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I realized lately that weird things were selling that I didn’t think were on sale but ignored it until this week. One day I put several different categories on sale with different amounts of percentages off for each category. I put my Mens and Womens Coats categories on sale for 40% off to clear them out. Later I sold a Florentine wood tray for 40% off! It was in my Collectibles category, which I had NOT put on sale. Next I sold a ring dish for 40% off—also a Collectible! So I called Ebay to figure out what’s the problem. I won’t put you through all the painful details, but when I hung up an hour and fifteen minutes later I had spoken to no less than 7 different people departments, had been “accidentally” disconnected and sent to random different and WRONG departments, explained my problem MANY times to people who insisted my items must be mis-categorized (they are Not), and so forth. The last person I spoke to told me her supervisor would call me back. That was a day and a half ago. No call back. My Ebay store is still as one Rep told me, “really screwed up.” Who the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks do I call now?????? After being shown how to look into the items downloaded into each category’s sale I can see that random items have been dumped into each sale, with price reduction percentages all over the place, and NOT including all of the items in that actual category I was trying to list. For example only 2 of the Mens Coats are included in the Mens Coats sale! I am so tempted to just quit Ebay because there is no way I can fix this. I am getting tired of the constant hassles. I’m not trying to be negative, but I was already wondering if It’s time for me to pursue other things at this time of my life. The apparent method of stumped Ebay reps is to just disconnect you and sent you out into the ebay phone call que when they don’t know how to answer your question about how to fix something.
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Wow! Sounds frustrating and a bit overwhelming.I would offer to call back when you are calm enough and ask to speak directly to a supervisor before even telling the full story. Then just have something else to do while on hold.
What has ebay said about ending all sales that are set up by category and then restarting them and adding in one item at a time?
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Thank you for the kind words. But Low and behold, right after I posted this I actually got a call back from a lovely supervisor who finally comprehended the scope of the problem! After walking her through everything she realized that my sales were each a random jumble of the wrong items, at the wrong percentages, and not even including the items that should be included. Trying to resort things under the correct categories would have been futile. I have her name and the call reference number so I can contact her if she would fail to call me back by Wednesday. Meantime, my store is finally off to the IT Department, which is what I asked from the beginning. Yay! I hope THEY comprehend the problems and FIX IT. If so I may keep up this little store of mine, which is now at 1200 items. PS. I suspect this all has something to do with “broken links”, although I have no idea what that means.
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Good to hear that you received a call back and that the problem is off to be fixed by the right people- the techies. From what I understand about broken links, it means there is an error in the coding in the links not allowing them to function as they are supposed to.
Congrats on 1200 items. That is not an easy thing to accomplish. -
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So today Tanya, the Supervisor, did call me back with an update. She said my store has a coding problem and they are still working on fixing it. I told her that now I am also not receiving any email confirmations when I list a new item. So add that to the list. At least she called back. 😕
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I guarantee you it is not just Linda’s store having the issue because she is not the one writing the coding/files for her store pages.
The coding being referred to includes the numbers, letters, and/or symbol sequences used to write the code based on the programming language being used. Yes, there is going to be similar and different coding based on what is being done. If the coding is written wrong or processed incorrectly it will cause broken links. Incompatibility between sever and browser can also cause a problem. -
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I’m a programmer and I’m horrified at all of the BS technical problems that ebay has. I don’t know who is running the show (head of IT) there but they need to be replaced. Changes should be thoroughly tested before being put into production and it doesn’t seem like ebay bothers to do that.
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Hi Linda,
My categories aren’t currently “jumbled” .. but I have been experimenting with running a variety of 24 hour sales everyday in multiple categories in differing amounts. Two “weird” things have happened this week…
1) I’ve got an entire category of men’s clothing and shoes that is still on sale 19% – and that sale has ended but all the listings remained on sale. (No big deal, really, but it is a bug for sure.)
2) The other day a best offer on a $3.00 item was automatically accepted, and I NEVER GOT THE OFFER. I have no idea how that happened, unless my kids were playing with my phone and accidentally accepted, but I don’t think so… Unfortunately it was a cheap toy and I just shipped it no huge loss, but I do not remember and would not have accepted a $3.00 offer. (Not sure if that is related to a coding error, but mentioning it because I’m still scratching my head on that one….?)While running my daily sales, I noticed the informational note in the markdown manager in the “Review your Sale Event” screen (when you go to schedule the times to start and end the sale…) this note is displayed:
If you have a sale ending today we recommend leaving at least two hours before your next sale starts.This got me thinking… do they KNOW about a coding error/bug where they know the hash or array of your store items are going to get jumbled if you run a bunch of sales ending and starting / overlapping at the same time? Have you been running multiple sales starting and ending while overlapping each other?
Hope you get it sorted out…
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I don’t think I ever ran overlapping sales, but it;s possible. But I definitely noticed sales still happening after the end date, and selling “On Sale” after the sale was over. Was also having things sell that were already sold and gone. Thought I was losing it. As soon as they straighten this out I’m going to ask for any recent defects about those things to be removed.
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All I’m doing is listing right now. I wouldn’t dare mess with existing listings right now. Oh, and I probably did have overlapping listings because it seemed like some listings were never ending, but the problem was already there obviously. My weekly total sales were dismal. I just figure it will get better when it’s all fixed. If it never gets fixed guess I’ll have a big garage sale and move on. God guides in mysterious ways.
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Hey Linda, I will share with you some details about this issue that came from the tech team members over at WonderLister which we use to list, but this issue with Ebay and their Selling Manager is an old one.
I think you know we use WonderLister as a third party app that does all our listing and managing our cross platform selling functions. I have spoken with their Tech team about two years ago as well as the tech team at SixBit which T-Satt uses. They are both very familiar with this issue with Ebay and Ebay knows about it also.
The bottom line is that these app receive the information about Sales, discounts, which items and start and stop times directly from Ebay and updates the software accordingly. The WL tech team told me that they have tried to work with Ebay for years to straighten out the issue about Ebay’s handling of items and categories going on and off sale.
What happens they said, is that when a Sale starts, Ebay makes the changes, reports it back to third party apps, then if some items are on GTC or ends in 30 days, the code Ebay sends back starts to get scrambled. In our case we did a 20% off Sale on about half our store. The sale ran fo a week. When the Sale started, everything was fine and those items were marked down in WonderLister. WL has 2 columns that show side by side. One is the original price, the second is the newest [current price] which is the sale price. Then at the end of the week when the sale had ended, we noticed that those items that were on Sale got relisted without a sale price being active at the Lowered [old sale price]. So, a $10 item that was on Sale for 20% off for $8.00 now was showing as an $8.00 original price [which it was no longer on Sale]. Then about a week later we ran another Sale at 20% off but now Ebay. showed the $8.00 item as the original price, had a red mark down line through it and it was showing at $6.40.
We caught this by observing the two columns side by side. We then stayed in contact with our friends over at WonderLister. They stated that Ebay has known about this for years and they had told WL that the situation was so out of control and scrambled that the only way to fix all of it was to re-write all the code and completely re-do the Sales and Promoted Listing section. Thus we all now see that recently we got the New Sections about sales and Promotions offered to us in the updates.
well guess what, I think from your explanantion, they still have some of those old hidden issues.
we never could find all of our affected listings and still to this day, make sales on items and then upon closer examination see where they sold for 20%, 40%, 35% less than we had listed them for a long time ago. We have lost a bunch of money on this at times.
This whole situation has happened to us three times over the past two years and in some cases some items that got put on Sale for all 3 of those Sales got actually relisted at 3 times the previous discounted showing as the original non-sale price.
we went through all of our listing numerous times trying to find and edit those that were showing at a much lower price than when we first listed them and have had to manually edit those.
The WonderLister tech team assured us it is definetly an Ebay thing, has been for years, WL techs have called and talked with Ebay numerous times and the WL group says that Ebay is just “lost in their coding” with regards to this issue and just redoing the whole thing is their answer.
As a future safe guard I suggested that the WL tech team add a new column to their software called “Historical High Price”. When we list a new item in WL the original starting dollar amount shows in this column. Then when any item gets reported back from WL at a lower price it shows up in a report. Then those items can be easily found and manually edited back to the same price. If we re-list an item and use a higher than start price, the amount goes up in that column. It will only go up, never down. This way we always know at a quick glance when Ebay screws up and re-lists an item at a lower than starting price.
So, I am sorry to report that you may have been hit by that bug and that this may point to the situation that this issue is present and hidden in the newest Ebay update to the New Sales and Promotion Managers.
I am going to report some of your comments to the WL team and see what they say. I also suggest that maybe T-Satt report in to SixBit about this and maybe for them to add the Max. High List price column into their software. I did report it to SixBit myself way back but their answer was that Ebay was coming out with a new version of Sales Manager and they were going to wait to see if this issue gets fixed. Well, I think it hasn’t and maybe SixbIt needs to know that also.
Sorry for all the details and hope it doesn’t add stress on top of what you already have experienced.
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta-
Wow. That’s a piece of relevant news. Thank you, Mike. So was your issue ever corrected by Ebay? Do you have any way of discerning exactly how much money this has cost you? My sales have fallen by a third just in the last month from the month before. It seems the harder I work and the more items I have in my store the worse my sales are. Your information doesn’t stress me out at all—just make things clearer. I’ve lived long enough, and been through enough, to know it’s only money. Fortunately my Ebay main goal was recently accomplished (paying off our mortgage in half the time). I could really look forward to getting my life back and pursuing other goals now, some of which I have already begun. If I close my Ebay business now my only question is what is the best way to liquidate my inventory of over 1200 items?
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Linda,
Just an idea. Instead of liquidating, 1. ask ebay to turn off all sales in your store. 2. Do not list new items. 3. Put an extended handling time (such as 30 days) which would allow you to sell off your inventory and enjoy your other life activities. 4. Open a new account and either ask ebay to move everything over with clean coding or end your lower priced item listings and move them over to your new account. Because your new account will not have feedback, having just the lower priced items may help them move quickly, gain feedback, and help you clear inventory. You could also sprinkle in some of your higher priced items. Then as ebay works on your old account, you will have been building a new clean account. You could then (at your leisure) add new lower priced items to draw traffic, make sales, gain feedback, and still allow yourself the opportunity to sell on ebay if you wish to do so even on a part-time basis. I know at first this might take time but it may afford you an opportunity to continue to earn some extra money if you choose to do so.
Best Wishes on this situation and whatever it is you choose to do in your life.
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