There appears to be a glitch with unsold items displaying incorrect quantities on eBay. This will be a particular problem for sellers who simply relist assuming quantities are correct and especially for those who rely on eBay for their stock control rather than a third party system.
Tamebay reader Debbie tells us “I went into my ‘unsold items’ yesterday to bulk relist, where I discovered a load of listings that I knew I had sold out of the product. In the list of ‘unsold’ items it was showing that I had a quantity of 1 or 3 (or whatever) but if you actually clicked the item link to view the auction it was showing correctly as having had 3 items …sold 3 items and 0 available. However within the ‘unsold’ items it was showing that I still had a quantity left???
Unfortunately I bulk listed a load of listings before I had realised this so effectively I had a lot of active items that if they sold I could not supply!
Some of the multi variation items were even more bizarre as it would show in my unsold as original quantity 3, available quantity 3 but when you clicked to view the variations it would say that I had 0 left of each variation!!
Overselling is of course the last thing any eBay seller wants to do intentionally. However as with many eBay glitches this goes beyond the affected listings, until the glitch is resolved it means you can’t trust your inventory for any listings that you relist and effectively need to carry out a full stock check to ensure your available quantities are correct.
11 Responses
This is potentially unmanageable.
So please some initial questions:
1 30 day or GTC listings?
2 If GTC is Debbie using the eBay out-of-stock option?
3 Bulk re-list or bulk sell similar?
To my knowledge this has been a bug for all my ebay time. 5 years where autorelist restocked sold items
I was thinking the same. When I relist cancelled listings, quantities revert back to those of the original listing regardless of numbers sold. Have to do a manual adjustment to avoid out of stock sales which I have occasionally suffered from as a result of this bug.
Unsold listings on eBay can be problematical without consistent care. Sorry to be long-winded here but it requires a level of detail.
If you are in SMP and click unsold from ‘Listing Activity – Ended Listings Last 90 days’ you will get quite logically the number of unsold listings that you have not yet deleted.
If on the other hand you go to the left navigation of SMP and click unsold from the left navigation you get the number of unsold listings that have not been re-listed or deleted.
The status dropdown in the top navigation reveals ‘not re-listed’ ‘all’ ‘re-listed’ ‘unsold from multi-quantity listings’ and a couple of other categories not totally relevant to basic re-listing. You need to be mindful of this.
Now, when re-listing it is easy to start from the wrong list if you have not deleted unsolds following a previous re-listing session. eBay should, in theory at least, not allow you to create a duplicate listing. But if something having been re-listed then sells out you would not be creating a duplicate by re-listing again.
It is also necessary be mindful of the fact that re-listing uses the final quantity when the listing was ended as the new start quantity.
If however, you ‘re-list’ using ‘sell similar’ then the start quantity of the new listing will be the start quantity of the original listing.
Yes JD I am aware of everything you have posted.
We delete items from our unsold list on relisting and just to be ‘doubly sure’ that we do not duplicate a listing we always select ‘not relisted’ from the ‘status’ drop down menu.
This is definitely a glitch (as confirmed by ebay 3 times now).
I wish I could post a screen shot but it would ‘out’ my account but as an example ….
I have an 30 day MV buy it now in my unsold
It states initial quantity 3 and available quantity 3. Just under the item title there is a link to show / hide variations. If you click to show variations you can see that I have 3 variations all with an initial quantity of 1 and all show as having an avaialable quantity of 0……So with all variations having sold out why is it in my unsold?
Equally a single item listing should not go into your unsold when you sell the last one you have. I have items that I listed with an initial quantity of 11 and I sold all 11 in the first week of listing them yet it has appeared in my unsold with an initial quantity of 11 and an available quantity of 3 yet when you look at the actual listing it clearly shows as having sold out!
Debbie. Start a thread on an Ebay forum, to bring this to other sellers attention.
Common issue.
Only way to prevent this is manage your listings manually.
Yes, I know its very time consuming, but thats why eBay is a time wasting monster.
Bottom line is if you don’t like dancing to their stupid tune, running around the houses, and jumping through hoops, then sell elsewhere.
It could so easlier be be much better and easier. Sigh!
Long live The Revolution!! 🙂