Are Your eBay Store Listings Disappearing?

by: Snapped

eBay purgatory.  Ghosts in the machine.  Apparitions?  Or aspirations?  Haunted by either, are all.

by: I Must be Crazy

I try to verify my inventory every quarter. I have noticed the same, listings that disappear. It is the reason that I need to review my inventory. There is no way that I have something listed that I do not have since each item is unique; boxed and numbered as they are listed. Very often I will find an item on the shelf, but not on eBay. Dropped listings is a fairly common issue that has been going on for years.

by: BargainzBabylon

This is a really old problem - I find eBay drops my listings after about 60 days, one here, one there.  Every few months I do inventory and find several, at times up to 10 or 12 that need to be relisted.  I think it happens with database indexing.

80 listings is pretty bad, though I've heard of people losing whole categories (not that often, though).  I'm a really small seller.  

by: iheartjacksparrow

I hope I'm remembering this correctly, but I believe there was a story a year or more ago that eBay was intentionally removing listings that they considered "stale."

by: Rexford

What iheartjacksparrow said.  And eBay is THE ONLY venue that does this.

Once again, the prove how much respect they DON"T have for their sellers.

by: Stone Cutter

Worked in Software Engineering for years. If Ebay is intentionally reducing inventory, then the only conclusion that makes sense is that Ebays technology cannot scale for growth. If Ebay built its site on an older technology (which I'm sure is true), then as Ebay grows they need to reduce the intake of data somewhere, or their entire site could slow to a snails crawl, or the entire site could crash.

And this is what I love about Amazon, which was built by Bezos who is a techie.
Amazon now uses a newer technology called "Rust" which computes in nanoseconds and is great for e-commerce websites, while the underlying technologies for both Ebay and Etsy are OUTDATED and slow! Like both Ebay and Etsy, their operations are led by businessmen who have no clue on how to develop a technical e-commerce site, while relying on the technical idiots they meet along the way.

As a seller on Etsy, I've noticed how Etsy is limiting functionality such as their "Update" function that would alert buyers of new items of their favorite shops. There is no reason for Etsy to reduce this great function that generates good money except that their technology can no longer handle large pieces of data that distributes to thousands of buyers.

In my many years in tech, I've found that the best technically run companies have techies as their founders...i.e..Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, etc. Otherwise, it's a crapshoot.  

by: Rexford

Stone Cutter says "If Ebay built its site on an older technology (which I'm sure is true), then as Ebay grows they need to reduce the intake of data somewhere, or their entire site could slow to a snails crawl, or the entire site could crash."

That would be my guess as well.  Are they refusing to spend the money to update?  Would they rather stuff their C-Suite's pockets than spend the money on updates?

I rarely see glitches on the other sites that I sell.   On eBay, glitches are frequent.