eBay Social Sharing Scheduler Has Major Delays, Negating Purpose Of Critical Functionality
eBay's social sharing tool is experiencing major scheduling delays and lag time for some sellers, negating the purpose of this critical user function.
Anyone know what has happened to the Social scheduling tool? I can post in real time to my FB and Instagram accounts but if I schedule an item to be shared it just sits in the queue and doesn't get posted.
Another seller chimed in and confirmed the feature was still working for them, but they were experiencing a significant lag between when items were scheduled and when they actually posted.
The last time I scheduled a post there was about a 2 hour lag. I have one scheduled for noon today, I will let you know if it posts...
...The post should have gone up about 15 minutes ago and it is still sitting in "Scheduled". I also have the auto-posting feature turned on and the first 10 listings that I put up 5 hours ago have not been posted yet either.
What time were your posts scheduled for? Maybe we are just experiencing extended lag time?
Both posters also participated in another thread on the issue, which has still not been resolved over a week after originally being reported, despite eBay community staff being tagged in the post to inform them of the issue.
For over a week now my scheduled posts through the eBay Social Media Schedule Ahead program is not working. In another thread one eBay seller reported that theirs are being delayed by as much as 7 hours. I've waited 2 days for some to post and it didn't happen. We can post them manually through the eBay Social Media feature but we can't sit on our PC's for 12 hour stints.
Please resolve this as our business sales have almost tanked without the scheduler.
We have loved this feature and really appreciate eBay offering it to us.
Thank you for efforts on our behalf!
Any update for us when this will be resolved? I am seeing lag times between 11 hrs to more than 24hrs.
I did not have any scheduled posts over the weekend, however, I have auto-posting enabled. None of my new listings have made it to my social media pages since Friday's new listings were posted on Saturday, 23 hours after the items were listed. I am now looking at way over 24 hours of lag time for new listings from Saturday.
eBay introduced scheduling to the Social tool in November, along with an AI-powered caption generator, both of which sellers found very helpful for creating and managing sharing of their listings to their social media pages.
Liz Morton
When it comes to social media marketing, timing is everything - just ask the many marketing agencies touting their in depth research about the best days/times to post on various social media sites for optimum reach and engagement.
This functionality for eBay's social sharing tool is a critical component to help sellers drive traffic to their listings and it's a complete failure if it is not capable of the most basic function of actually posting listings at the scheduled times.
In years past, we've also seen similar "latency" issues cause delays in relisting items when they reach their "good til canceled" roll over time.
Liz Morton
Sellers have also previously experienced similar delays with markdown sales and promotions - another often time-critical functionality that can have a serious impact on sales if it's not working properly.
Interestingly, a now-ex eBay community staff member had confirmed at the time that the markdown manager delays could be caused by a "security issue" that could cause indexing to take longer than usual if eBay was checking to make sure the listings do not violate any policies.
I'll definitely get examples over to our tech teams of excessive delays. When looking into this I didn't see a spike in reports of delays - though the experience of some of the sellers here seems to have changed recently, the indexing process will take different amounts of time for different sellers as this time period may be used for us to manually review the items being listed/marked down.
That isn't to say that there might not be an issue going on with some of these longer delays, just a potential explanation for why some members who never saw delays before are now running into them now (and my not see them again in the future, then may see them again, etc.)...
...the indexing process is in part a time where we can review the listings being published to the site for any security concerns. This includes any policy violations or prohibited items that would need to be removed or otherwise actioned. When a listing price is changed through Markdown Manager, this process would need to occur again to minimize the risk of fraudulent activity on the site.
Factors such as account history, item category, suspected fraud trends for the item itself, etc. can all impact when a closer look is needed. This is generally performed by our investigative teams and subsequently can result in longer indexing times based on volume. This is one of the many ways we work to keep eBay a safe place buy and sell.
Anything under 24 hours would be within the normal expectations, even if this is not something you usually see or not something you saw until recently. Some of the extended time frames reported here for promotions to go live are beyond what is typical and I appreciate you helping bring this to our attention for review!
However, many sellers suspected that was just a generic answer at the time and the real culprit could be eBay's servers struggling to keep up with indexing, especially during peak holiday sale times.
There are myriad examples that could be given to show that changing prices likely does not trigger any such manual review in many cases, but the most obvious one would probably be the ubiquitous car scam listings that proliferate across the site, especially in the UK.
Liz Morton
In this scam, fraudsters usually use compromised accounts to post fake ads for cars, with the intent to trick unsuspecting buyers into contacting them and paying off eBay.
These compromised accounts often show what appears to be "placeholder" listings where the scammers create the listing using a gibberish title, no picture, and low starting price.
The listings are then later edited with the details of the vehicle supposedly for sale and the price is revised as well.
We've observed thousands of similar listings in our investigation of that fraud scheme, as well as many other types of fraud on the platform, and can confidently say eBay is not flagging them for manual review based on revisions in price or any other listing details.
A much more likely explanation is that 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.
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."
Performance improvements are a never-ending journey. The key is to strike the right balance. As noted above, we made significant progress on speed in 2019. But that is not the end of the story. Going forward, we have put a few things in place that will always keep us on the edge when it comes to performance.
- We formed a committee of Speed Champions. This includes the core speed team and performance experts from critical domains across the web, iOS, and Android. The Speed Champions own the budget for their areas and are responsible for monitoring and keeping them within range. They are also involved before starting a major feature development, so performance is considered right from the beginning, instead of it being an afterthought.
- Before every code release, our systems will check the speed metrics against the budget (which is the current baseline, as the budget has been met). This will happen in a synthetic environment as a part of the release pipeline. If the metrics are not within the acceptable range of the budget, the release to production is blocked until the degradation is fixed. This process ensures that we do not introduce any new performance regressions, and the budget is always met.
- The speed budget is not something that is set in stone. Things change over a period of time. To acknowledge this fact, Speed Champions will meet on a quarterly cadence to review the budget and update it as needed. The updates are based on a couple of factors — competitive benchmarks, upcoming critical product features, and the state of global internet connectivity. If an update is due, we will give a heads-up to associated teams to plan for ideas and methods to meet the new budget.
It's certainly understandable why eBay would prioritize the performance of the buyer experience.
However, if that is what's happening here, sellers at least deserve some transparency and honesty about it instead of excuses about security checks that don't hold water or worse, complete silence in the face of legitimate questions and concerns - which is so far what is occurring with this current social sharing lag issue.
Either way, the scheduling functionality of the tool holds very little value if sellers can't depend on their selected schedules actually being followed and eBay owes them some answers.
Are you seeing delays in listings being shared through the eBay Social tool? Let us know in the comments below!
