eBay changed the quantity of sellers’ listings that had international shipping options when it made an update on May 26, it acknowledged on Tuesday. We wrote about the issue on Saturday on the AuctionBytes Blog, explaining that some shoppers purchased items that were out-of-stock because of the glitch.
Sellers are likely wondering why eBay would make a change on a Friday before a long-weekend holiday when apparently no one would be on hand to fix any issues should things go wrong, as occurred in this case.
Because no one was on hand to even acknowledge there was a technical issue, sellers had to figure out what to do on their own. And, as eBay acknowledged when staff returned on Tuesday, “We understand that this may have caused sellers to cancel orders or issue refunds but we’re working to correct these quantity errors.”
In Tuesday’s post, eBay wrote, “Here’s what you need to know about the recent update”:
- We’ve updated any listing to show the correct quantity available and quantity sold.
- For listings where sellers manually revised the quantity, we won’t make any changes.
- For sellers who had to cancel orders, received negative feedback, or had stockout strikes during our update, we’ll ensure that their seller rating isn’t affected.
Sellers wondered if the glitch was related to the switch to the new eBay International Shipping program. eBay didn’t specifically say that was the case, but said the update it had made was “to listings with international shipping options.”
As we reported on Saturday, that wasn’t the only glitch sellers had to deal with – some sellers said they were unable to list items.
You can read the full Tuesday night post acknowledging the glitch on the eBay Seller Announcement board.
In Tuesday’s post, eBay wrote, “Here’s what you need to know about the recent update”:
We’ve updated any listing to show the correct quantity available and quantity sold.
For listings where sellers manually revised the quantity, we won’t make any changes.
For sellers who had to cancel orders, received negative feedback, or had stockout strikes during our update, we’ll ensure that their seller rating isn’t affected.
We are just a platform that connects sellers and buyers …. good grief.
1) use your 9000 employees to get it all done
2) fire the idiots that caused the problem (and DONT say that you dont have a mirror of the site running backups ALL the time) and get him to fix it
Overpaid, arrogant computer programmers who [bleep] up should be demoted to janitorial duties for one week. It’s only right.