A check of the
eBay Technical Issues board reveals sellers are battling some major issues this holiday weekend. Some sellers began reporting on Friday that eBay changed the quantity in their listings, and some sellers are also reporting they cannot list, revise, or renew any listings.
There are several threads where sellers report eBay has increased the quantity of listings available for sale, though at least one seller said that had not happened to their listings.
One seller explained
how it impacted them: "Same Here - They took all that has sold and added it to existing inventory. If I sold 500 small black and had 10 in inventory, now I have 510 in inventory."
Sellers are concerned that shoppers are buying items that are out-of-stock because the glitch changed the quantity in their listings.
Another seller in the same thread said it will be difficult to fix the issue since they don't remember the quantities of each of their listings: "I'm going to have to spend a whole lot of time going through physical inventory and checking it against the listed quantities."
Another seller who did not appear to be impacted wrote, "I always keep a hard copy running balance of my active listings and so far they look okay, but I have yet to check the MV ones."
One seller speculated eBay's transition from the Global Shipping Program to EIS might have caused the glitch: "I'm wondering if it's related to the switch to eBay International Shipping from eBay International Delivery. The only items I've noticed being affected are the items that had eBay International Delivery set as an option. And today I started getting my first orders using eBay International Shipping."
The consequences of the glitch could cost more than time. As one seller who experienced the issue wrote on Saturday, "I had this same issue today. Woke up to a massive flood of sales, all of which I had to cancel and refund because I simply was out of stock or didn't carry the inventory in that quantity. I immediately recounted and reset inventory manually for several hours this morning, then called eBay to deal with the delinquencies.
"eBay suggested I reset inventory manually, which id already done, then they opened support tickets for each cancellation to ensure no fees or cancelled orders will appear on my account because of this."
Other threads on the eBay Technical Issues board dealt with the issue of being unable to list items. "The Create Listing page and also revise listing page will not load for me," a
seller reported. "There are very pale shadowy gray boxes which blink softly, but nothing more shows. Everything else seems to be OK, and other websites load well for me."
Other sellers reported the same issue. One person responded: "At least one user experiencing this issue had some success switching to Firefox. If the browser is not the difference, perhaps there was a difference amount history, settings or browser add-ons. It might be worth temporarily disabling add-ons to see if that makes a difference." (They posted a correction - "switching from Firefox to Chrome was what helped that user.")
While very serious for the sellers who are impacted, the issues don't appear to be affecting every seller. We didn't see much activity in the comments sections of the eBay for Business Facebook page and Down Detector website, which is typical for widespread issues.
Those who are impacted worry the long holiday weekend could delay a fix to the problems.
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Some eBay Sellers Battle Tech Issues This Holiday Weekend
by: COVID-19