The seller has had hundreds of complaints of never received books in the last month.

[slj-21]

Why does  EBay allow the seller to use their site to sell books.  The are hundreds of complaints related to never received books in their negative feedback for the last month. If you scroll through the negative feedback for the last month,  it’s quite shocking.  There is something seriously amiss.  Despite the fact the seller is “ away until April 20th”, the problem appears preexisting.  I looked at the feedback of other used booksellers and this complaint isn’t prevalent with other dealers.  

[nobody*s_perfect]

Yes, something serious has happened with that seller.  They've been selling since 2006, have over 8.9 million sales and over a million feedback, yet fully half of their recent feedback is negative ratings for nondelivery.

https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_profile/discover-books?filter=feedback_page%3ARECEIVED_AS_SELLER&...

Currently they have only 151 active listings, which as you noted are on vacation.

[valueaddedresource]

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@nobody*s_perfect wrote:

Yes, something serious has happened with that seller.  They've been selling since 2006, have over 8.9 million sales and over a million feedback, yet fully half of their recent feedback is negative ratings for nondelivery.

https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_profile/discover-books?filter=feedback_page%3ARECEIVED_AS_SELLER&...

Currently they have only 151 active listings, which as you noted are on vacation.

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@nobody*s_perfect interesting - most of the listings do show the note that says seller is on vacation and have the extended delivery estimate because of it, but I found at least one that does not.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196103239840 

I wonder if they went on vacation thinking vacation mode was applied to all their listings but some were not and so they sold while the seller is away, then negs were left and eBay stepped in to handle INR claims when orders were not shipped?

If so...yikes, what a mess to come back to!

[soh.maryl]

What happened when you pointed this out to eBay? 

[nobody*s_perfect]

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@valueaddedresource wrote: ... most of the listings do show the note that says seller is on vacation and have the extended delivery estimate because of it, but I found at least one that does not.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196103239840 

I wonder if they went on vacation thinking vacation mode was applied to all their listings but some were not and so they sold while the seller is away, then negs were left and eBay stepped in to handle INR claims when orders were not shipped?...

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Good catch!  That's very surprising, since Time Away is supposed to apply to all fixed price listings.

https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/selling-tools/time-away?id=5137

Here's another item that isn't on Time Away.  What a mess!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196099723742 

[valueaddedresource]

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@nobody*s_perfect wrote:

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@valueaddedresource wrote: ... most of the listings do show the note that says seller is on vacation and have the extended delivery estimate because of it, but I found at least one that does not.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196103239840 

I wonder if they went on vacation thinking vacation mode was applied to all their listings but some were not and so they sold while the seller is away, then negs were left and eBay stepped in to handle INR claims when orders were not shipped?...

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Good catch!  That's very surprising, since Time Away is supposed to apply to all fixed price listings.

https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/selling-tools/time-away?id=5137

Here's another item that isn't on Time Away.  What a mess!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196099723742 

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@nobody*s_perfect hmmm the one you linked to is showing on vacation for me and I agree, I thought it was odd because like you said, there is no way in seller settings to apply Time Away to only some listings as far as I know.

On the one I linked to, I had refreshed multiple times since posting it and every time it was still not showing until just now when it finally changed.

So maybe there was an indexing delay in eBay adding it or maybe the seller is in contact with eBay and they are fixing it if there was an issue?

[nobody*s_perfect]

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@valueaddedresource wrote: ... hmmm the one you linked to is showing on vacation for me ...

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Curiouser and curiouser!  Both of the listings in question are not showing Time Away for me (yet?).

[valueaddedresource]

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@nobody*s_perfect wrote:

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@valueaddedresource wrote: ... hmmm the one you linked to is showing on vacation for me ...

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Curiouser and curiouser!  Both of the listings in question are not showing Time Away for me (yet?).

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@nobody*s_perfect oh my goodness, now that one is back to *not* showing it for me too. 🤦‍♀️

Here are screenshots of the one I posted, from the time of my first post and now.

[valueaddedresource]

@nobody*s_perfect  and....I hit refresh again and now it's showing on vacation again on the one you posted.

What in the world is going on here?

[tobaccocardyahoo]

The joys of distributed database systems.

There is no way to insure that all of the copies of the data for a listing or a seller are in sync and up to date.

It was known well before there was an internet or cloud but implemented anyway.

[treasurehunti-0]

Actually I bought from the seller on March 8th. I purchased and paid for the book and on the 11th I got a tracking #. Item was supposed to be delivered on the 16th-20th. I waited and no book. At the time I purchased to book they had over 1 million items listed. I remember because I thought how would you be able to maintain getting that many books out as you are selling. I figured I'd still wait a couple more days. On the 25th still no book and hundreds upon hundreds of negative feedback start showing up on their account for not sending out items. I filed a Item not received complaint and about this time they put their store on vacation until the 20th of April and left everyone hanging. I ended up receiving a refund thru Ebay. If they are on vacation then what a mess to come back too. My question would be if they were on vacation who kept posting all the tracking info on their items?

[toomuchstuffagain35]

Being the size of seller they are you have to wonder if they've had some disaster strike.

[valueaddedresource]

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@treasurehunti-0 wrote:

Actually I bought from the seller on March 8th. I purchased and paid for the book and on the 11th I got a tracking #. Item was supposed to be delivered on the 16th-20th. I waited and no book. At the time I purchased to book they had over 1 million items listed. I remember because I thought how would you be able to maintain getting that many books out as you are selling. I figured I'd still wait a couple more days. On the 25th still no book and hundreds upon hundreds of negative feedback start showing up on their account for not sending out items. I filed a Item not received complaint and about this time they put their store on vacation until the 20th of April and left everyone hanging. I ended up receiving a refund thru Ebay. If they are on vacation then what a mess to come back too. My question would be if they were on vacation who kept posting all the tracking info on their items?

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@treasurehunti-0  thanks for that additional info - that prompted me to dig a little deeper and things do not look good!

Appears that listings have been taken down from eBay and Amazon and their direct website is now locked/showing a message saying they are having "technical difficulties"...plus their Google business listing says their warehouse location is "permanently closed" and there are some very interesting things being said about the whole situation on Reddit too.  👀

[lux.ra_14]

Looks like they're suddenly defunct, according to the employee who posted on Reddit. Their inventory has also disappeared from Abe and Biblio.

Could be any reason, but I wonder if postal increases have diminished the mega-bookseller model. Even with their volume discounts, maybe the margins are getting too small for cheap books with free shipping.

[ffamily · Accepted solution]

The seller appears to have gone out of business ~ March 20th.   Verified this in a couple ways…. See my “Seller discover-books seems to have gone out of business ~ Mar 20. NOT Still taking orders?” Buying community thread.  My first search didn’t hit your thread or I would’ve posted here.

My guess there may be 100s of books bought that were never shipped.   It looks like they’ve not yanked the sellers items yet BUT it looks like they’re not purchasable: