eBay Confirms Bug When Entering Promoted Listings Ad Rate
UPDATE 3-28-22
The eBay Ads team has confirmed that eBay has no intention of offering any help or consideration for sellers who may have been impacted by this bug - as far as they're concerned, if a seller didn't catch that a decimal point was missing due to eBay's technical error, it is the seller's responsibility.
Our investigation revealed that this bug only affected the user experience for changing ad rates. While we understand that this bug may have caused some inconvenience, sellers still had the ability to review their ad rates before accepting any changes. Sellers don’t need to take any further action at this time.
The eBay Ads team in the community has confirmed a bug reported by a seller which may have inadvertently caused some sellers to enter higher ad rates than they meant to.
The new advertising dashboard has a bug.
In the "Apply single ad rate" window, no initial characters except 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 are accepted.
Inputting 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 is ignored, no number appears.
There's more. If you input an 0,1,2,3 or 4 then immediately type any other digit without hitting a decimal point, both digits immediately appear. So you can enter 41%. But not 4.1%.
This essentially forces you to enter no single ad rate lower than 5%, and if you are not paying attention, you can easily enter say 42% if you meant to use 4.2%.
On Ebay's part this seems buggy at best, and deliberately misleading at worse, and needs to be fixed pronto. This sort of trickery from a much larger Ebay competitor, is why I left that competitor and stayed with Ebay.
AdsTeam@eBay responded:
We've identified a bug that was causing the issue. Our team has since resolved the issue and you should no longer be affected by it.
Thanks for letting us know you were impacted, and please let us know if you see something in the future.
It's nice they've acknowledged the bug and all but....where's the announcement and instructions for affected sellers to get assistance if they were overcharged ad fees due to this bug?
As the original poster pointed out, it would be very easy for sellers to inadvertently enter a much higher amount than intended if they didn't realize there was no decimal point.
I've asked Ads Team what the best course of action is for sellers who were impacted by the bug and will update as soon as I have more information.
Have you seen glitches in eBay Promoted Listings ad settings? Let me know in the comments below!
