else ever experience this?