eBay Technical Meltdown 2-7-2024
eBay is suffering a widespread technical meltdown today impacting many areas of the site including seller hub, creating and editing listings, purchasing shipping labels, requesting payouts and more!
Just tried to end a couple listings and it won't let me. Does anyone know what is going on?
I keep running into this error when trying to use quick updates in Seller Hub (quantity, price, custom SKU). Primarily I am trying to update custom SKUs on variations.
! We ran into a problem and couldn't save your changes. Please try again
So far I've duplicated in 2 browsers on 2 accounts. Still running through troubleshooting to see if I can get it to work in other ways. Have not yet gone in to see if I can revise within the listing and save changes, but that's coming up on my list.
Update: Went in to revise the listing the long way 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.
I am also unable to create a new listing using my listing software (GarageSale). I am getting an error that says business policies are not available. I mention this to say that it's not just you. It appears that Ebay is having problems.
I cannot create a Buy It Now listing (not an auction). When I commit to listing it, I get this in red:
Looks like something is missing or invalid. Please fix any issues and try again.
Buy It Now price
The Buy It Now price that I previously entered is gone. I put it in again, try to list it again, and I get the same error. The Buy It Now price I entered is gone again.
it boggles my mind how ebay is always asking for more of a cut from our sales with the ridiculous scam that is promoted listings, yet hardly even has a functional website. Every time I am listing something, at least once (usually 3-4 times!) the page will refresh and I lose information that I've input. I've seen several people post about this so I'm not the only one having this issue (in fact it happened while typing this post!). It's 100% an ebay specific issue, as it does not happen to me with any other sites.
I am trying to start a listing using the GarageSale program -- just like I do every day. I am getting an error that says "Business policy details are unavailable at the moment" and I cannot start the listing. This error occurs when trying to upload the listing to the Ebay server. I believe it is a problem on Ebay's side and not with the software.
Same here. My listings did finally post but if I go back in to check the listing the Shipping Policy pull down only shows one Shipping Business Policy. No options except for the one I chose initially. Taking a long time to list items, too because everything just spins. It eventually lets me list but I am double-checking everything to make sure Shipping Policies are correct.
This error issue just started today as I tried to revise some of my listings. I got this message “Inventory-based listing management is not currently supported by this tool. Please refer to the tool used to create this listing.”
What tool? I do not use any other then what EBay provides when creating a listing.
Who else is having problems with payment on demand, I have money available but when I go to withdraw it says $0, I called eBay and they said it was a site wide problem
I thought I would try here because it has more eyes. I just tried to print a label and got the red, USPS cannot produce this label at this time. I hit the back button to see what was going on and it shows that it way paid for and has the tracking number for the item. The problem is I can't see what I can print it. I can print the packaging label, but not the postage.
I know I can cancel and try again and wait for the money paid on postage to come back, but there's got to be another way to print a postage label again without having to go through the cancel and try again method. Any help would be great.
Surprisingly, eBay's System Status page is actually showing a disruption for once...unsurprisingly, it is only showing a disruption to Buying when in fact most of the reports being made to the eBay community are about almost everything except buying being broken.
eBay has at least taken the proactive step of placing a banner on the contact page acknowledging "trouble" with "certain areas of our site."
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 increased use of AI for critical support functions, though it's not clear if today's troubles are related to the reduction in staff.
Liz Morton
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.
Will current CEO Jamie Iannone face similar pressure from the board and investors to address these long standing issues and legacy technical misexecution?
Are you experiencing technical problems on eBay today? Let us know in the comments below!
