eBay Video In Listings Delays Raise Server Processing & Latency Concerns
UPDATE 8-21-24
eBay is once again struggling with delays in processing videos in listings with dozens of reports posted in the eBay community today.
Normally the videos I upload to my listings take about 5 minutes to become live. It has now been 24 hours and all of my 70 scheduled listings are still showing under review.
Has anyone else been having issues this week with video uploading.
I posted a video yesterday and today in 2 different auctions and neither has become live yet. And like you, it used to be only 5 minutes or less for videos to become live when I posted them. Either there is a programming glitch or they are really looking at every video now before they go live.
I posted a video on my car sale listing. It has been over 4 days and it is still under review. How can I get assistance on this.
I know this is systemic, ebay support knows this is systemic. I was told by support many people uploading videos and there is a backlog. What were you told?
Is it true that executives only meet once a week to figure out solution? Here is the solution: Managers, reassign employees to review videos till you are all caught up.
SOme items have better sell rate if video is seen. It makes no sense to post an item on sunday when my target market is viewing and its days later when a video becomes approved.By that time, my listing is 100 deep. Im sure that is the case with others.
In the past, eBay has simply chalked these delays in relisting items or reviewing videos to "latency" and said it is normal for it to take 24-48 hours for listings to reindex or for videos to be reviewed.
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 eBay 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 at least be upfront and transparent with sellers about it rather than hiding behind vague 24-48 hour windows when performance slows down.
Let us know in the comments below if you're seeing longer than usual review times for videos in your eBay listings!
UPDATE: 2-19-22
eBay community staff confirmed in the weekly chat that eBay had experienced delays in approving videos, but the backlog has been worked through and most videos should be loading in 24-48 hours - prompting me to wonder how in the world eBay thinks this new feature can possibly scale across the platform if they are relying on a human power manual review process.
We've had a few threads recently about using the new video-in-gallery tool, and how long is it taking for the review (before the uploaded video actually goes live). Here's an update from Wednesday's Weekly Chat:
"...the backlog has been worked through and ...currently the vast majority of videos are being approved within that 24-48 hour timeframe, with nearly all others being approved 'shortly thereafter'. "
Best advice I can give, if your video is not live after 48 hours (or maybe a little longer), you might want to contact Customer Service. Hopefully, ebay will eventually put an actual process in place to make this easier.
I'm planning on listing some music boxes within the next week or so, so will have an opportunity to test this out.
A seller in the weekly eBay community chat said they are experiencing very long processing times for videos uploaded in eBay's new listing experience.
And, speaking of video, I have the feature, and uploaded a video to a listing last Friday night. The Video is still "under review". I know ebay says "up to 48 hours" and in some busy periods, up to 7 days, but......how busy can they be? It's a less than 30 second video. Basically one image and some narration. Really, just a test...but I sure didn't expect to still be waiting on this.
If ebay doesn't speed up the process, it's hard to imagine people using this for auctions (and many auction are for items that could definitely benefit from video....) If ebay has run into a problem with the video review process, how about a little transparency and just tell us?
Tyler@eBay responded that he had not heard of any issues with the video review process but would share the input and provide updates as he hears back.
I agree that "up to 7 days" could be a problem for auctions, as it won't do much good if buyers can't see the video before the end of the auction.
Other sellers discussed the new feature in a separate thread.
Time for approval: ebay says up to 48 hours normally, but up to seven days if they are very busy. Not sure why your listing is not up. The listing should go live regardless of the video. If the video is approved, it will be added in (to the second slot in the Gallery). I don't know what happens if it is not approved. As I have said elsewhere, the approval process makes it a risky thing to use if you are using auction format.
I posted a listing this past Friday night. The listing is live, but the video is STILL in approval limbo. I hope this is just the result of being an early adopter, and that they'll speed things up soon.
We have uploaded a couple videos to already existing listings and it took around 30+ hours....
...The videos do seem to be lower quality than originally uploaded though.
Yeah, I can also understand why they would not want 4k or large file videos on every listing. Hopefully it’s a computer algorithm and not just some poor soul sitting at a desk watching everyone’s video clips clicking verified.
Maybe once it’s fully released the process will be sped up
One seller did provide a link to a listing as an example for those who want to see what video in listings looks like. This listing is a great example of how the video feature can really benefit both buyers and sellers - being able to see how the labradorite catches light at different angles as it moves really makes it stand out.
(Value Added Resource has no affiliation with this seller and this is not intended as a promotion, just an example of how the video feature works.)
I can also see video in listings being very useful for mechanical items or items that move/make noise to show them in use as well as clothing where seeing how the fabric moves and flows could help make the sale.
More info about how to upload videos in the new listing tool here:
Liz Morton
Video In Listings is an important part of CEO Jamie Iannone's tech led reimagination of the platform and transition away from legacy tech. As such, it's absolutely critical for eBay to deliver a stable, working product for this initiative.
Amazon, Etsy, Poshmark, Depop, and Facebook all beat eBay to the punch on providing sellers with video capability, so this new feature isn't really an "exciting next gen experience", it's simply eBay playing catch up with the competition.
Liz Morton
Hopefully they can get the kinks ironed out to speed up the review process. Beyond that, I'd love to see eBay incorporate "includes video" as a search filter on the buyer side as well.
Have you tried eBay's new video in listing feature yet? Do you love it, hate it, wish there were more bells and whistles? Let us know in the comments below!
