eBay Sellers Hit By Another Traffic Reporting Glitch As Status Page Says All Is Well
eBay sellers are once again reporting problems with traffic reports and item view counts shown in Seller Hub, flooding the eBay community forum with complaints as eBay system status page continues to claim all is well.
Affected sellers say when trying to view traffic reports, they are receiving an error message saying "we encountered an unexpected issue loading some of your performance data. Try refreshing this page to resolve" - but refreshing does not do anything to fix the issue.
barrys_chainsaw_shop
I was recently getting consistent sales, 4 - 12 packages a day and today have nothing. In addition, I have to load my seller page 4 - 6 times before it finally shows the information. When it doesn't load properly, I get the message in the title. What the heck is going on?
tarotfindsandmore
My views in Active Listings have all been reset to zero, there are errors all over my seller hub Overview page, sales aren't showing up on Marketing page, traffic isn't showing in Performance, and "Something went wrong" messages are displaying on help pages. How many different ways can one site be screwed up??
A seller who contacted support was told there were no problems, despite the fact that many users are currently experiencing this exact issue.
rayneedsthespace
Since yesterday, all of my listings are showing 0 views. I have over 200 active listings, and they all had views before. Now every listing shows 0 views, although a few still show 1–2 watchers.
At the same time, I usually average about one sale a day, but I haven't had a single sale since last Saturday. No offers either, which is very unusual.
I called eBay, and they said my account is fine, traffic is normal, and there are no restrictions or issues.
As usual, the eBay System Status page shows no outages or disruptions even as widespread reports of technical problems can be found across social media and the company's own community forum.
But Downdetector tells a different story with spikes in reports of problems on eBay starting yesterday evening.
One comment on Downdetector pointed out that problems with traffic reporting may impact determinations in the selling process.
eBay is screwed up from sellers perspective at the least. View counters aren’t working and website and the app will not display any sales analytics.
I’m sure they’ll offer sellers a discount for this, right? Yeah, okay. It’s not like the analytics are used to make determinations in the selling process or anything. 🙄
Extremely bad look going into the weekend when most sellers have their auctions ending. Do better eBay! You’ve given sellers a legal way out of not only paying you now, but voiding auctions sales - contracts, over this.
Missing view counts and traffic statistic anomalies are unfortunately not an uncommon occurrence on eBay, as recurring issues with these reports seem to crop up every few months.
Liz Morton
Historically, eBay has sought to assuage seller concerns by saying it is only a "display issue" temporarily affecting how data is displayed in Seller Hub but that the data itself is still being collected and retained by eBay to be accurately shown once the "display issue" is corrected.
But many sellers have expressed skepticism, saying they fear these glitches may have an impact on current and future sales since click through rates and view data are used in eBay's Best Match search ranking algorithm.
The recurring issues with traffic reporting are just one of many example of the ongoing problems affecting sellers on eBay.
Back in 2019, eBay and then CEO Devin Wenig faced activist investor pressure from Elliott Management calling for changes at the company, with constant site glitches and technical misexecution called out explicitly as one of the major problems at the company.
7 years later, 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.
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?
And Wenig answered:
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 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."
eBay has not yet acknowledged this most recent recurrence of the traffic reporting and view count glitch or provided a timeline for a fix.
Let us know in the comments below if you are experiencing this issue!
