A "Ghost Listing" strikes again!

[movieman630]

Just when I thought I'd seen the last of the "Ghost Listings" today I had another one.  It's been some time since I've had one, I was hoping they were all gone now.  I really hate having to cancel a sale for "out of stock" that I wasn't responsible for.

I wish I knew when that ebay glitch happened, I think it was 2017ish. 

Have any of you been able to narrow down when the "Ghost Listing" glitch started? 

[robbie31415]

Database errors do happen.

So does human error.

Probability wise "ghost listings" are most likely due to human error.

"It's simply not that hard to understand 🙄"

[kensgiftshop]

---

@powell-memorabilia wrote:

---

@toomuchstuffagain35 wrote:

In much the same way those who claim it's operator error and they've never had one so it doesn't happen are also impossible to convince.

Even though ebay reps have admitted it happens, but can't pin down how or why, and it's a "glitch" that's seemingly impossible to replicate.

---

Ever agree with someone just to end argument?  I have, we all have.  That’s what eBay did - they couldn’t find a “glitch” or “bug” to fix.  

---

Or, they know it's a problem but they don't know how to fix it.

It's not hurting them, so I don't think they'll do much to fix it.

[chapeau-noir]

---

@powell-memorabilia wrote:

---

@chapeau-noir wrote:

Databases update and are not infallible - there will be events happening, this is one. It's simply not that hard to understand. 🙄

---

Maybe.  But why do they fail over and over again on select sellers?  Reminds me of a friend that always seems to think that police are targeting him with faulty speed guns.  Maybe he’s right - and I can’t prove that he isn’t.  But seems to me that if that never happens to me, and we drive in the same areas, maybe that is more about how he drives.

---

It's not 'select sellers' - it's a scattering of sellers throughout many thousands - some here happen to report it, others have not experienced it. It's the nature of the beast. You may never experience it, or you may. But a DB error is not a rare nor is it a complex concept. Back in my corp days I helped run a small server farm for a busy tech documentation company, and one of our most pesky problems was data loss and file duplication. It didn't happen often, but when it did it was frustrating. I'm not even seeing an argument here because I know this kind of thing happens.

[movieman630]

---

Don't you love it when you report here on another issue (after selling here for 12-13-14 years) and other sellers tell you you're probably doing something wrong?

Love it.

---

That's the human condition.  There's always going to be someone telling you you're the one who's wrong.  You could pick up a piece of trash on the sidewalk in a crowd and 1 or 2 people will say something negative about it.  It's just how people are.  Cabin in the mountains looks better and better every day. 😉

[powell-memorabilia]

---

@movieman630 wrote:

---

Don't you love it when you report here on another issue (after selling here for 12-13-14 years) and other sellers tell you you're probably doing something wrong?

Love it.

---

That's the human condition.  There's always going to be someone telling you you're the one who's wrong.  You could pick up a piece of trash on the sidewalk in a crowd and 1 or 2 people will say something negative about it.  It's just how people are.  Cabin in the mountains looks better and better every day. 😉

---

Nah, people telling you you are wrong are those that want you to figure out how to prevent these so-called ghost listings.  The human condition part would be people that think something going wrong is always someone else’s fault, and they look for a shadowy figure to blame.

I don’t want to get into the math, but it wouldn’t be that hard to demonstrate just how unlikely these ghost listings are. If you have some sellers with hundreds or thousands of items for sale, that have been selling for five, 10, 15, 20, 25 years, without ghost listings, and select sellers that seem to have them every few months or every few weeks, that tells you everything you need to know about the existence of so-called ghost listings. 

regardless, let us pretend that ghost listings are a real thing.  Perhaps some sellers have a better way to head them off. Does it make more sense and does it really get to a solution to just shake your fist at the sky? Or, does it make sense and would it work to figure out how to avoid getting these so-called ghost listings?  Me, I’ll take the path of optimism where we actually control our own destinies.

[deltilogical]

While I'm sure most of the time it is my own fault, I've seen too much weird stuff and I have some confidence in my work.   

I see weird image issues where I loaded up an image in error, I deleted it, but when I see the saved listing, it shows the deleted image in the search results , but when I go into the listing itself, the correct image is retrieved.     Considering the multiple layers the platform has to work through, all told it does a decent job these days.

[mamabeardsley]

What exactly is the smarter move when these happen?

[mamabeardsley]

I have had two of these in the past week. They happen frequently enough despite eBay's insistence they don't. It's hard to track because the listings that magically reappear are often a year or so in the past. You can't simply search the sold listings to find if the item had been sold previously. 

[mamabeardsley]

I don't think so. It;s happened to me on a number of occassions and I did not re-list or double list the items. 

[inhawaii]

I won't say that ghost litings DO or DON'T happen, just that it has never has happened to me in 20+ years.

I've also never seen a ghost in real life,

[brightlightbookseller]

I didn't have any ghost listings last time I checked, and I have a semi-automated way of checking (a spreadsheet that I can compare our listing titles to what we have on record being listed), but I did have several items I know we listed that weren't showing up.  Less of an issue, perhaps, but when a $300 item is sitting on the shelf taking up space and eBay just doesn't have any record of it being listed, that's still a problem!  We have experienced the ghost listing phenomenon before, just not this time that I checked.