eBay Buyers Worry About Security As Watchlists Show False Winning Label On Items They Didn't Bid On

eBay buyers are raising security concerns after strange glitch showed false "winning" label in watchlists on items they had not bid on.

The issue has affected multiple buyers today, according to posts in the eBay community forum.

Watchlist shows Winning items I’ve not bid on.

When I go to my watchlist I have a bunch of items that show Winning that I have never bid on. This is pretty big issue for an auction site.

False "Winning" label

There is a false "winning" label inside the Watchlist. I have not bid on either item.

The issue appears to only be occurring in the eBay app, prompting other users to suggest trying to access the watchlist through the desktop web experience instead to confirm they really didn't have any bids on these items.

Have you tried accessing the account via a webpage instead of the app?

Just to make sure? I mean this could be faked somehow. Or someone else used your phone or account to place bids on those items. And if that's the case, you may be able to retract the bids.

This could also be one of those cases where the images are being loaded incorrectly, if you indeed haven't bid on them and are not showing any bid history on the account for them.

While eBay has yet to provide an update as to whether the glitch has been fixed, Kyle@eBay did respond to this post saying he had brought the issue to the attention of the appropriate tech team.

thanks for bringing this to our attention. I have gone ahead and reported this to the proper teams!

This is just the latest in a string of technical problems that have hit the eBay app experience recently.

For example, eBay inadvertently pushed an app change meant just for the UK to the US as well, forcing sellers to revert to the web experience to use business policies, not to mention updates which stopped support for many older phones in the UK in February.

eBay App Update Forces Sellers To Web Experience To Use Business Policies

eBay sellers frustrated by app error message directing them to complete listings on a web browser to apply business policies.

Value Added ResourceLiz Morton

And that's just the tip of the iceberg of near daily, business impacting technical issues on the site.

Back in 2019, eBay and then CEO Devin Wenig faced activist investor pressure from Elliott Management calling for changes at the company, with constant site glitches and technical misexecution called out explicitly as one of the major problems plaguing the platform.

Six years later, it's shocking just how much of Elliott's "Enhancing eBay" plan still rings true today.

Wenig infamously said at eBay Open 2018 that technical glitches are unacceptable and really pissed him off. Interestingly, eBay has since blocked that YouTube video from being embedded or shared on other sites, but you can still watch it here.

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.

Mazen Rawashdeh was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at the time, but 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."

Patt and Fisher both left the company, but Rawashdeh remains as CTO while the site continues to experience by near daily technical problems and operational challenges.

Are you seeing this false "winning" label in Watchlist problem in the eBay app? Let us know in the comments below!