eBay glitch week

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This weeks seems to be the week for eBay glitches, if you’ve been lucky enough to escape them all so far you’re doing well!

First to come to light was PayPal payments not being marked as paid in eBay but showing pending, as if they were all eCheques. eBay had so many calls regarding this that they put a message on the PowerSeller support telephone line asking people not to speak to support but to email them them the affected item numbers instead.

Hot on the heels of paid items not showing as paid was a glitch in My eBay which exacerbated the situation. If you went to My eBay Sold Items and used the drop down to mark an item as paid instead of returning you to the Sold Item View when the page reloaded you were in the My eBay Summary View. With multiple items to mark as paid unless you had Selling Manager or Selling Manager Pro multiple clicks were needed to mark each item as paid.

Next to come to light were sellers finding postage was missing from their eBay listings. Postage cost and delivery method disappeared and was replaced with the message “Check item description and payment instructions or contact seller for details.” Of course for sellers whose postage was missing it wasn’t in the description. TurboLister which had originally uploaded the listings couldn’t be used to correct the error and each listing had to be manually edited. Multiple item listings with sales couldn’t be edited so most shop inventory format listings with the glitch had to be ended and relisted.

Sadly this has a knock on effect more serious than the couple of pennies lost in fees, shop inventory can’t be included in Mark Down Manager sales until 28 days after they’re listed. Sellers affected by this glitch who were intending to have a pre-Christmas sale could be affected more seriously than just the time taken to correct postage rates.

Now today users are reporting issues with Selling Manager Pro is missing orders. Some users have nothing in awaiting payment, awaiting shipping or paid and dispatched. Possibly worse are items shipped being unmarked as despatched which could leave sellers sending duplicate orders. No doubt buyers won’t complain, but it’ll cost unwary sellers. Thankfully this is localised to Selling Manager Pro and it’s still possibly to work from PayPal and My eBay, but for those that use SMP automation for emails to buyers or bulk printing of invoices it’s not good news.

Tomorrow will see maintenance run on the site, and there’s already advance notice that many functions including checkout will be unavailable for a few hours. Lets hope while they’re tinkering they fix the existing glitches without creating any new ones.

4 Responses

  1. Reading about all these glitches both on here and on the eBay discussion boards makes me so glad I don’t use eBay’s tools to manage sales.

  2. Steve, the problem with not using eBay’s tools is that eBay change things so often that third parties just can’t keep up: e.g. I used to love Spoonfeeder for listings and auction management, but it got so behind the times, by the time I dumped it, it was close to unusable.

  3. I still use Spoonfeeder for listing but my own database for sales management/stock control. Whenever eBay change something I can usually adapt my system within a few minutes to accommodate (a couple of hours for a major change).

  4. When I chucked SF, their listing didn’t support item specifics, or listing in more than one category, or the updated categories (there were some pretty major changes in my categories all around the same time this summer). As far as I could see, there was nothing that I could do about that: it was down to SF to change things, and they were just not keeping up with the rate that eBay UK was changing.

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