[Updated] Problems with eBay search and Stores access
by Sue Bailey
If you’re having a problem getting into eBay UK tonight, you’re not alone. eBay has announced that it is working to resolve issues with a delay in search being displayed. It’s not so much slowness as stopped here; any search I run gets me no results, but the message:
We were unable to run the search you entered. Please try again in a few minutes.
eBay.com’s announcement has a few more details together with a workaround:
if you use the Advanced Search option at the top of the page, and type in your search query and click the title and description box and then run the search, the results for the title and description search will be returned. Likewise, if you receive a 0 results page for title search and choose the title and description box and re-run the search, you’ll see the appropriate results.
There were also problems accessing eBay Shops for a short time this morning; it seems from an announcement on eBay.com that these may be ongoing too.
Update: According to this thread on the US PS board (you’ll need a PS sign-in), eBay “is admitting on its customer service line that it will need to give refunds to sellers” for invisibility due to this outage.
I’ll keep this updated as and when more info comes in.
Update Sunday 14.00
Post on eBay Ink, including statement from Lorrie Norrington:
Our immediate priority is to resolve this issue. Once that is achieved, rest assured that we will assess the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately. In the meantime, we will be issuing full fee credits for affected listings.
As for the actual fix, everything seems okay here now lots of things are back but item specifics drill-down in search has disappeared over many categories. How about where you are?
Update Sunday night
eBay UK announcement says
we will assess the economic impact of the problem and will compensate sellers appropriately. The mechanism and process for issuing full fee credits for affected listings will be announced over the course of the next few days.
73 Responses on "[Updated] Problems with eBay search and Stores access"
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Biggest and deepest outage I’ve seen for many years. It’s been going on for many hours around the world. Still got 182 listings gone AWOL at the moment. At one point the only thing that wasn’t bringing up a blank page was the front page and forums.
Reading the various forums it seems even now there’s many things still not working right and other parts totally missing.
Weird, been fine all day til just now here apart from about 15 mins this morning.
It would seem there’s been problems off and on since about 7pm this evening and some minor one’s earlier, but around mid evening the site was in total chaos, I thought I’d have a look around eBay rather than put up with the X-Factor, otherwise I’d probably not even know. Blank pages or no results, heaven knows how many listings still not showing on the site. Auctions seem to still be missing totally from some categories, a right old mess.
Whatever problem they have/had it must have been pretty serious to affect so many things so badly. Looking forward to an explanation from eBay on this one. Probably the tape drive on their commodore 64 mangled a cassette.
Probably the tape drive on their commodore 64 mangled a cassette
oh, didn’t realise they’d upgraded the server.
You bet – they now have a Sinclair Spectrum
I haven’t said this for 20 years, but here goes – ‘No way, the Commodore 64 is better than the Spectrum!’
Joe: 20 Years ago the Commodore 64 was out of date, I was using Amiga’s by then. Bought my first one around 88/89 time.
“It would seem there’s been problems off and on since about 7pm this evening and some minor one’s earlier, but around mid evening the site was in total chaos…..”
Yup. I can testify to this. Been struggling to research prices on the site (.com and .co.uk) all evening with little success.
“Ebay has announced” what a joke who to?
Not a single mention of the problems on a single one of their sites around the world, ebay uk has a twitter account they haven’t used for 3 weeks and as usual they are nowhere to be seen in their own forums, they treat their customers with total and utter contempt
There’s a UK Announcement Board post (as linked in my post).
There are two US Announcement Board posts (linked from my post).
There’s also an Indian Announcement Board post here:
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/in/200911220014502.html
[Edit: and a Canadian post here
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/ca/200911211941422.html ]
There’s a post from a pink on the UK PSB here:
http://forums.ebay.co.uk/thread.jspa?threadID=1200325048&start=125
(he obviously doesn’t know what’s going on, but good for him for posting)
I’m trying to look at UK Q&A but the forum seems to be part of the outage itself.
If they used Twitter to deal with reporting site outages, they would be (and have been) criticized that they don’t use on-site postings. So in the light of several AB posts, it’s unfair to characterise the response as “not a single mention”.
No probs with Q&A here, infact it’s the only reliable part of eBay right now.
Though no pink posts on the subject.
If you had a major problem with your website that had lasted 6 hours so far where would you put it in your service announcements or on your front page? The fact is most people wouldn’t have a clue how to find those pages, which means 1000′s of their customers don’t have a clue what is going on and those that do found out through forums which is no thanks to Ebay
im even more peed off as i didnt realise there was a problem and ebay are still letting custermers list on auctions even tho they cant show them
I spent all day testing an application that uses the Finding and Shopping API so I thought something was busted. Had no idea it was all of eBay search that had failed. All I can say is I’m glad this didn’t happen on Monday because that would have been a disaster.
Based on my clients’ usage I’m showing sales are off 13% in the past 24 hours compared to the 24 hour period before that. That’s from a small sample of mostly US sellers.
I should point out that I’m referring to only fixed price and store listings. I don’t track auctions so can’t help with those.
Well in one of my shops I have 3 items available to buy (same in view sellers other items).
Wonder when the other 379 listings will pop back again? Hopefully by the time I wake up in the morning!
Hell another of my shops is even better – only two listings showing
I thought it was just me,There was a few items ineeded to bid on but could not bring them up,I noticed that Buy it nows are showing ok now.Thought Ebay might have post a message to let us know wht is going on,Or not as it happens.
The eBay System Announcement states:
”Due to errors in some of our backend systems, members may be seeing different errors in Search.”
Here’s what’s meant by ”backend system.”
http://www.linktionary.com/b/back_end.html
”Users interact with applications in front-end systems to make requests on back-end systems. The back-end systems then process the requests, searching and sorting data, serving up files, and providing other services.”
””Back-end systems” loosely refers to servers, superservers, clustered systems, midrange systems, and mainframes that provide data services to users. The location of these services is often called the server farm or data center.”
In less complex lingo, there’s a failure in the search engine.
//*
”If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you’ve just proven a natural law.”
Grace Hopper
After wondering why I had zero sales since yesterday, which seems impossible (it’s 5 p.m. here in Seattle now) I just sold an item…must be from a person that had my item listed as “watching” since no serach is working in any way right now on EBAY USA. The buy functions are working properly and so is Paypal. I needed that $50 for a pizza tonight. Thank god he had me on watch. No searches working here for the last 5 hours as I’ve been working most of the day. Just a TINY problem for one of the biggest ecommerce sites in the world right before the holliday.
Marty
Dear Sue,
That’s when ebay decided to acknowledge it. On this thread its date stamped 5:02am that they started to see problems. Now ebay is editing/revising the system announcement but they didn’t first tell us the workaround, they’re just replacing the previous notice.
http://tinyurl.com/ya7ljxz
Also, I noticed someone said they saw on my listings I had 4 items, whereas I should have almost 20. This alone looks very similar to what many of us experienced in summer 2006 through 2008 which was the disappearing, missing, duplicating and otherwise ghosting listings. I dont know if many remember but I had a thread on the stores board where we would test each others listings to check to see the listing counts and took screen shots. We were able to see in real time how the shifting was going on. before ebay deleted me, I was able to determine that these events were happening in waves and could pin point it to the listing promos. That is, when you had a listing promo the day it started to 10 days afterwards (the max days u could list) that people would reporting missing/disappearing listings. Me thinks that is because they dont have enough to service the data being pushed through the system. It reaches capacity and then boom something get slowed or redirected. Kinda like sucking a golf ball through a straw. lol
Love you!
Fruity
Does any one know what current listing promos are available on the various worldwide sites? I mean is there a link to list of existing/current promos?
Deb, I think its because right now you have alot of big retail sellers coming on and they got too much inventory. I’m just saying before it was with promoso but obviously that added more inventory in a short period of time.that’s what I mean.
ps. We did radio so if you want to hear us discussing the outage its here
http://tinyurl.com/y986m8m
What the bloody hell… even searches for things that obviously should have hundreds of results gimmie nothing but 0′s. I’ve been searching Super Nintendo stuff on Ebay before, and now all the listings are gone? Bullocks.
YES I THOUGHT ID LOST IT! BUT NO ITS DOWN TO E.BAY!!!!HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU BE EXPECTED TO CONDUCT A BUSINESS WHEN THE SITE IS NOT FUNCTIONING? NO STATEMENT FROM “THE BAY” GIVING EXPLANATION! DO I GO TO SLEEP AND HOPE ALL IS O.K.TOMORROW?????? OR WHAT????TOTAL CHAOS!!! JENNIFERB.
well the “advanced search” solution works fine (or course only .0000001% of the people in the world know about this at the moment) as does the buy function…i just sold another item but god only knows how. putting your business in ebay’s hands is a dangerous business indeed. chris, you will get nothing on any search for anything if you don’t go through the advanced feature. i’ve been doing searches for the last 7 hours and getting zero results.
marty
just so you all know, the media outlets are playing this off as intermittent or a disruption. If you have a small business and you’re impacted, you all should riot til the walls fall down because ebay kept on dabbling til the last minute rig up their site to be like Amazon. THey should of put all code changes on hold at the end of October just like previous years
Yes, there is definitely some behind the scenes tickering going on. I can’t help feeling that this is so irresponsible so close to Christmas.
As arrogant as Ebay is regarding their fees, I doubt they will ever concede or admit to creating any issues for buyers or sellers. If you’re looking for customer service from these folks it just doesn’t exist. When will some real competition for Evilbay ever come?
Tech Mashable wants to know if people are experiencing difficulties!
http://mashable.com/2009/11/21/ebay-search-down/
ebay’s geeks are finally putting some power behind their titles…searches are starting, in a very limited way, to turn up results on ebay usa. tested with 3 browsers and they’re finally back to about 40%
Surely they can’t be reworking the system at this time?
4th quarter figures to date must be really bad for ebay to pull a stunt like this so late in the season.
Turnover/profit must have severely plummented.
Ebay is a company in chaos and in crisis, thrashing around trying to find something, anything which will save them from being trounced by the likes of Amazon this Christmas.
I can’t understand why someone at ebay doesn’t grab Donahue by the shoulders, shake him violently, slap him about the face and say, “For goodness sake, man, it’s not working! Innovative? Maybe. Disruptive? Certainly!”
What’s wrong with the current ebay executives? I hope they have their résumés ready.
What does Pierre think of all this??
The rest of the stockholders must have money to burn.
No wonder Meg jumped ship – she couldn’t afford for ebay’s taint to effect her election chances.
When history reviews the fall of the giant companies – eg Enron, General Motors, etc, ebay will be amongst them.
It’s sad. It’s tragic. A once great company reduced to this.
If ebay does survive it will be a runt of its former self.
those bozos couldn’t even get the invoicing done right. what is it with the homer simpson techno manual
Sitting, trying to chill out in the early hours of sunday morning, I got to thinking. I wonder just how near eBay came to the Perfect Storm senario? So badly mangled that it couldn’t recover from it in any decent time frame. Many hours on the UK site and US site (maybe others) are still in a mangled mess.
Maybe they’ll finally start to honour their often repeated/never honoured “No changes during the important Xmas season” after this.
This will make John Donahoe made: Meg Whitman wouldn’t of let this happen
Fixed for the moment in the USA. Wow, great time to be down for 10 hours.
appears to be fixed .com/.ca 10:30 EST
It’s definitely not fixed yet. For one, half my items are still MIA. For two, I’ve been testing searches over the past few hours. A search for “Weird Al” was turning up 0 results in the CDs category. Then it was turning up 120+ results, and now it’s back down to 74 results…
No featured first upgrades are working in the UK – a serious downer especially on a critical trading weekend prior to Christmas
Items listed yesterday not showing on shop front page
It would actually have been nice for them to email all sellers and advise them of the problem instead of the head in the sand approach as usual…
About half my listings showing in sellers other items, less than 5% showing in my shop at 4:30am GMT.
I feel like plastering my web URL over anything that can be seen on ebay in revenge…..
maybe I should go to bed instead.
RBH has a post up on ebayinkblog. Ina has some new info on Auctionbytes as well.
We have a tentative promise of “refunds” but that won’t do much for sellers whose listings ended with far fewer bids than they normally would have.
Search AND browse is still down as of 8:40 pm PST
they are saying its because of a “listing surge”…medved aucton count shows no listing surge…
Its no way near fixed. Do a search and reload your browser, the listing counts are shape shifting against, 240K to 480K, this is back to the same debacle of missing/disappearing search results where ebay kept telling us look at your selling screen there are the listings. and was the reason why they inserted that verbage when your items would not be guaranteed
Makes me quite glad I am too busy with other projects to be ebaying at the moment.
Still, things break from time to time, I doubt it is on a par with the end of the world as seems to be muted in some quarters.
I wonder if we’ll get a refund lol. I’m glad I’ve got plenty more irons in the fire.
For a second I thought my competitors had quit over night, because they had zero listings
Wishful thinking
I noticed something strange yesterday with the eBay guides and reviews
Explains lack of sales then, best week in 2 years followed by worst Saturday in 5
Yesterday sales = Nil Poi.
I feel sorry for the poor buggers who had auctions ending yesterday.
From the most recent .com announcement:
‘….. Please accept our sincere thanks for your patience as we work around the clock on your behalf to restore search functionality. …..’
it was our fault all along then?
Totally -issed off with ebay,trying to run a business from it,just had 7 day suspension listed for using 1 wrong word (almost NEW) & now the total listings have crashed.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE can someone set up some serious competition,when they paople will leave ebay in droves.
I got a pretty detailed reply from Powerseller Support about how to clear my cache and cookies when I complained about the search problem.
Surprisingly, it didn’t fix the problem.
Just got off the phone with them. As my searches seem to work good right now in Michigan… my listings show otherwise. Items worth over $150 are still at $0.99 with only 10 hours left. I will be calling them back an hour before they end it they are not near the correct price and have the end the items. Also my listings were down about 20% Friday night. They told me they would credit sellers for this problem…. yea probably the listing fee, not the $200 I lost. Anybody else still have trouble searching? I am shorting eBay stock first thing Monday morning to try and gain some $$$ back.
Seems search is still messed up with items specifics and not showing any sub categories. For example, if I go to “> Computing > Desktop PCs>” the part for choosing a brand, Dell, HP, Compaq, IBM, etc. isn’t there.
Whether this is a change or still the affects of the massive screw up I don’t know, but the same thing is happening in many categories from what I’ve been reading.
Fortunately the option to search by TRS only is still there though.
…and so is the “Close my account” link in “My eBay”.
SORRY, AOL……….
Cursed the hell out of them last night, for once, not their fault
I wonder how this will affect best match. Depending on where in the pipeline impressions are recorded and where the failure was it is possible that listings gained impressions while receiving no visibility. Meaning the site may now become flooded with “2nd page” listings.
There is an annoucement on co.uk timed at 6.33pm claiming a fix.
Search options do not seem to be available to me!!
It’s definetly not completely fixed. I had an item on watch for a seller with the intention of bidding on a few. There other items are not showing. This is a US based seller so maybe it’s just international searches that are still broken ? Same scenario with a UK seller and its fine.
Message on .com claiming a fix but stating that ‘secondary features’ searched by item specifics have been kept offline.
Message was timed at ’22/11 – 03.45PM PST – 18 hours ago’.
Well I make it around 22/11 – 05.00PM PST NOW, so how is that claim 18 hours ago????
I detect a huge squirming on the claiming of the fix time, aka we ain’t givin nothin much back.
Usual disingenuous carp.
Hi,
Paypal is not working too.
Hi,
From Portugal, i can’t access ebay.co.uk or even ebay.com, ant even the paypal is slow as hell!
do any of you guys have any update on this?
regards
I’m also in Portugal, as from 9 am I’m unable to access ebay. period. All their sites seem to be down at the mo.
(I accessed successfully before leaving for work, at 8.40 am)
Paypal is working fine.
I have two invoices to send *aaaaaahhhh*
I blame Dan,Chris and Mark for appearing on Working Lunch last week.
Compensation details etc seem to be here
http://thebrewsnews.com/2009/11/23/ebay-responds-swiftly-with-an-email-to-address-sellers-concerns/
Thank you Linda. We’re waiting to hear from eBay UK exactly what they’re intending to do: obviously the email posted by TBN relates to US buyers/sellers (references to dollars etc.) so I’m not going to assume the same thing will apply globally.
I bet the UK get free wrapping paper.
I had the best week for 2 years last week, don,t appear to have been affected by this at all
No hurdles here !!
eBay UK will be making an announcement tomorrow morning re. this. Watch this space
Jody must be mulling over the details whilst sipping a dry martini at the bucks club.