UK Sellers have started to receive emails from eBay confirming that in a recent eBay missing images glitch where pictures were lost from some Good til Cancelled listings.
Some sellers have received a link identifying the listings for which images are missing, others received the email but with no way to identify which listings may be affected.
The error was first identified in June and eBay were at one stage hopeful that they might be able to restore images. This turned out not to be the case and sellers in the US were emailed with the bad news a week ago. It now appears that UK sellers are receiving the email with the bad news:
“During a recent site update, we experienced a technical error that deleted images from Sellers’ Good Til Cancelled listings. We’ve restored the first image for all impacted listings, but weren’t able to recover additional images.
We’d like to apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.
While errors can happen, we recognise that this creates additional effort on your part, which takes away from your business.
Again, we apologise for this technical error.
Thanks for selling with us”
The eBay Seller Team
There is one main difference between the emails US sellers received and those sent to UK sellers – US sellers were offered 200 free listings with four days in which to use them.
The massive problem for sellers is that often the additional images are vital to display details of their products. This is especially true for items which may have blemishes or for items where showing from different angles is essential. We all know that buyers often don’t read seller descriptions on eBay nowadays but make buying decisions based on the title and images alone.
For sellers who use multichannnel management software solutions it’s possible that you will be able to synch and restore your listings (if you know which ones are affected). But for those who list manually it’s likely that you’ll have to eyeball each and every listing and try to find the image files to replace those that have gone missing on eBay.
Whilst it’s a lot of work, if you can’t find your original images, an eBay user known as stuff4divas has figured out that images may well be retrievable from Google Cache.
- Put the item number into the Google search box
- Under the item in the search result, there is a green description with a drop down arrow all the way to the right
- Click on it and it will show ‘Cached’
- Click on Cached and the listing will pop up.
- Drag the photos to your desktop then upload them back to your eBay listings
6 Responses
I normally think that people are far too quick to criticise eBay but this is absolutely shocking, Their apology, whether with some pointless free listings or not is very underwhelming and shows a complete disregard for sellers
Another problem which seemed to happen at the same time, and may be related, is eBay forcing stock images on listings for used items which use the catalogue, despite the listing page stating they won’t show stock images.
The picture problem has become worse in the last 4 days. Any change made to the listing looses all pictures if you dont upload a picture before exiting the listing where as before if one item had been sold from the listing the pictures were kept unless nothing had been sold and therefore the pictures would be lost. Also It is now showing the wrong picture for the item in the sold page but shows the correct one if you go back to the actual listing.