Hi gang,
eBay’s had a tough week.
Not that it hasn’t been a tough week in general. Lehman’s gone. AIG is getting bailed out (I bet that makes Lehman happy – if they would have waited 3 days, maybe they could have received part of the $600 billion the gov is forking over to save the economy). Gas stations here in the Southeast are all running out of gas – and price gouging the hell out of everybody – due to the hurricane. You know, maybe the oil companies could bail out AIG – they’re the ones who always get rich in a crisis. Stock market’s up 500 points one day, down 500 the next. Daytraders are probably making a killing.
eBay’s stock plummeted below $23.00 also, which is the worst it’s been in a long, long time. John Donohoe, eBay’s CEO, was called one of the worst leaders by his own employees.
On Tuesday, eBay rolled out the new 30 Day Fixed Price listing, or FP30. Tuesday was an unbelievable day because, well, nothing happened. eBay did not roll out the programming interface to list the FP30 listings until midnight, which in plain talk means nobody was able to actually list FP30 items. Not even eBay’s own tools, like Turbo Lister, could do it. By Tuesday night, third party companies, independant developers (like us), and eBay’s tools were enabled to list.
By Thursday or so, all seemed go be going well. FP30 listings started to skyrocket – in the millions – which was a good sign that FP30 was going to be widely adopted.
Then came this announcement:
| ***Some Items Not Indexed in Search*** |
 September 19, 2008 | 08:55PM PST/PT Some items listed or revised between the morning of September 17 and 6:30pm PT on September 19 are not indexed into eBay Search. We are working urgently to resolve the problem for the affected items as quickly as possible.At this time, we are asking sellers NOT to end and relist these items, because we don’t know at this point whether the relisted items will index properly. However, we do know that new items will index properly, so if you’d like to end your affected listing and start a new listing from scratch, that will be fine, and it should index into Search properly. We will update this post when we have more information. In the meantime, please be assured that we will be automatically crediting fees for all impacted listings (whether active or closed) early next week. Thank you for your patience, and we apologize for the frustration this is causing you. |
As of this writing, it is unclear if this issue has been corrected.
I do not root against eBay. eBay needs to be successful in order for the 1.3 million sellers on their site to be successful. eBay is and will hopefully continue to be a big part of my business.
Let’s just hope eBay gets all these bugs worked through in the next 30 days, because Thunderbirds are go for the holidays. We still have to get through capped shipping and the removal of money orders/checks as payment in October.
Crossing his fingers,
Kevin
http://inflatablemadnessdvd.com
