UPDATED: eBay Restores Search Functionality

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FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Saturday, November 21st, 2009

UPDATED: eBay Restores Search Functionality

First of all, my personal apologies that I’m only just getting something up now. Inexcusable and I assure you it won’t happen again. This official statement was made by eBay Inc. this evening:

SAN JOSE — Saturday, Nov 21, 7 p.m. PST — eBay expects full search functionality to be restored to eBay.com on Sunday after a technical issue today resulted in searches returning either limited or no results throughout the day today. The identified technical issue has been fixed and is being implemented across the site.

The unanticipated technical issue resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago. The company said the technical issue, once identified, was easily fixed.

I’ll obviously update this post as I learn more.

-RBH

UPDATED

***Full search functionality expected to be restored to eBay.com on Sunday, Nov. 22 – Lorrie Norrington, President, eBay Marketplaces ***

We are really sorry about the technical issue that resulted in searches returning either limited or no results throughout the day on Saturday, Nov. 21. We know this search issue may have disrupted your business. Our No. 1 priority has been to identify and fix the issue as quickly as possible, and restore full search functionality. Our teams are working around the clock to do that. Search functionality is returning to eBay.com throughout Saturday evening, PST, and we expect full search functionality to be restored Sunday.

We know this is a really busy time for sellers as you are ramping up your businesses for the holiday season, and we regret any potential impact that this technical issue may have had. Please accept our sincere thanks for your patience as we work around the clock on your behalf to restore search functionality. We will continue to keep you informed of site performance. Our immediate priority is to resolve this issue. Once that is achieved, rest assured that we will assess the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately. In the meantime, we will be issuing full fee credits for affected listings.

UPDATED 2pm PT 11/22/09
The following statement was issued by eBay at 2pm PT today:

eBay restores search functionality following disruption due to technical issue

SAN JOSE — Sunday, Nov 22, 2:00 p.m. PST — eBay restored search functionality to eBay.com overnight Saturday after a technical issue resulted in searches returning either limited or no results throughout the day. The unanticipated technical issue resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago. The company said the technical issue, once identified, was easily fixed and was implemented across the site’s servers throughout Saturday afternoon and evening.

Also, Lorrie Norrington, President of eBay Marketplaces, made the following statement on the eBay Announcement Board:

***Search functionality restored to eBay.com – Lorrie Norrington, President, eBay ***

We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels today. As part of our effort to restore critical search functionality as quickly as possible for sellers and for buyers, we have kept some secondary search features temporarily offline. This includes refining search by certain item specifics, such as color or clothing size, and having Store Inventory Format results included in the main search results. We expect to bring these features online today as part of a phased approach to restore full functionality.

We encourage you to keep checking the System Announcement board located in the right side on eBay’s Announcement board for the latest updates on these secondary features.

We know this is a really busy time for sellers ramping up for the holiday season. We’re sorry that this technical issue occurred, causing search to return limited or no results throughout the day Saturday, and we regret any potential impact to your business. Our teams worked around the clock to restore functionality as quickly as possible. Please accept our sincere apologies, and thanks for your patience as we resolved this issue.

Our first priority has been to fully restore search functionality. We will now be assessing the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately. In the meantime, we will be issuing full fee credits automatically for affected listings.

UPDATED 7:00pm PT 11/23/09
The following letter from Lorrie Norrington was posted to the eBay Announcement Board earlier this evening:

On Saturday we fixed a software issue that resulted in a disruption to our site. Because this was an isolated incident and not systemic, we were able to correct the problem and resume normal operations. By Sunday, the site was performing well in stress tests, handling increased activity levels throughout the day.

While we’re confident that we remedied the software problem and that it won’t reoccur, we deeply regret the impact it had on the eBay community. To minimize the impact, we’re working to ensure that sellers and buyers whose transactions were affected by the disruptions will be made as whole as possible. This includes listing fee refunds and protection against negative or neutral buyer feedback as well as detailed seller ratings (DSRs) lower than 5 stars for impacted sellers, and coupons for buyers of items that were impacted by the disruption.

To the eBay community, you have our most sincere apologies for the disruption and inconvenience caused by the software problem … and our commitment to continuing to provide the best marketplace for sellers and the best deals for buyers.

Sincerely,
Lorrie Norrington
President, eBay
More

Thomas Lynch / November 21st, 2009 at 8:36 pm

I hope this is in regards to narrowing the searches, or refine searches. I can usually get a particular search down to under 50 items not 1900. Hope it is resolved soon, thanks

Joey / November 21st, 2009 at 8:47 pm

I had a one day auction eneding today, no one was obviosly able to bid on it because they couldnt search for it. Will i get a credit for this?

sue thompson / November 21st, 2009 at 8:52 pm

eBay should credit all sellers with active listings during this time. these issues have cost sellers many bids and sales. once again eBay is screwing sellers.

Larry Phillips / November 21st, 2009 at 8:55 pm

There is also a significant store problem. Hope that’s not being minimized. I have over 9,600 items in my store. Right now, at 10:50 pm Eastern time, only 3,882 are showing in the store. That means 60% of my items are not showing up in my store. I’m hearing on a variety of discussion boards that this is typical of sellers with eBay stores.

So the problem is bigger than search, and I hope this will also be resolved.

Kim D. / November 21st, 2009 at 9:03 pm

Only 66% of my listings are showing up. “My Ebay” shows all the listings, but when you search by my seller id, or by the type of item, 1/3 don’t show up. So, it doesn’t sound like it is fixed yet . . .

DANIEL / November 21st, 2009 at 9:14 pm

EBAY SHOULD CREDIT SELLERS FOR THIS!!!!

Julie / November 21st, 2009 at 9:24 pm

Not Fixed.
After 12 hours of outage today, we now have:

1) My store variously shows 0-80 items, when I have many times that.

2) I cannot find any of my items in search. Searches are returning far fewer results than usual.

Still. Not. Fixed. This is abysmal, & claiming it is fixed is a bit insulting to those of use who have anxiously watched a worthless day slide by with no sales.

Amber / November 21st, 2009 at 9:28 pm

Richard, you shouldn’t apologize. You are not the entire eBay corp. Surely SOMEONE at the company could have stepped in and done SOMETHING during the entire day this has been going on. I assume there is a communications team there at eBay?

As for the PR, it seems to me that reading between the lines means that the Diamond powersellers who pay zero insertion fees and negotiated FVF are the ones who caused this failure. Is that true?

Russ / November 21st, 2009 at 9:29 pm

Man, what we paying ebay these listing fees for ?

Don’t they have redundant servers?

Thanks for taking my money and giving NOTHING in return ebay.

Gary / November 21st, 2009 at 9:44 pm

We had over 100 items ending today on live auctions. Out of 100 items only the ones that had gotten hit prior to disruption was all that I sold. And that was a real big disappointment. This would had been another great day and really ruins a big week in sales.

gbayemporium / November 21st, 2009 at 10:17 pm

So they’re blaming the sellers for listing too many items. Well eBay, the blame boomerangs right back onto you. YOU wanted these giant outlet type sellers to list all their stuff on eBay, and look what it’s done!

Seeing as they don’t pay insertion fees and apparently even get to negotiate their FVF’s, it doesn’t really hurt them much, does it?

And yet, one has to wonder about the truth of this story. If it’s true, it basically tells us that eBay had no clue that these sellers would be listing large quantities of items, and hadn’t done a single thing to make sure the infrastructure could handle it….

What does that say about eBay management?

Fire John Donahoe. As far as I’m concerned someone has to fall on their sword for this, and he’s the obvious choice.

Then fire whoever decided it was a good idea to make the listing visibility change on the 16th. OBVIOUSLY this has contributed to the problem. eBay promised no changes in peak times, and look what happens when they break that promise.
Not only was the rollout a farce, with adult only listings showing up on regular listings, but it’s undoubtedly had a lot to do with the problems.

Can’t wait to see the stock prices Monday.

gbayemporium / November 21st, 2009 at 10:22 pm

And actually, Richard does owe all sellers an apology.

It’s typical of eBay that executives, managers, supervisors, etc etc, tend to get weekends off, so that when an issue comes up like this, there’s really isn’t anyone around to do anything about it.

It’s a 24/7 site, so there should be equal coverage at all times. That would make sense, right? Right?

Oh wait, yeah, in the Donahoe era, if it makes sense you don’t do it.

I can’t wait for the DonaWHO? era.

Eric / November 21st, 2009 at 10:27 pm

Stock should plunge 20$ on Monday and CEO should step down.
Not only due to bad management of tech team but also silly idea of bestmatch. nonsense changes in the past 2 years.
We make more sales in ebay these year but we still think they do very bad job to general seller and buyers

Sandy / November 21st, 2009 at 10:40 pm

ebay should be embarrassed to blame this on the sellers. ebay has been the one to encourage sellers to “ramp up” for the holidays. And for it to take this lone to work it out. What are your IT people doing? It is almost 11 PM mountain time and still not working.

Shelley_rae / November 21st, 2009 at 10:41 pm

Just upset and frustrated Richard over the LACK of communication eBay has given out about this! This is a total epic FAIL.
It should be OUT there on the HOMEPAGE and NOT hidden on the system announcement page.

Buyers, especially novice buyers need to see this outage report! They aren’t going to look on the systems page!

And the “work around” eBay gave is pure XXX and how are novice buyers going to know to do this!

xcergy / November 21st, 2009 at 10:42 pm

Richard, it’s not your fault. eBay probably told you not to post about this until after the fact. Communication with Buyers/Seller should mean everything to a large company like eBay, but sadly, no announcement of a fix has been posted (12:30 EST 11/22) on the system announcement board, and was NEVER posted in the Announcements section of a User’s My eBay page. Blogs are NOT the place to make official announcements or policy statements, yet eBay seems to feel this is the norm.
Apology from eBay? Sadly, that will not repair the damage done, or make up for monetary losses sellers faced (i.e $200 item sold @ $.99 opening bid) Refunding listing fees will not cover those losses.

For a company that demands perfection from it’s sellers (TRS program) eBay does a horrible job of leading by example. If I as a seller offered the same service that eBay offers to the community, I would have been NARU long ago.

Now it is eBay’s turn to make up for losses they caused. We need action, not apologies.

Cliff Aliperti / November 21st, 2009 at 10:43 pm

Richard,

Thanks for posting on this and inviting us over from John’s show to post about it.

I understand outages happen, and assuming we’re back to normal tomorrow I can deal with that.

My concern is the buyer’s perspective.

I really believe this announcement should be on the eBay HOME PAGE alerting buyers that they may encounter problems–not hidden on the System Announcements boards that casual eBayers don’t even know about, or worse, discovered through outside sources such as Google or Twitter.

I’m ALWAYS on eBay, I know if there’s a problem. But my buyers might not even realize the site is experiencing problems, they just might think there’s nothing to buy, leave and not come back.

Thanks again, Cliff

Shelley_rae / November 21st, 2009 at 10:44 pm

LACK of communication eBay has given out about this! This is a total epic FAIL.
It should be OUT there on the HOMEPAGE and NOT hidden on the system announcement page.

Buyers, especially novice buyers need to see this outage report! They aren’t going to look on the systems page!

And the “work around” eBay gave is pure b.s. and how are novice buyers going to know to do this!

Larry Phillips / November 21st, 2009 at 10:44 pm

RBH – One more comment for your Execs – Your technical people can’t always see all aspects of an issue. There needs to be an ONGOING two-way dialog between your technical people, and the buying and selling community, where you can keep us updated, and we can tell you how we’re impacted.

Puppylovejewelry / November 21st, 2009 at 10:57 pm

The way that ebay has treated me and others today is insulting, unethical and arrogant. HOW DARE YOU lie on your customer service line and tell numerous people early in the day that this is a normal scheduled maintenance period? HOW DARE YOU minimize the complete functional outage of your entire site today by calling it a “search engine glitch”. NO ONE COULD SEE MY STORE AT ALL. no one could buy or sell anything for hours. Your complete dishonesty and lack of integrity is going to cost you dearly…you have handled this in the poorest possible manner and we will continue to publicize your unethical behavior!

Karen / November 21st, 2009 at 11:31 pm

Dear eBay Management,

We are so frustrated regarding the glitch with search! We lost a considerable amount of money today and we lost goodwill with customers as well. We had also planned on listing 200 new auctions and fixed price listings but once we realized that our No Reserve auctions closing today weren’t being seen and we were getting complaints from potential buyers, we nixed that plan until we could be try and figure out what was going on.

We had a number of auctions close today that we started at .99 with no reserve a week ago. These items were up to $160 in retail value. The items closed between $5.84 and about $42.00.

We had NO option to try and CLOSE the listings since there was less than 12 hours in the listing and they were no reserve items. To try and minimize losses, I tried cancelling bids on one item and writing to all the bidders but people kept rebidding and as such our $119.95 item closed at under $6.00. Naturally the bidder (whose bid I had previously cancelled but decided to rebid anyway) paid immediately. I refunded his/her money, sent 3 very nice emails and kindly requested cancellation explaining the systemwide outage, an article on Auctionbytes saying that ebay has been aware of this since early Saturday a.m. and appealing to his/her common sense judgement. (We have over 20,000 overall ratings with 100% positive feedback. He/she has over 4000 with 100% positive feedback.) Even with all this the bidder refused the cancellation via ebay and I fear he/she will dock our DSR scores and possibly our feedback too.

So now on top of the losses of revenue, the confused or ticked off customers, the lack of search exposure for hundreds of listings on sale, the dozens of emails from buyers asking what happened to our listings, we will have to deal with buyers refusing to accept cancellations and very likely docking our DSR scores thus bringing ebay more revenue when we drop out of the Top Rated Seller program.

Well we do have about a dozen people really happy with us. They got new items for 10 – 20% of cost. We’re petrified to even consider asking them to cancel because we can’t afford low DSR scores to drop us in ranking. What will ebay do about this to prevent this kind of retaliation? How will they reimburse for No Reserve auctions that got little to no exposure in their last 12 hours? Specifically?

And why, why, WHY didn’t ebay just buckle down and extend the listings 24 hours as indicated in their outage policy? OR..why couldn’t they freeze the listings or allow sellers the option to cancel them before close? It could have saved us and other sellers so much time, money and problems. It was the respectful, ethical thing to do. Please let us know an answer to this.

We have been customers over 11 years and have given ebay thousands of dollars in revenue each year. We are proud of our PowerSeller Status, our Top Rated Seller Status, our 100% feedback with over 20K overall transactions and our DSRS that are normally 4.9 and above. We are incredibly fearful that our ratings, income and standing with ebay will drop because of all of today’s problems. If our rating drops, our revenue drops, our status in
search drops and it hits our pocketbook in a big way. This is our family business and it solely supports us and our two kids. We work from home because our kids both have special needs and ebay is a perfect way for us to earn a living while taking care of them as well. We simply cannot afford for ebay to not take accountability with our customers for this outage.

We are posting here because we want others to see it. Unfortunately when we email ebay we tend to get canned impersonal responses that show neither interest in our situation or a possible resolution.

We would truly appreciate a personal response from anyone at ebay who has the authority to assist with a resolution. We’re happy to give our username to ebay management. Thank you.

Joey / November 21st, 2009 at 11:32 pm

Ebay is just a corporation that is getting to big and cant be controlled and handled anymore!

Jeffrey Bernstein / November 21st, 2009 at 11:38 pm

Seems like it’s time for a change in management….not going to well the past couple of years……

CEL / November 22nd, 2009 at 1:59 am

It has been unacceptable that eBay tech announcement is always too late to inform us and it rushed to announce everything has been fixed.

A tell-tell sign of your system problem has been started about a week ago. Yet, no one paid any attention when I reported each time. They want me clear my cache.

eBay finally shot at own foot today and you have only one solution to recover the tarnished reputation you have built for the past years.

Change the management, stop the nonsense DSR and BM search. Redirect your investment on new improvements that actually serve the eBay users.

Bring back Old Ebay and make a TV ad saying “WE ARE BACK… OLD EBAY AS YOU HAVE LOVED FOR YEARS!” That would be the best commercial you will ever make.

Amber / November 22nd, 2009 at 8:02 am

I hate to say it, Richard, but to have Lorrie post a response to this on the System Announcement Board INSTEAD of the main announcement board is a huge slap in the face.

System Announcements aren’t archived and don’t show in most spots on the site that scroll the latest ‘news’.

Trying to hide this on an announcement board that gets deleted every other day is so not cool.

Michael / November 22nd, 2009 at 8:08 am

What a mess! None of my store listings are showing up in searches. My mother always said never put your eggs in one basket. Fees are high enough. We need compensation for this weekend.

Bobby / November 22nd, 2009 at 11:13 am

Richard,
I know you personally screen all comments for appropriate content, so I give you great credit for allowing the postings of all your readers’ critical comments about eBay’s failure to properly handle the system’s search failure. AND for showing their comments on the general failure of the JD era and its policies.
Thank you.

Tommy Day / November 22nd, 2009 at 12:08 pm

Rather than text, I put my thoughts into a youtube video… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjU4TVLAyGk

Beth Cherkowsky / November 22nd, 2009 at 1:01 pm

eBay’s Current Rating ? FAIL on ITEM AS DESCRIBED. FAIL ON COMMUNICATION

1. It’s unacceptable that something reported at 8:30 AM (I did that) was not acknowledged until 2:30 PM – 3 PM EDT. and not fixed yet? (cause the systems board isnot updated so I doubt it’s fixed. eBay would have bragged on that.

2. It’s TOTALLY unacceptable to blame sellers, I don’t care if it was the Diamonds or me. YOUR SYSTEM!! Your job to keep it running. You want me to run it?? You pay me. I’ll plan better than whoever was in charge.

3. How could you not plan for a surge at this time of the year? How stupid is that??? (pretty blinkin’ stupid) For 14 years there’s been a surge in listings numbers/volume at this time of year.

Well there won’t be next year so you don’t have to plan that far ahead. Start planning where you’ll work then.

HERE IS A HINT!!! The surge will last til January when we all bail again because 1) you raise fees to cover the new Dell Laptop you’re running this system on and 2) we all finally decide to do our own websites and have some sort of professional alliance.

APOLOGIES ARE APPROPRIATE HERE ON BEHALF OF JD AND Lorrie. Not you. And one of the customer service people have to be allowed to monitor Twitter on weekends.
OH WAIT?! that’s not an ebay service, it’s probably blocked on ebay’s server.

I’m sorry ebay management but this brings back long dormant memories of 1997/98. Please submit your resignations now. I believe Meg needs campaign staff.
Beth
@antiquedaze

Amber / November 22nd, 2009 at 1:11 pm

Karen,

If eBay does not allow you to cancel those auctions that people were unable to bid on without reprisals, then they are setting themselves up for some serious legal action.

They need to proactively protect sellers like you.

This was a HARD OUTAGE that they are trying to spin as a soft outage. During hard outages, listings are supposed to be extended. They were not. That is inexcusable.

This was not just a title search failure. It was a failure of browse as well. The ONLY way for about 12 hrs to find any item on eBay was through a watched item list.

That, to me, means that buyers were unable to bid which = a HARD OUTAGE. They can weasel word this however they choose, but I would refuse to sell anything that went for below cost yesterday.

jeff hinds / November 22nd, 2009 at 2:13 pm

I was treated incredibly rudely by ‘customer service’ when I called on the phone AND by chat help. Both disconnected me. The girl on live chat told me if I copy the chat and post it in an ebay forum It would be removed and I would be ‘disciplined’ and possibly shut down–also that I should not talk to any media.

Amber / November 22nd, 2009 at 3:34 pm

Thank you for the update, Richard.

Unfortunately, there are several FALSE statements in that release.

Search results was not the only thing affected. Browse was inaccessible as well. Results weren’t “limited” they were non existent. There was NO way to find items on eBay except through watched item lists.

This wasn’t a search “glitch” and I really hope they stop trying to spin it as such. It was a failure of the entire infrastructure that allows items to be found. NOT JUST SEARCH.

Karen Perry / November 22nd, 2009 at 10:52 pm

I have never sold on ebay but followed blogs in the Technical Problems section last night with great interest. When it became obvious that even links were disabled and that only items tagged in “Watching” (My Ebay) were retrievable on search attemts I informed 2 of the sellers I was dealing with of the outage. They were IRATE , to say the least, and one seller will now be listing on Craigslist.As a novice, I am struck by the cavalier attitude of customer service to complaints (“clean your cookies” or “clean your cache”) Their offered solutions are invariably 2 days late and ineffective. The lack of forthright communication may also cost you BUYERS as well as sellers. I do not know what percentage of buyers are casual and might not know how to circumvent the “400 Bad Request” which EVEN NOW comes up when I click on the Announcement text at the upper right corner of the page. This is NOT a user friendly site and now I fear your status is irreversibly tarnished if you do not treat this as the hard outage that the sellers deserve! Ebay- DO THE RIGHT THING!!! Dakini313@aol.com

Ivan Ivanovich / November 22nd, 2009 at 11:41 pm

As of this moment I am still not able to access any ebay site anywhere in the world. ebay.com, ebay.it, ebay.de, ebay.co.uk, ebay.au etc. neither browser access nor specialty progs can log in. I can’t access paypal either. All I ever get is page cannot be shown in my browser (tried with ie, firefox and opera on 3 different machines). I’m located in sweden.

grossesse / November 23rd, 2009 at 5:00 am

It is true that you can get a search down till 50 items and not more than that. E bay must definitely credit sellers for this. I came to here that a person payment was accepted but he didn’t received anything. Ultimately E-bay should look out on the server.

Marline / November 23rd, 2009 at 6:02 am

I personaly want to thank you Richard. For me as a buyer I found this web site a great place to go for I respect the sellers as well as the rest of the staff that keeps ebay going. I havent found a web site yet that didn’t have a problem at times. I know this web site is big and it’s the one web site that I can find any thing that I long for in the past.

Linda / November 23rd, 2009 at 6:56 am

I have never posted, but now am at my witts end with eBay.

First, the outage…NOW on 11/22 they send a message saying 50% auction insertion fees for 11/23-11/25. Great, so I decide to wait and list more items the next day. While online this morning 11/23, I see a message pop up with the following…
“A few of you may recently have received a note from eBay in your My Messages inbox with the subject line: “50% OFF Auction-style Insertion Fees–Nov 23-25.” Unfortunately, this message was sent in error: There was a promotion planned for this coming week that was cancelled. There are currently no plans for a 50% off Insertion Fee Promotion on the dates mentioned in the prior email. Please note that any listings created during these dates will be subject to normal Insertion Fees.”

This it totally BOGUS!!! Sorry eBay, but You posted it…YOU must honor it…it was YOUR mistake!!! WHO makes these decisions! VERY unprofessional!!

Gosh, I now understand all the complaints, from both sellers and buyers, that I have heard about eBay!!

permacrisis / November 23rd, 2009 at 7:15 pm

Perhaps someone handed Vladuz a Blackberry thru the bars of his prison cell!

Consignment Pal Resale Directory / November 23rd, 2009 at 10:12 pm

Thanks Richard.

From Cliff above: “I really believe this announcement should be on the eBay HOME PAGE alerting buyers that they may encounter problems…”. This should have been done Sat. and Sun. at the very least. Was it?

Can an eBay announcement about the outage be put on the PayPal home page so buyers can see it when they go to pay?

Is there a way for eBay to email all buyers who won during the outage and explain that many sellers will not be able to sell at the very low prices achieved due to the outage?

It’s better if eBay takes the wrap for this rather than the eBay sellers.

Linda

CC / November 24th, 2009 at 8:05 am

IMHO Ebay handled the entire thing badly. And still is.
And as of Monday night Ebay was still having search issues and other problems that were messing up auctions. I’ll take a guess and predict the problems will linger throughout the week until after Thanksgiving while Ebay continues to do damage control and attempts to keep the maximum amount of profits coming in at the sellers expense. That will be par for the course.

I’ll be blunt…… I believe Ebay was and is only worried about their profits at the expense of it’s sellers.

They could have alerted all concerned easily to the problems but instead chose to still accept new auctions even though the Ebay system was crippled and it was costing the sellers sales and profits.

I THINK ebay just decided to oil the wheels that squeaked and those that were unaware would just totally lose out. In this manner Ebay could still harvest some profits while they attempt to fix the issues.

I and others I know have canceled our auctions and will not start new auctions UNTIL we are 100% positive the search feature is completely working.

COME ON EBAY…… why not do something NEW like BE HONEST and ACT LIKE YOU CARE about the sellers who bring you all the $$$ you make.

What really needs to happen is for Ebay to have REAL COMPETITION. We need a couple more real E-Commerce sights and the lack of an Ebay monopoly will fix many of Ebays greed driven practices quickly.

Brenda / November 24th, 2009 at 9:17 am

Quite frankly, Richard, I’m disgusted at the way this outage was handled. And very glad I don’t sell here any more. A “listing surge”? Right. Like we can’t access Medved and see the truth of that ourselves. So now it’s a “software problem”? That’s probably a little closer to the truth. The cross-merchandising that was enacted on the 16th with 24 hours notice, despite the fact that sellers were promised that eBay would only enact changes twice a year and with 60 days notice, is widely believed to have brought the tottery Jenga game that is the site crashing down.

Do the executives of this company not understand that every time they lie, spin and break promises they only make it harder for anyone to believe anything they say? You cannot work with a business partner you can’t trust.

And the delayed response to this emergency is truly pitiful. There are no IT people available on weekends in a company of this size? There was no backup available? You expect this sort of thing from someone running a website out of their den, not from a publicly traded company.

The gripes are not directed at you, BTW. I wouldn’t have your job for the world.

Ed Tomchin / November 24th, 2009 at 6:29 pm

Why should I post anything. I posted the other day about the eBay search failure and my post was removed. Pah!!

Dalia / November 25th, 2009 at 2:30 pm

I noticed the problem early morning, and tought it was my browsers, I spent hours trying to figure it out, went to the announcement sections on ebay and found noting about the outage!.. I later find out that the problems was on your side, I sell on ebay, and this has caused valuable display time for my items!.

DO YOU THINK THAT A 10% COUPON, IS ENOUGH TO COVER FOR OUR LOST AUCTIONS,!! I WILL SEARCH FOR A NEW SELLING PORTAL, SINCE YOU EBAY CHARGE TOO MANY FEES, ALONG WITH PAYPAL. IM TIRED OF ALL YOUR FEES!

Ann / November 26th, 2009 at 11:20 pm

I lost hundreds due to the outage. So far eBay has done nothing to compensate me. I see a world wide lawsuit here. eBay should have stood behind their own policy and backed the clock up on items ending during the outage by 24 hours. Then i get an email saying 50% off when there wasn’t. Another email went out retracting the 1st email. I’m currently surfing the internet for other auction sites eBay does not own. This time eBay really screwed up.

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