eBay: Please enter a quantity of -1 or less
Here’s something you don’t see every day – I want to buy some boots and eBay are telling me to “Please enter a quantity of -1 or less”.
I’m at a loss to explain how this can possibly work. I can understand a retailer being out of stock, but how can they have minus one in stock, and even worse why are eBay suggesting I enter a quantity of minus one or less? Perhaps eBay want me to return an item instead of buying it?
Anyone with any ideas what’s causing this glitch or how to rectify it please do let me know. The retailer (my friend John) reckons he has none in stock, but somehow that’s been translated onto eBay as minus one.
Chris Dawson says
2:39 pm on 17/01/2013
Just for laughs I stuck “-1″ in as the quantity I want to buy and the message changes to “Please enter quantity of 1 or more”!
whirly says
9:18 am on February 1st, 2013
UK 5 Shiraz Red…Suits you sir.
John Pemberton says
2:59 pm on 17/01/2013
I wonder if it means the customer has to send me one?!!
Clarky says
7:12 pm on 17/01/2013
It happens occasionally when a 3rd party tool has a fit, also happens very rarely when 2 customers purchase at virtually identical times, the listing will usually show as “0 available” and not allow you to purchase but I guess the ebay coders didn’t think to extend this to minus numbers
ebuyerfb says
2:00 pm on January 19th, 2013
It has nothing to do with 3rd party apps. Set your quantity available to 0 in eBay directly and this will happen. Even if a 3rd party app could set your quantity to -1 it is eBay’s fault for not blocking such an obviously incorrect revision request. This is eBay’s glitch on that page and does not reflect the auction quantity eBay is tracking. If you go to eBay.ca you’ll see the variation as out of stock.
You are right about the 0 quantity available happening. Happened to one of my users last year. It actually isn’t a glitch when it happens most times. It is only a glitch when it gets stuck like that.
flowers says
9:03 pm on 17/01/2013
I can confirm this is the latest glitch. I am a seller and I sell a listing with 2 variations, so there’s a colour and size drop down box to choose from. I don’t know if it’s only happening on these types of listings.
It is occuring when we have 0 in stock. Sadly, we can not remove those items from the drop down options without deleting the whole listing and its sales history, so there is literally nothing we can do to change it.
They have also made the drop down boxes much more complicated to use. You now have to select both a colour and a size just to see the picture. And if you choose a colour, it blocks you from seeing all of the other available sizes (and vice versa).
This started last night on my listing, and no sales since then. Hmmm… I wonder what could be causing the sudden drop…
Cal says
10:23 pm on 17/01/2013
Happy Birthday!!!
Chris Dawson says
12:57 pm on January 18th, 2013
A belated thank you! Sorry I took some time off yesterday evening
ebuyerfb says
1:56 pm on 19/01/2013
I noticed this one two days ago after a recent customer of mine thought I caused it as they’d sold for 5 years without ever experiencing this before. My investigation shows that it is restricted to eBay’s item view page, only affects sold out variations, and only affects a few sites. So far I’ve only witnessed this on eBay.com and eBay.co.uk. It does not affect the public APIs.
Fedor says
12:04 am on 01/02/2013
We have contacted ebay developer tech support and notified them of a problem. It is seems to be a problem on eBay’s backend system and it will be resolved shortly with all stock updates taking effect.
Until this is fixed by eBay you can’t even set this to +1 through API or on eBay.