Paying for an eBay Store That Doesn't Exist?

I’ve been seeing multiple reports from eBay sellers that links to their eBay stores from the listing pages are not working, resulting in errors that say “Sorry, this store does not exist” or this helpful message which simply directs the prospective buyer to continue shopping on eBay…..just not with that seller.

Despite this very insightful post from an eBay community member, it has been almost a month and eBay still has not implemented a fix.

Not only are sellers potentially losing sales when buyers cannot browse their store for additional items, these sellers are also still being charged their monthly store subscription fees which can range from $4.95/month for a Starter store to $299.95/month for an Anchor store.

eBay announced they were expanding the Stores experience to the mobile app back in November 2020. Is this issue possibly related to this update?

Harry Temkin, eBay VP of Seller Experience & Seller Tools has been very busy lately rolling out new reports and tools for sellers and recently announced big plans for an upgraded back end to power all of these cool new features. However, he has been conspicuously silent on this major technical problem that is most certainly negatively affecting both the seller and buyer experience.

Ex-CEO Devin Wenig made waves at eBay Open 2018 when he said that site glitches “pissed him off”.

“I hold my team accountable. It’s not important, it’s an internal matter, but we’ve made changes to people and teams, because shipping product that isn’t ready is not okay. It’s not okay with me, and it’s not okay with my team.”

Current eBay CEO Jamie Iannone has taken a more positive approach, focusing his public statements on his vision for a tech-led reimagination of the platform to make eBay the partner of choice for sellers and build lifelong, trusted buyer relationships.

Iannone also stated in an internal memo about ethics :

Since I rejoined eBay earlier this year, and particularly over the last couple of months, the eBay Leadership Team has frequently discussed how openness, honesty, respect and doing business with integrity drives our success.

Will Iannone succeed where Wenig failed? Proactively crediting affected seller’s store subscription fees would be a good start - devoting whatever resources are necessary to fix this issue ASAP would be even better.