eBay appear to have had a technical glitch this evening where sellers have supposedly exceeded their monthly selling allowances and had their listing cancelled
There appears to be a rather serious system error that’s causing this. Currently we don’t know if eBay will be able to reinstate the missing listings or if users will be left to relist themselves once the error listing limits are lifted.
One thing that we do know is that if your listings have been affected your probably going to have to do a full stock check and verify the quantities on all your listings, regardless whether eBay reinstate your listings or if you have to relist manually.
Another serious issue is of course loss of Best Match score and Sales History on cancelled listings.
Have your listings been affected? Let us know if you have any more information
Email from eBay
We’ve noticed you’ve exceeded your monthly selling allowance. Because of this, your most recently listed unsold items have been removed and all associated fees have been credited to your account. Selling allowances are put in place to help you establish a positive selling history and provide excellent service to your customers.
The removed listings will be available in your “Unsold Items” section in My eBay. You can relist these items by adjusting your current inventory.
For further information, or if you want to have your selling allowance reviewed, please contact us
We appreciate your understanding and cooperation.
Thanks,
eBay
21/3/13 Edited to add: Latest update emails from eBay
We’re writing to let you know that as a result of a software issue on Wednesday, March 20, you may have mistakenly received a notice from eBay that you’d exceeded a maximum number of allowed listings. As a result of this issue, some of your listings were ended and some may have been temporarily hidden from search results.
Rest assured we take these situations very seriously. Our teams have been hard at work around the clock to rectify this quickly, prevent any reoccurrence, and ensure your uninterrupted selling. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused.
The software issue was fixed within a few hours. Any hidden listings are now restored to view. We are in the process of relisting these listings for you—with a fresh start date and for the same duration. This will not have any adverse impact your standing in Best Match search or your seller feedback or standards.
Please note that if you have already relisted any of these items on your own—and you are free to do so—eBay’s automatic relisting actions will not cause you to have a duplicate listing.
We also apologize if you experienced any delay in reaching our customer support. We will get back to you shortly with an update on the actions we’re taking.
Again, we apologise for any inconvenience. As always, thank you for selling on eBay.
Regards,
The eBay Selling Team
43 Responses
Yes got the same email yesterday. Have had over 200 listings cancelled!
Just random items, I cannot see any link at all!
Rather annoying.
comfort yourself with the thought that ebay appreciate your cooperation and understanding lol
This terrible mess hasn’t affected me yet but I posted on the PS forums that everyone ought to download their current active listings using File Manager (not TurboLister).
This will give you a current stock list in Excel / Calc format that you can hang on to just in case.
Link here:
https://k2b-bulk.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SMDownloadRequest
Still no announcement on the site….Poor management…..Users do not know if they should re-list manually now or wait for advice?
Yep, 300+ listings all gone. Yet one of our main competitors has all theirs still showing? Am getting very, very, very fed up with ebay….
I had all my listings closed last night,
I received this email at 6.57pm,”MC999 NOTICE: eBay Listing(s) Removed”
My last order was 6.44pm, all my listings have been cancelled, I looked on line and it seems that the US site has suffered the same glitch as it is mentioned on their ebay forum,
If they don’t get it fixed for the weekend I will lose around a £1000 in turnover, maybe the loss in fees will stir them into acting,
Those lost sales will go to whoever is left on the site, for me it will be the business sellers pretending to be private sellers, who now have no competition.
We had the opposite issue on Tuesday, we were unable to cancel listings that were then out of stock due to other marketplace sales or shop sales.
We were able to take them off yesterday and luckily did not “oversell”.
When we phoned ebay on Tuesday to report it, wed didn’t get through and eventually someone on the switchboard at ebay cut in and took our number with a promise to call back when it was less busy – still waiting!!
I initially thought the call centre was busy with other people having the same problem, but it was probably to do with the seller release.
Lee
Hello all
Just a quick update on this
Last night due to a software issue, a small percentage of seller listings in global markets including the United United Kingdom were inadvertently removed from our platform, impacting a number of sellers. Thsi issue is now resolved and we continue to make progress in restoring these listings, a process that is rolling out in stages and is expected to be completed for the majority of listings by the end of the day today. Separately, we are reaching out to eBay sellers most impacted and assisting them directly in their recovery efforts. We will keep our sellers apprised of our progress and apologise for any inconvenience resulting from this issue.
Regards
Patrick
The eBay.co.uk team
Do you know I am really sick of reading this pathetic “small percentage” spin of a line. It’s 10,000 sellers!! 10,000 people and more affected!!
For such a big company the tech side of eBay really does come across as being very amateurish. Has this mistake happened because somebody simply pressed the wrong button or used the wrong query on the live site and not a test one? Surely a change has to go through several layers of testing and verification before it can hit the live servers??
Hi KGA and Dennis
Just to put this in context. I’ve responded on behalf of the UK business. It’s 10,000 sellers impacted Globally not UK. The issue was solved last night and we are making sure that we sort things out for impacted sellers.
Regards
Patrick
To be honest I don’t care if most of the affected sellers are in Timbuktu, it’s still 10,000 sellers all being stressed out.
I’m waiting for my listings to be restored, I’ve not been in touch with CS yet as there seems to be little point whilst they are being swamped. I’m just assuming at some point today my listings will be put back into place, though it remains to be seen how they will be ranked. I’m worried that it will affect my Sales History and thus Best Match positioning. I had quite a few listings built up over months with Good ‘Til Cancelled.
Also a few of my listings have been completely removed so I can’t even re-list them anyway from the “Unsold” section.
I don’t know how eBay plan to help sellers impacted. However, if eBay attempt to restore any of the listings ‘lost’, I’d advise those sellers impacted to check their eBay account – in case they are charged any listing fees for this service!
surely if its such a small percentage, it would be a small expense to simply give these sellers a full refund of their seller fees for the month, after all we sellers are expected to refund [and provide vital organs]if we get it wrong
Just spoke to CS. I’ve asked what will happen to my sales history? I was told that they cannot do anything about it. All day will do is to relist my items.
So I said – due to your error we have to suffer now. All my listings with 100+ sales will be on the bottom of search results… – sorry nothing we can do.
This is unacceptable!!!
I’m glad I’ve got my website and Amazon account too.
All listings cancelled, no sales coming in! Not good at all, this lost revenue will affect us majorly as I am sure it will all the thousands of other business sellers.
@Patrick
I find it odd that you comment on a 3rd party site, but you and other eBay employees are noticabley absent from the dozens of threads on your own forums. Not only that but we seem to have no community pink, the one you introduced us to via your Twitter feed a while back has totally disappeared, apart from another pink using his ID.
probably the better quality whinging and moaning here that attracts
I phoned customer support in Ireland this morning I was advised all listing would be re listed but with no idea of a time frame,
He then advised me to start relisting my items straight away,
I have relisted 62 of my best selling lines and have had 3 sales so far, since 11am, this allows time for them to go live,
As every minute ticks by that is a potential lost sale, compounding the problem,
Every 24 hrs down I lose 35 sales, that then goes to another seller who has not been affected,
If they now relist automatically surely I will now have 62 duplicate Buy It Now good til gone listings,
Obviously I have also been charged to relist the 62 listings, and was not credited for the ones which were shut,
I also have listing completely removed and I can’t even copy the title.
I’ve just had a disturbing update from eBay.
Apparently, when the listings are put back by eBay they will show the original quantity of stock listed. So, if like us, you have many variants of Size, Colour,Qty and many listings, you are going to have an absolute nightmare of a job on your hands. You are going to have to do a full stocktake for starters, then you are going to have to go through each and every listing and manually amend the totals items per variant – This job alone for us will take days and will cost hundreds!
Not happy!!!!
I was also effected. This has been an appalling mess.
The lame excuse of a “software issue”, for a global internet company is like the banks blaming losses on a money issue. It isn’t a valid explanation.
There has been no message as a follow up to the original message cancelling all listings, now 24 hours later. No apologies that I can see and no offer of recompense. I’m even paying for relists.
It’s possible to forgive the error but the lack of a good follow up is disgraceful.
A flippant response to something affecting thousands of sellers and millions of listings is unforgivable.
As a long standing seller Ebay will have to do a lot to put this right for me, it looks as though they aren’t even bothering.
this reminds of the early days when ebay was auction only you watched your listings with baited breath and if they finished without ebay crashing you breathed a sigh of relief
As this appears to be the only place in the UK any Ebay representative seems to be discussing this, I wondered if there were any updates.
Sellers have lost days of trade, an extra workload and most of all trust in Ebay.
The only reassurance I have been given is that my relist fees will be refunded, in time. I think Ebay believe I’m supposed to be happy with that. I most definitely am not.
Any (more) communication would be welcome.
So how is the thing about selling limits supposed to work? Is it a new idea we haven’t been told about yet that was released too early in error?