eBay Listings Disappear In Annual Recurring Glitch
UPDATE:
eBay has put out an official statement by way of community forum post, calling the issue a "technical data processing delay" due to an "annual increase in system activity experienced during this period."
Credit where due: that communication was much quicker and more transparent than in years past and I sincerely hope eBay continues to engage with sellers in this way!
That being said, if eBay knows this is an annual occurrence where delays occur because of an increase in processing relistings - why would they not proactively implement measures to increase the processing capacity ahead of this entirely predictable event and what are they doing to plan for future known higher system activity periods?
eBay sellers are once again reporting listings which are supposed to renew today are instead disappearing in what appears to be an annual recurring February glitch.
The eBay community forum is being flooded with posts about the problem, with some sellers saying they've lost hundreds of listings so far.
76 Listings Just Disappeared-No Explanation
Was finishing month end updates and listings and realized 76 listings had just disappeared. No notice. No explanation. Anybody else finding this problem?
Same and I got eBay concierge on the phone about it. We figured out GTC listings are not relisting and it seems to be a glitch. It's bizarre because if you track an item number that has ended and should have been relisted and type it into search it won't show up.
However, if you search your active items with the item number it does come up but it is blank for how much time is left. If you keep the page open from right before it ends and refresh after it ends the page is still there. Seems to be a glitch but I am losing listings by the minute and I hope eBay figures this out
I just lost over 400 listing in the space of an hour. How can we trust ANYTHING E-Bay does? How can we trust their accounting of OUR funds? They become more & more pathetic and less accountable every single day. It's time for Jamie Iannone to be replaced.
Several sellers have pointed out this is a recurring issue that always seems to happen in February, likely due to the short number of days in the month.
eBay active listing count is dropping for no reason (nothing ended, nothing sold, nothing removed). Oh, I forgot, it's the last day of February and this happens every year! One year, 80% of my store was gone. Hopefully it doesn't get that bad this time! @ValueAddedRS
— less than three records (@RecordsLess) February 28, 2025
Listings are Disappearing Across the Board!
I've lost over 200 and counting. Ebay does this every February in their attempt to keep the 30 day month. In the past they have eventually showed back, problem is if the listings are not visible, they can't be purchased. But then ebay is not in the position to worry about the seller.
Other sellers confirmed that is likely the issue, with some reassuring that when this has happened in the past, the listings have eventually come back - they just may be delayed while they are indexing.
The listings that appear to be missing are those dated 29th, 30th and 31st. They will reappear once your listings renew. It is because February only has 28 days.
Hang in there, we are all going through it.
This sometimes happens on the last day of the month when listings renew - they always reappear once the listings are re-indexed.
I think it has something to do with the short month because I usually see it on months ending in 30 days - or in this case 28 days.
That is exactly what happened when this issue happened last year - the listings did eventually reappear within 24 hours.
Liz Morton
These types of renewal/relisting delays are not uncommon and not exclusive to February, though the fact it is a shorter month could be an additional exacerbating factor.
Liz Morton
In the past, eBay has simply chalked these issues up to "latency", saying it is normal for listings to take 24-48 hours to reindex, and they've given the same answer for other issues as well like, delays in posting listings to social media using the Social Sharing tool.
Many sellers have believed that's just a catch all for anytime eBay's servers get bogged down and struggle to keep up, but what if the delays are sometimes actually intentional?
In some instances, eBay may be simply load-balancing, preferencing fast load time and responsiveness on the buying side of the site at times to the possible detriment to the selling side, especially during heavy traffic or peak load events.
The importance of optimizing for the consumer-buyer experience was laid out in a corporate blog post when they launched a company-wide Speed initiative in 2019, focused on improving performance across experiences on desktop, mobile, and apps and specifically targeting home page, search and item page performance - all importantly geared toward the buyer-facing side of the user experience.
The post explicitly calls out making cuts in certain areas to balance their "need for speed" as well as creating a committee to monitor and oversee application of the "speed budget."
Death by a thousand cuts is a popular figure of speech that refers to a failure that occurs as a result of many small problems. It has a negative connotation to it and is referenced on many occasions when things go wrong, and there is no one primary reason to blame.
We have a similar story at eBay, but this time on a positive note. In 2019, we started working on an initiative called “Speed” to improve the performance of end-user experiences across major consumer channels — iOS, Android, and Web.
Fast forward today, we have made significant improvements to our speed numbers, both globally and across all platforms, but there was no one major contributing factor. It was a culmination of many small enhancements (or “cuts” as we call it) that moved the needle.
It's certainly understandable why eBay would favor the performance of the buyer experience in the constantly changing calculations for how to prioritize resources, but if that is the case they should be more upfront and transparent with sellers about it rather than hiding behind vague 24-48 hour windows when performance slows down.
Whether this current issue is due to intentional load-balancing, lack of planning for the entirely foreseeable fact that February has a different amount of days or bogged down server latency, unfortunately sellers will likely just have to wait it out and hope those magically disappearing listings will just as magically reappear.
However, it should go without saying that after 3 decades in the business, someone at eBay should have been able to figure this issue out by now to prevent these kinds of predictable, recurring disruptions.
As CEO Jamie Iannone has now been at the helm for ~5 years and just having passed the 6 year anniversary of Elliott Management's activist bid to push for change at the company, it's shocking just how much of Elliott's "Enhancing eBay" plan still rings true today - particularly critiques around glitches constantly plaguing the platform and lack of leadership prioritizing operational and technical excellence.
Ex-CEO Devin Wenig infamously said at eBay Open 2018 that technical glitches are unacceptable and really pissed him off. Interestingly, eBay has since blocked that YouTube video from being embedded or shared on other sites, but you can still watch it here.
There've been a lot of site glitches recently on eBay. What are you guys doing to get rid of them?
Here's the simple answer - unacceptable, unacceptable. And we're making a lot of changes. When you make changes there are times that things happen but that's not an excuse and it's not ok with me and this summer in particular there have been a number of issues that directly impacted sellers like people not being able to see their view counts and a few other things and it's just not ok.
I'm extremely proud of a lot of things we've done, I'm not proud of that and in fact I hold my team accountable and it's not important, it's an internal matter but, we made changes to people and teams because shipping product that isn't ready is not ok. It's not ok with me and it's not ok with my team.
So the short answer is it's not like we don't get it. We are making a lot of changes and I want to make those changes, we need to make those changes, but making changes and then having to back up and fix things is not cool and I totally get it. Most of the issues from this summer have now been remedied but I was pissed off.
Mazen Rawashdeh was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at the time, but somehow managed to escape the wrath of a "pissed off" Wenig.
He was then promoted to Chief Technology Officer in 2019, after a brief period where he co-led Core Product & Tech along with Mohan Patt when Steve Fisher was being shuffled from CTO to SVP Payments "in order to focus on a personal matter."
Patt and Fisher both left the company, but Rawashdeh remains as CTO while the site continues to be plagued by technical problems and operational challenges.
How much longer will CEO Jamie Iannone, Rawashdeh and Chief Product Officer Eddie Garcia be allowed to blunder down the same path before eBay's Board of Directors finds themselves facing another call for change from investors?
Properly planning and programing for February being a short month may seem like a little thing, but as Admiral William McRaven said - “If you can't do the little things right, you will never do the big things right."
