eBay Sellers Stymied By Ended Listing Disappearance & Delays

eBay sellers report ongoing technical issue causing delays and disappearance of ended listings, resulting in critical workflow disruption when refreshing stale listings.

The issue has been happening for several days with reports across the US, UK and other community forums and social media indicating it may be a global problem.

When I "end listings" they are not showing up in the "ended listings" tab.

Most of my listings have several of the same item available. Almost daily, I'll end some listings and then "Sell Similar" to put them back up. I'm very careful to not do this with zero quantity listings, because they're gone for good after that. I only do this with listings that have items available for sale.

I did this yesterday with 22 listings. When I went to the "ended listings" tab, there was nothing there. Several hours later I checked, and 8 of them had reappeared in "ended listings." I've had this happen a couple of other times. Is there something I'm doing wrong, or is it a glitch?

This happened to me yesterday, and it is getting close to 24 hours. So far, they have not reappeared. I am not amused since I don't remember exactly how many and/or which ones I ended.

Ended Items Disappeared

I ended a bunch of stale listings and they are gone, not in my ended recently. Anyone else have this happen? Is there a fix?

The glitch may be being compounded by filters that may be applied to the Ended or Unsold Item page in Seller Hub.

If there is currently a delay of 24+ hours before ended listings are being populated on this page, but the end date/time remains accurate to when the seller actually ended the item - those items may not show up if the seller has their filter set to "last 24 hours."

Sellers who are experiencing this issue who are still not seeing their ended listings on this page 24+ hours later should double check and change that filter to a longer timeframe to see if the items are still there, but are just on a much longer than usual delay.

Some sellers are particularly concerned that eBay may be considering ways limit their ability to "end and sell similar" or "end and relist" after confusing messaging at eBay Open said it was a "myth" that the practice is helpful to refresh your listings, not to mention recent design testing which hid option to "sell one like this" from the View Item page.

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eBay sellers are struggling with more undisclosed testing this week as “Sell One Like This” button removed from View Item pages for some users.

Value Added ResourceLiz Morton

While those concerns are understandable, I believe this is much more likely a technical issue due to increase server latency or load balance.

We often see similar issues crop up when live Good Til Cancelled listings roll over at the end of the month - particularly in February when the shorter month means more listings renewing at the same time, which can push reindexing times to 24-48 hours or more.

eBay Listings Disappear In Annual Recurring Glitch

eBay sellers are once again reporting listings set to renew today are instead disappearing in apparent annual recurring February glitch.

Value Added ResourceLiz Morton

In the past, eBay has simply chalked these issues up to "latency", saying it is normal for listings to take 24-48 hours to reindex, and they've given the same answer for other issues as well like, delays in posting listings to social media using the Social Sharing tool.

Many sellers have believed that's just a catch all for anytime eBay's servers get bogged down and struggle to keep up, but what if the delays are sometimes actually intentional?

In some instances, eBay may be simply load-balancing, preferencing fast load time and responsiveness on the buying side of the site at times to the possible detriment to the selling side, especially during heavy traffic or peak load events.

The importance of optimizing for the consumer-buyer experience was laid out in a corporate blog post when they launched a company-wide Speed initiative in 2019, focused on improving performance across experiences on desktop, mobile, and apps and specifically targeting home page, search and item page performance - all importantly geared toward the buyer-facing side of the user experience.

The post explicitly calls out making cuts in certain areas to balance their "need for speed" as well as creating a committee to monitor and oversee application of the "speed budget."

Speed By A Thousand Cuts

In 2019, eBay prioritized a company-wide initiative, aptly called “Speed,” focused on improving the performance of critical eBay flows across all platforms — iOS, Android, and Web. This article explains the journey and outcomes.

eBay Inc.Senthil Padmanabhan

Death by a thousand cuts is a popular figure of speech that refers to a failure that occurs as a result of many small problems. It has a negative connotation to it and is referenced on many occasions when things go wrong, and there is no one primary reason to blame.

We have a similar story at eBay, but this time on a positive note. In 2019, we started working on an initiative called “Speed” to improve the performance of end-user experiences across major consumer channels — iOS, Android, and Web.

Fast forward today, we have made significant improvements to our speed numbers, both globally and across all platforms, but there was no one major contributing factor. It was a culmination of many small enhancements (or “cuts” as we call it) that moved the needle.

It's certainly understandable why eBay would favor the performance of the buyer experience in the constantly changing calculations for how to prioritize resources, but if that is the case they should be more upfront and transparent with sellers about it rather than hiding behind vague 24-48 hour windows when performance slows down.

And as eBay continues to insert AI into the user experience, load-balancing issues may become even more pronounced with sellers bearing the brunt of the speed and performance trade offs.

However, after 3 decades in the business, someone at eBay should have been able to figure out how to avoid these days long latency or load-balancing events - or at the very least figured out how to proactively communicate with sellers about the issue so they don't panic thinking their listings will be lost forever.

Almost 7 years after Elliott Management's infamous activist bid to push for change at the company, it's shocking just how much of Elliott's "Enhancing eBay" plan still rings true today - particularly critiques around glitches constantly plaguing the platform and lack of leadership prioritizing operational and technical excellence.

Ex-CEO Devin Wenig infamously said at eBay Open 2018 that technical glitches are unacceptable and really pissed him off.

eBay has since removed the video they had posted on YouTube of the event, but the interviewer asked:

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 be plagued by technical problems and operational challenges.

Mazen Rawashdeh was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at the time, but somehow managed to escape the wrath of a "pissed off" Wenig and was promoted to Chief Technology Officer, a title he still retains today despite the fact the site continues to experience near daily business impacting "glitches."

Sellers affected by this latest technical snafu can report the problem to eBay by clicking the question mark icon in the lower right of the page in the desktop experience or shaking their phone while using the eBay app.

Stay tuned for updates and let us know in the comments below if your ended eBay listings are delayed or disappearing from Seller Hub!