eBay Sellers Can't List From Drafts As Technical Issues Plague Platform
eBay sellers report they are unable to complete draft listings today, receiving server time out and error messages when attempting to list from drafts.
I try to list from my drafts and get this message:
"Well, this is embarrassing.
We're sorry, but the listing tool isn't working right this second.
Please try again later."
When I check the status of ebay site- it says everything is working?
How do I fix this, if it is just me?
When I attempt to list drafts using the eBay listing tool, I get the following message: Unable to Process - listings not processed due to server error. This has been going on for several hours.
Well, this is embarrassing.
We're sorry, but the listing tool isn't working right this second.
Please try again later.This is the second times in 24 hours that i've received this message. I could not fix it no matter how long I waited for Ebay to fix itself. I had to delete the draft and start over again. This is happening when I try to list a draft. Anybody else getting this glitch?
For the past 24 hours I have not been able to list any items. I am a longtime 20+ year eBay seller with all systems established and top rated performance. This is beyond frustrating. The mobile app, laptop, and desktop apps, no longer work. I’ve reinstalled, cleared cache, and done everything I can think of to get my eBay business going again. I’m losing money, and eBay is losing money. This is not a new problem to others, but I’m not sure why It’s happening to me or what the fix is.
eBay community staff have acknowledged the issues and passed it onto the Product Team but have not provided any timeframe for a fix.
Devon@eBay said:
Thank you for having this reported and our Product team is looking into this.
Interestingly, the eBay System Status page that is supposed to provide dashboard with a quick look at whether there are any major outages or disruptions currently only shows a message that says "Please check this site for the latest news about eBay."
This current problem comes as eBay is experiencing many other technical issues too numerous to list here, but some examples are FedEx shipping adjustment back charges; disappearing descriptions, duplicated listings, and incorrect item specifics added; and listings completely disappearing.
eBay recently announced a mass layoff of ~1,000 employees, including over 100 software engineers in California alone, leading to seller concerns about site stability and use of AI for critical support functions.
The increasing occurrence of serious, business impacting technical issues on the site brings to mind another period in eBay's history that saw sellers, media, and even activist investors take executive leadership to task for their technical misexecution.
Ex-CEO Devin Wenig infamously said at eBay Open 2018 that technical glitches are "unacceptable" and really pissed him off.
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.
Those glitches and other executive failures caught the attention of activist investor Elliott Management, resulting in a very public letter calling for substantial changes in their proposed Enhancing eBay plan (emphasis mine).
...As an online marketplace that provides a critical forum for millions of buyers and sellers, the efficient and effective functioning of the platform is paramount. Unfortunately, eBay has been plagued by technical problems and operational challenges for years...
...Fast forward to recent years and the platform still faces issues. In 2018, eBay sellers complained about countless technical issues including incorrect billing, lost photos, warped titles and many others. On this month’s end of year podcast, eBay senior management apologized to sellers and admitted, “This is a 2018 that we don’t want to repeat on a number of levels. And the technology issues that we have had with the platform is top of the list.”
We agree: The consistent reliability of the platform is central to eBay’s success, and management must do all that it takes to achieve it.
While innovative endeavors in new pursuits like machine learning and augmented reality are promising future technologies, eBay’s publicly touted initiatives in these areas will add little value if the core platform continues to have critical functionality failures.
Current eBay Chief Technology Officer Mazen Rawashdeh, who was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at the time, 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."
Five years later and very little has changed - eBay is still plagued by technical problems and operational challenges and management is certainly not doing "all that it takes" to achieve consistent reliability of the platform.
Will current executive leadership face similar pressure from the board and investors to address these long standing issues and legacy technical misexecution?
