eBay Experiences Yet Another Outage

by: Kaz

So,how many outages so far this year, is it 16 or 17 ??
ebaY.co.uk is now at number 1 in the downdetector charts for downtime.
Every day the UK and North-West Europe glows either orange or red on the outage chart, a sign of major disruption.
As for it being fixed ??
Well I had auctions ending tonight and a number of potential bidders emailed to say that they could not bid.
Some said that their bids just "hung" (the slowly spinning circle that memerises you), whilst others got the message that "this listing does not exist".
The whole ebay.co.uk site is an absolute technical disaster at present.
ebaY may as well close the .uk site and merge the UK with either .ie (Ireland) or the .com site.

by: JQ

Ebay has a major outage about once a month. One that effects most, if not all, users and lasts more than two hours. Given that this has now gone on for about six months, without explanation or reasonable compensation to sellers, I am somewhat surprised there are as many people still out there willing to conduct their sales through auction format.

It is even more surprising to me that a house cleaning of the entire technical staff has not occurred months ago. I can think of no other  company where this level of incompetence would be tolerated for this long.

by: Anonymous Annie

No sympathy for eBay... all my sympathy goes where it's deserved: to the hard-working sellers who are most impacted, and who can least afford to continually take these hits from eBay's incompetence.

by: iheartjacksparrow

I was having problems printing out labels on PayPal this morning.

by: comet

Well this COULD explain why my one and only buyer did not pay for their item---the one they got for the start price and bid on DAYS before.

One can only hope.

And since I do NOT price at $.99 but instead price at a fair market price they got a great deal but NOT a freebie at MY expense.

Now if only I could get MORE sales-----

Why can ebay not SEE that THIS is one of the BIG reasons buyers (and sellers)  NO LONGER TRUST AND USE EBAY????

by: JustMe

If you're a merchant and haven't initiated your move from eBay, nobody is going to cry for you. You've been warned time and again. Diversify. Sure, it takes some work but while you do that work, you get a better understanding of you businesss.

by: dpetes

@ comet

Why can ebay not SEE that THIS is one of the BIG reasons buyers (and sellers)  NO LONGER TRUST AND USE EBAY????

Because it is the sellers fault NOT fleebay's.  

by: BB2

I was one of those sellers who continued to have issues. It took multiple attempts to add a simple tracking number to a listing. That was around noon Central today, 3 hours after the situation was resolved. I kept getting the same "Page Not Responding" error message displayed on the blog.

by: angryllama

Embrace Outages as the Savings Opportunity they truly are.  Start placing EARLY bids on interesting items at 1/3rd what you are truly Willing to Pay.  90 percent of the time you'll be outbid .. no harm no foul .. but the other 10 percent you just might be Lucky Enough for there to be another outage and... voila you get the full series of all 7 seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation for $47 with free shipping.  Don't laugh... it happened last month.  Very Next Day after they arrived I sold 2 of those 7 for more than I paid for all of them. Maybe the outages are Purposely Planned Outages and intended to hammer yet another nail in the coffin of Auction Listings? Nobody likes outages, but if your listing is GTC at a fixed price this part of the PAIN would be no big deal.

by: Ed Gadfly

Is this incompetence or the establishment of an alibi?

System crashes: Uhh, we don't know.

System crashes again: Oh, sorry we'll get back to you.

Third time: Stay tuned for details.

... Seventh time: it's better, it wasn't that bad, don't call is, we will email you.

THE LAST TIME: Oh, real sorry but eBay and PayPal here "hacked" and all your money is gone.

Sorry, PayPal is NOT A BANK, so your money is not insured or protected by the US Government. If you have a problem, take it up with our arbiter, you signed away your court rights.

So sorry, WE would never steal YOUR money. We will get right on it, and if we find the money, we might tell you which "innocent until proven guilty" party you can try to proscecute.

NAW, this is far fetched and will NEVER happen.

Things will be better for Cyber Monday. Isn't is keen that eBay is green by reducing the air conditioning for their server farms!

Less calories, tastes great,
less calories, tastes great.
Just a venue, Best there is,
Just a venue, best there is...

Ah, brainwashing!

by: tonali

eBay needs to start "owning" some of the consequences here with a performance guarantee. a 5% fee rebate for the month for ALL sellers for an outage of more than 30 minutes would be a good starting point.

It's all very well to say that "affected sellers" will be contacted - but this affects everyone. Lost confidence, lost continuity. You can't even assess the missed bidding opportunities on auctions.

Bottom line is - if ebay can't deliver a consistent service they shouldn't be charging the fees they are.

by: Orwellwasright

It is unfair to condemn ebay.

  It is the bizzare assumption that just because ebay makes BILLIONS of Dollars a Year essentially for doing nothing more then maintaining a platform, that the platform be somehow reliable or stable.

 As this point the remaing dumbells (myself included) who still cling to this vicous dying pig  must enjoy the abuse and ineptitude we endure.

 Ebay cannot afford to take the attentions of their programming staff away from devising ever more puntative methodoligies for eliminitaing the morons who refuse to jump ship and reassign them to actually stabilising the site, any more then could actually , after 15 years, devise a actual fraud prevention and resolution center.

 The beauty is that the more they tinker with the site in furtherance of their war on the sellers , the more unstable the site becomes, and the more sellers flee from their servitude voluntairily

HEY ! just figured it out!!!!

Its a Win Win for ebay!!

by: Rexford

Sales on eBay are about the same during the outage as they are when there isn't an outage.  LOL

Hoping a Lady will chime in to tell us what a great selling platform eBay is.  I really need some hope.

by: ebay refugee camp

At some point ebay needs to have a board meeting and clean house.
This should be unacceptable in anyone's eyes.
The outages,glitches that are constant, bad policies and the assault on sellers.
Sales are way way down.
What advertising?

by: charcorvet

keep changing your passwords folks, every week not, not every 3 mos or whatever is the currently recommended time frame. Because REALLY?? who here doesn't think this is a continuation of the Big Hack last year??

by: Rexford

ebayrefugeecamp, the Board is as bad as the C-level management.  The whole Board needs to be replaced as well as the C-level management.

And I agree with you re: the advertising.  Ineffective.

I think the biggest problem is that eBay search is broken.  Is it just me who notices that the best chance of selling an item is if it is newly listed, and once the newness wears off it falls into a black hole?

If search were working properly, long standing items would likely sell at the same rate as newly listed items and that just does not happen.

by: RCL

eBay's representation that they will contact the affected sellers directly means that the phone reps will take down info. I am very sure only the squeaky wheels will get the grease. I don't think they have a way of knowing which servers/customers were affected until we tell them..

by: LDS Brother

REXFORD said: "Sales on eBay are about the same during the outage as they are when there isn't an outage.  LOL"

Yeah, I was wondering what hack ????? No to slow sales on my end, still making my big $85 a week Gross net Profit this close to Christmas

Can't wait till AFTER Christmas, January maybe I can make $25 a week OH and by Spring and Summer with the NEW eBay coming, based on the selling peak season for me thus far, making $85 a week, when I used to make $35,000 a year plus ( All time record was $6,000 Gross Net Profit in December Alone ) I expect based on this trend, and the fact that eBay is DEAD, Buyers and Sellers don't trust it. se;;ers are buyers and leaving, I should make $8.50 a week

Well my plan is in motion, I am on my way out of eBay, might take a while yet, buy I have woken up and am making plan B as this site is a DAMN Joke, HOUSE OF HORRORS !

And I did have many buyers message me asking why they could not bid on my items, when I NEVER have that, I had a drove of them all at once !

Thanks again eBay for NOTHING !

Remember Devin, all hacks, no sales, no exposure, bidders unable to bid aside, you NEED TO RAISE THE FVF Fee to at least 12 to 15% for all you do for us !

GO TO HELL EBAY !!!!!!!

by: JQ

"eBay needs to start "owning" some of the consequences here with a performance guarantee. a 5% fee rebate for the month for ALL sellers for an outage of more than 30 minutes would be a good starting point."

This exactly echoes my own thoughts. Even fixed price sellers are badly effected by these outages. On days with outages which last a few hours my sales tend to drop to about 50% of my normal for that day. Even though I almost never use auction format any longer I am sure these outages have cost me at least 5% of my monthly fees, probably closer to double that amount.

by: Eric Saeger

Rexford sez:
"Is it just me who notices that the best chance of selling an item is if it is newly listed, and once the newness wears off it falls into a black hole?"

Not at all.  Cassini prefers newest-listed, which is a complete 360 from the old system, which was basically ending-soonest with a side of price-point.  Cassini had a slow rollout, but when it suddenly took over, our sales were cut in half and still haven't recovered.  

I recently got into it with a guy on the Seller board who insists Cassini focuses on price-point.  It's quite obvious Cassini fixates on newest listed.  Anyone remember the rollout, when eBay mouthpieces were saying "Cassini likes new, new, new!" which I took to mean "new items in sealed packaging."  
It's BS that no one ever spelled it out for sellers. In an age of open-source, these jerks can't even give us a hint about how to bump up our hits?  What a bunch of jerks!

Meantime I don't believe Donahoe is bright enough to have thought of it as a money-grab way of getting sellers to shell out extra fee money for constant end-and-relists.  I think he just wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the main gear of eBay search as an experiment.  What a complete nitwit that man is.

Someone else on the board talked about the eBay servers bending under the weight of way the hell too many listings.  I think that's true too.  I think they're using cheap methods of striping multiple servers (I swear, some listings are sitting on old beat-up XP boxes or something) instead of shelling out for a couple-three mainframes that could handle it.  

I saw something on Glassdoor where one eBay employee was complaining about "outdated hardware," which would explain it.

Either way, there's massive theft of service going on, no question about it.

11 Main looks promising.  I've sold 3 out of 13 listings so far (I refuse to go all-out like I did with Bonanza).  
But the big news is that one of our 11 Main items came up first in the right-side column of "Shop on Google" on a Google search.  THAT is cool.