We’d like to advise members of multiple issues with Shop Categories which they may be experiencing. Currently affected are multiple areas of a seller’s shop, including their Shop front Navigation, Promotion Boxes displaying items, Shop Category search, and the Listing Frame on their View Item page. This issue is currently affecting all sites. We will continue to provide updates where possible and thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this.

Personally haven’t experienced any of this – though a few people are complaining about their sales tap being turned off (not unusual in itself). Anybody know what’s going on?

Update: Aha. Slightly more detail from German-language sites: items are not appearing in the correct categories. eBay are working on a fix.

We’ve been asked by a few people over the last day or two whether there was a promotion on for Adcommerce, as invoices for January have been sent out saying there was nothing to pay. Sadly, the Adcommerce Blog has just posted that these were an error, and that revised invoices for actual money will be sent out in the next few days. Automatic payments due to go out on 18th are likely to be delayed slightly.

Bad luck, chaps.

In the meantime, the SYI form is working correctly, so that’s one option for sellers anxious to get on with listing.

Update as of Friday night: Changes have now finally gone live.

photo credit: PhoebeJ

We’ve heard from numerous sellers over the last few days that they’re having problems accessing their own and other sellers’ About Me pages on eBay UK. On the View Item page, the link to the Me page seems to point back to the same page you’re on; the link at the top of the Shop home page doesn’t work (though AFAIK the one in the sidebar normally does); several of the links from within My eBay don’t seem to work… the list goes on, the problem seems to be intermittent, and of course, there are conspiracy theories.

The About Me page is – still – the one page on eBay where a seller is permitted to link an off-eBay commercial website, and lots of sellers – myself included – have speculated in the past that we’d see it disappear. In the US, a revised links policy saw off-site links banned even from About Me for a while in 2008, but that policy was quickly reversed.

But for now, at least, sellers can rest easy: these non-linking links are a glitch, and James the eBay UK Community Manager has confirmed that eBay will be fixing them. How much of a priority that fix will be remains to be seen: if you’re relying on your About Me page to offer your buyers crucial information re. their eBay purchases, you might want to look at other options for that.

It’s one of those things that eBay think is a minor inconvenience – but sellers know can make for unhappy buyers, and can easily turn transactions which are hanging in the balance completely to the bad. Let’s hope they fix this one soon.

Ady from AVMDVDs was the first person to mention this. He had a buyer from outside the UK who said they were posting a cheque: he said, no, it’s PayPal only. And when he received no payment, he opened a UID. So far, fairly standard stuff. But when he came to close the UID, the system wouldn’t let him – because, it said, the buyer had paid. And the payment date was the date the buyer had completed checkout.

Just a glitch, you’d think – but not so. On contacting eBay Support, Ady was told:

your buyer xxxxxxxx have completed our Checkout process and paid for the DVD they have purchased from you using a postal order ot banker’s draft. Our system recognised that the payment has been made by the buyer and this is the reason why you were unable to close the unpaid item case you have filed against the buyer [sic]

He posted the problem in a thread on the PowerSeller board and it seems he’s not the only one with the problem: at least two other sellers have experienced the same thing.

Ady’s case does seem to have a happy ending as the dispute is now closed – apparently all by itself – and the FVFs refunded. Nonetheless, as he says, “surely we can’t be expected to complain to support everytime we get the same thing happening because the system won’t let it go through”.

PS: Ady, I did try and mail you back but My Messages won’t let me.

The guys who work with our Google feeds are aware of the issue and are working on this as a major priority and hope to have a fix in place shortly.

I’ll update this if we have any further news.

eBay are working on a fix for the problem. In the meantime, the advice for sellers is (1) don’t use the bulk listing editor on MVLs, and (2) be aware that any listings you’ve edited might now have errors in the quantities.

You don’t need to hear me rant again at how blithely eBay say “it’s a glitch”, and ignore the hours and hours of work it will take sellers to fix the problem.

By now you may be aware that between 4:45pm GMT on Saturday, 21 November and 8:00am GMT on Sunday, 22 November eBay search was unavailable with searches returning limited or no results.

We know this was a very serious disruption, especially as you look to increase your sales for the Christmas shopping season. Because you had listings ending during or within an hour after the outage, I wanted to let you know, personally, what we’ll be doing to support your business and protect your eBay reputation.

First of all, this outage will not negatively impact your feedback or detailed seller ratings (DSRs) in any way. All Auction-style listings completed during this time will be protected from negative and neutral feedback as well as DSRs below a five star rating.

In addition, we’ll not expect you to fulfill Auction-style orders completed during this time if you feel the search outage prevented you from realising the full expected price from your auction-style listings that closed during the outage or within an hour after the outage. It’s up to you whether you want to fulfill the item in the interest of good relations with your buyer or cancel the transaction.

If you do plan to cancel a transaction, we ask that you contact your buyer by end of day Tuesday, 24 November. For your convenience, we’ve drafted some language below that you can use in your emails to inform the buyer of your intention and let them know this cancellation was due entirely to an eBay issue and not you as a seller.

If you had Fixed Price listings completed during this time period, you would of course be expected to fulfill sold items as usual.

Second, in keeping with eBay’s Outage Policy and doing what’s right for sellers and buyers, we are taking the following actions for listings that ended during or within an hour after the outage (4:45pm GMT Saturday, 21 November – 9:00am Sunday, 22 November GMT):

We’ll refund all associated fees for Auction-style listings and refund pro-rated fees for all active Fixed Price listings during the outage. This refund should be reflected in your next eBay invoice.
We’ll remove negative/neutral Feedback and detailed seller ratings (DSRs) lower than 5 stars given by buyers for affected Auction-style listings.
We’ll alert the eBay and PayPal resolutions team in the event that a claim of item not received is filed for an affected listing.
We’ll be sending a 10% off coupon to buyers who won Auction-style listings during the outage for any inconvenience, up to a maximum value of £70.
We fully understand the impact of an outage of this scope on you, our valued partners. We sincerely apologise for the disruption to your business. I want you to know that we are continuing to focus our teams and resources to ensure a smooth and rewarding Christmas selling season for you.

Sincerely,

Jody Ford
Senior Director Seller Experience Europe

———————————-

Suggested email for notifying your buyer of cancelled Auction-style transactions:

Dear Buyer:

As you may know, for a period of time from Saturday, 21 November to Sunday, 22 November, eBay search was returning limited or no results. See the official eBay report. Unfortunately, the item you purchased from me on [date] was offered through an Auction-style listing affected by this technical disruption.

I wanted you to know that as a result of this issue, I will not fulfill this transaction and any payment you made will be fully refunded. In addition, eBay will be sending you a 10%-off coupon for your next purchase up to a maximum of £70 for the inconvenience. Now that eBay search is fully restored, I will be relisting this auction [today]. I sincerely hope you will bid again – and win!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact eBay via the “Contact us” link at the top of the eBay homepage. Thank you for your understanding. I look forward to your future business.

Sincerely,
XXX

The Brews News has the text of the similar email sent out to US sellers.

A number of issues, particularly with regards to just how feedback will be removed, are not clear from the above; no doubt further clarification will be forthcoming at some point.

Update: There’s also an AB post about this.

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.

The developer blog reports that eBay have recently identified a means by which someone could have (not necessarily has or hasn’t!) gained access to eBay Developers Program account information. Details such as credit card details will not have been compromised and eBay say they’ve detected no fraudulent activity on developer accounts.

The new passwords must be 8 characters or longer, and contain at least 1 upper case letter (A-Z), 1 lower case letter (a-z), 1 number (0-9), and 1 special character (!@#$%*+-_.?). Quite frankly I’m surprised they don’t simply insist developers use the PayPal Security Key as that would wipe out any password security issues instantly.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that some will think they’ve paid – I’ve one buyer who’s managed to send a note with their payment and yet they’ve not actually paid! It might be worth sending reminder eBay invoices or emailing any customers who haven’t yet paid as they could be expecting their purchases to ship.

Going through eBay.com, however, does work, so sellers should log in on the other side of the pond and pay there. This tip brought to you by The Jewellery Shoppe.

How about these two?

Just one more. This one’s a little tricky:

If you spotted that only one of each pair was a gun, well done: you did better than eBay UK. Numerous sellers over the last few days have reported receiving warnings that they may be in breach of eBay UK’s firearms policy when listing a range of entirely innocent items: lilac blouses, biscuit cutters, inflatable canoes, keyrings and bras are a few more of the restricted listings. The items can take several hours to show up in search, and sellers are being left wondering if their policy compliance – and hence seller discounts – will be affected.

Whatever filter has been added to eBay UK recently seems to have a powerfully broad vocabulary: videos which have been “shot”, “barrel” and “tube” shaped beads and “magazines” have all fallen foul of it, and may cause listings to be hidden in search. eBay support had said that they were aware of the problem and that it would be remedied by yesterday, but it seems that sellers are still getting warnings when listing items which have nothing to do with firearms.

Though Support have advised some sellers to wait a few days before listing items, the range of restricted items is so random and varied that it seems like just about any item any of us care to list might get picked up, so “don’t list that one” isn’t much of a solution. So while we wait for the fix, leave us a comment with your most ridiculous restricted item

With thanks to the following for pictures: beige sweater, bonsai tree, pendant, gun, gun, gun.

Nevertheless, it seems that if you’ve looked at underwear, this may be one of the searches eBay throws up: Amanda *had* looked at some faked designer underwear mentioned in a forum thread. Would that be enough to produce this kind of search result? Only eBay knows; presumably they have some kind of filter to remove illegal and prohibited items from front page search results, but that filter isn’t working properly here. As Amanda says, it’s a lovely first impression for anyone new to the site.

Click to embiggen

This particular transaction is on eBay.fr so I’m not sure how widespread the problem is, or whether this is a glitch or eBay deeming the information no longer necessary. But if you’re staring at unpaid sales, it might be worth a check whether the buyers are still registered or not. Those FVFs won’t refund themselves

It seems eBay have made some changes to their sold item emails in the last few days, which may cause some confusion to sellers. TameBay reader Kate from Cat’s Eye Designs forwarded me an example from one of her own sales:

Sale price: £2.99
Quantity: 6
Quantity sold: 3
Quantity remaining: 3
Buyer: XXXXXXX

Kate points out that the quantity sold to the buyer in question was 2, and that 3 is in fact the total quantity sold from this listing. On another transaction, where the buyer had bought a single item, the email read:

Sale price: £3.50
Quantity: 11
Quantity sold: 9
Quantity remaining: 2

Again, the email reflects the total quantity sold from the listing, not the number purchased on this individual sale.

It probably bears saying again; if you’re relying on any single set of emails for sales information, you’re going to run into problems sooner or later. Better at least to reconcile eBay with PayPal, and to be getting your information from the site, not relying on mail.

And if anyone from eBay is reading this, could we have the “send invoice” button back please? I notice there’s a yellow button to go to My eBay, so I assume this hasn’t been removed in an anti-phishing move to get people to stop clicking things in emails. So it seems like yet another case of the people who design things at eBay have never used the site. It wasn’t broken, it didn’t need fixing, please, let’s have it back.

Last month, like many sellers on eBay UK, I received a voucher for £50 of free play on eBay’s Adcommerce, the new in-search advertising program. Not to rehash all the discussion we had at that time, my thought on Adcommerce was that I had £50 of free advertising; even if they weren’t providing me with any conversion data, I would at least have a play with it, because at current click-through rates, my £50 would last me until somewhere around Christmas.

Dear Reader, how wrong I was. This morning, I received an invoice from eBay Adcommerce for €10.42. I mentioned this to Chris: don’t you have a credit as well? he asked. No, I don’t. We compared invoices: his has the total due balanced by an equal credit. Nothing to pay. Mine has no credit.

I wish I could act surprised by this, but eBay and I have a long, long history of their promotions just not working (long-time readers of the PowerSeller board might remember the “free anchor shop” they charged me £450 to have). There’s probably some glitch associated with me being in France and eBay being all over the shop, so I just mention it, in case anyone else is in the same position and gets charged for something they’d been told was free.

Latest eBay information will be reported here, but I’ll update this post  if/when I find out more.

Update: This issue is apparently resolved.

Having initially disallowed Good Til Canceled (GTC) items from the free Subtitle promotion, which ran for the whole of December, eBay allowed users to include free subtitles on GTC listings. They then announced they’d refund any Subtitle fees incurred up until 15th January at which point sellers would be able to remove subtitles from GTC listings (even if they had sales) so that they wouldn’t be charged for Subtitle on subsequent relists.

Today eBay have announced that they’ve been unable to update the site to enable users to remove Subtitles from GTC listings and this will now be enabled by 3rd February. Consequently the fees for Subtitles on GTC listings will be refunded for all qualifying GTCs on relist for the period 1st January – 9th February 2009.

So what started as a promotion for December will no effectively benefit sellers for up to three months. Any GTC listings launched with Subtitle between 1st and 11th December will get two renewals with Subtitle and a full 90 days benefit. All sellers need remember to do is to remove the Subtitle prior to the listing renewing after 9th February.

Well not any more, Skype has moved it conveniently close to the UK, just South of Germany and the Czech Republic. Skype illustrate how Skype To Go works saying “Sam’s based in the US, so he’s got a US Skype To Go number. His family is back in Australia“, with an image of the call hopping across the Atlantic into Europe.

Not quite Australia, Sydney is about 10,000 miles away from Vienna in Austria, Skype need to get their geography books out.

Via IT Wire