Ebay delayed Notifying Me of a Sold Item for Almost 20 minutes. In the meantime I sold it to someone else and got a defect
Summary: farnorthsid reported an issue with a Canon camera listing on eBay, where a sale was not immediately notified due to a presumed glitch, leading to a cancellation and a defect on their account. fullers_uk suggested waiting for email confirmations rather than relying solely on eBay's real-time notifications. Other participants like inhawaii and shire123 noted that delays can occur in e-commerce systems, and advised caution when relisting items that appear as sold. The general consensus was that patience and confirming sales through the seller hub could prevent such issues.
I listed a small Canon camera Seriously, not even 2 minutes after the listing went live, I received a message from a potential buyer aking if that item had sold. I replied I JUST listed it minutes ago and no, it had not sold. The buyer informed me it showed it had sold and was out of stock and she could not purchase it.
So I went to the listing and sure enough it showed "you sold this item". I never received a notification of anything sold. I checked the orders waiting to ship. Nothing. I checked the payment tab. No new transactions. I checked my messages. Nothing.
As far as i could tell this was some sort of a glitch, so I relisted it and the buyer who messaged me purchased it. As I was printing the shipping label, I then received a notification that an item had sold. It was the original buyer for whom I never received notification. I looked at the order details and it showed this buyer purchased it almost 20 minutes previous. I had no choice but to cancel it due to being out of stock, and of course received a defect and a denial to appeal the defect.
I have never seen this happen before and don't feel it was appropriate to give me a defect when this circumstance was beyond my control and obviously some sort of glitch on ebays end.
Was I wrong to have relisted this considering, from my point of view, this item had not really sold.
It is bad enough to receive a defect when you deserved it, but way worse to receive one that you didn't earn.
bashort
·1 week agodid this happen on Sept 23? ebay was having widespread issues with listings disappearing that day.
tobaccocardyahoo
·1 week agoYou decided Ebay had a problem. You caused your problem.
Your items is internally marked as sold in real time. You are not notified in real time. There are multiple steps between when the buyer places the order and when you are notified. Software design queues many of those steps, and when they complete may have variable latency based on system load, maintenance activity and other factors.
shire123
·1 week agoWe are so used to things being almost instantaneous in this electronic age. But there are a number of factors that can delay when we see an activity. We need to realize that there can be a time lag. What gets most of us is that often things seem to be instantaneous but that will not always be the case.
onlinecentral
·1 week agoSo I went to the listing and sure enough it showed "you sold this item".
The first buyers ID would have been displayed.
You could have sent them an invoice or a message to confirm the sale.
You should have waited for one of these to happen before considering relisting.
1) The transaction appearing on the Sold or Awaiting Payment screens.
2) A cancellation request from the first buyer.
3) A notification from eBay that they had cancelled the sale.
4) You filing an unpaid case at 96 hours.
kandf_vintage_finds
·1 week agoI'm sorry this happened to you. In the future don't jump the gun.
kensgiftshop
·1 week ago"Was I wrong to have relisted this considering, from my point of view, this item had not really sold."
If it showed sold, you shouldn't have relisted it until you were sure.
Some times there is a little delay in the system.
You might not think so, but you did make a mistake when relisting after it sold.
inhawaii
·1 week agoI'm sorry, I just not buying that it was sold and it took 20 minutes to show "sold/awaiting shipment" on the seller hub.
deltilogical
·1 week agoI think I would have waited a bit if I had seen the item showing sold.
The lie of e-commerce is Instantaneity. E-commerce is no faster (if not actually, slower) than the physical world. On the bourse I leave the day with money in hand. on ebay it will be 3-5 days. On the bourse the customers leave with their items and they don't have to wait.
inhawaii
·1 week agoI've sold 18,000+ items.
Not once did I count on eBay to notify me that the item had sold.
shire123
·1 week ago@inhawaii But the OP checked a number of places on their seller's tab to see if it sold. They did not rely completely on any ebay notification.
Although the seller did see that the listing said it was sold so they should not have relisted it. With the huge number of items that ebay has listed it is not reasonable to expect instantaneous notification.
In this case it was only 20 minutes before they received the notification.
fullers_uk
·1 week agoI think the idea is now to be reactive, wait until you get an email to say its sold or check what you have sold next time you log in, being proactive and helpful doesn’t work as well with the ebay machine.