How do you keep Ebay from randomly deleting old listings without telling you?
I've noticed over the years that I will randomly find items on my shelves that have no listing. I chalked it up to a mistake but I suspected this was an ebay "feature". I've seen rumors of the same thing on Reddit and such, but now I know for sure.
I recently did a partial audit of my inventory and found many, many items that have no listing. No evidence of sales when going back as far as the history allows. All the boxes in question were quite dusty so it seems that ebay is in fact deleting my old listings without telling me. Now I have go through 10,000+ items to audit the whole thing and see how bad the damage is.
I can't even imagine how many thousands of dollars of stagnant wares I have and how long they've been sitting with no listing. Is there any way to avoid this?
reallynicestamps
·1 year ago@kyle@ebay
It's not so much the removal, although that is annoying and expensive both for potential lost sales and storage of unlisted product, but that the notices of removal are in fact not going out.
Take 'em down if you like.
But let us know.
bbcardzman
·1 year agoEBay removes items that have been listed for more than a year with no activity. Unfortunately they do not let you know which ones were deleted like they used to. An easy way I found to keep this from happening is when your listings get to be on for 5 or 6 months, just end and relist them. This gives them a new item number and refreshes the listing to the top of the heap.
quicksilverdiecast
·1 year agoI am in the process of doing the same thing, for the exact same reason., As well as manipulation by ebay motors with a listing once it has been listed and live.
atlasesattic
·1 year agoThe same thing happens to me, I found 3 the other day that I had to relist
turtles-trading-post
·1 year agoMy own theory on missing listings is that they lose them on the monthly roll over.
Have you ever been doing a "Sell Similar" or Relist on 100 items and you get an error message on a couple of them? Then you look at them and see nothing wrong. (note that they were listed a few minutes ago) So you hit "Sell Similar' or Relist again and they relist without a problem?
I believe that in the monthly roll over, some of those listings are refusing to renew, but since it's an unmanned operation it just deletes them rather than produce an error message.
The sad fact is that eBay pretty much is a banking system... in the realm that they are handling millions of dollars in financial transactions, pretty much like your online bank app. This would be totally unacceptable if your bank was losing deposits or funds and the feds would be all over that bank! So I don't get how eBay sails along unregulated and seemingly unconcerned
allstar-comics
·1 year agoI've been asking about this for over a decade and never got a answer I'll be re inventorying since its been slow and expect to find a ton of items that are no longer up Kind of a big deal when you have 35,000 listings I did a couple boxes on one shelf and found $2000 worth of stuff in a half day of checking much of which I immediately listed and was able to sell
dhbookds
·1 year agoMaybe it's time to ask for help....
@devon@ebay
@kyle@ebay
@elizabeth@ebay
Is Ebay still removing listings for being on the site too long? Do they send notifications to sellers when they remove listings? If they don't send notifications, can we get them to do it? Thanks......
inhawaii
·1 year agoI'm not saying that it doesn't happen, just that they don't do it "randomly".
inhawaii
·1 year agoDear customer,
We randomly removed your order number: 226510704029.
No rhyme or reason. We just did it because we can.
ci-motorsports
·1 year agoThey most definatly remove listings. During a part audit I found over 200 parts that dropped off our catalog and were just sitting on the shelf. Needs to be a notice letting users know their items are being removed PERIOD!
inhawaii
·1 year agoDo you really think ebay "randomly" deletes listings? 🙄
chapeau-noir
·1 year agoYes, actually. I sure didn't delete the listings missing from my lil' shack. 😒 Fortunately, it's only here and there.
inhawaii
·1 year agoCan't be random. You would think they would use a dartboard or maybe tickets and one of those raffle drums? 😉
chapeau-noir
·1 year agoTheir database is probably like the inexorable mills of the gods - only instead of grinding exceeding small it's just usually clogged.
chapeau-noir
·1 year agoI only have a relative handful of listings up, never have anything listed for a year (I roll things over at 60 days) and still experience loss of listings. For me it's one here, one there - about every season change I notice a few listings gone. I just see it as 'new' inventory and make a new listing.
If I had a lot of listings, like OP, I would invest in archival software like 6Bit or inkFrog because at that level it would be an expensive and aggravating problem.
Like the 'ghost' listings, I see some of this as database loss.
cstpos
·1 year agoI've asked about this too. If ebay would notify us, we could decide if the item was even worth relisting. We could then donate or scrap it. It's the not notifying us part that's aggravating.
lacemaker3
·1 year ago@nujik, and @jonathanbrightlight
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/listings/creating-managing-listings/removed-hidden-listings?id=4656
jonathanbrightlight
·1 year ago@lacemaker3
Thanks! That's even more clear than I was remembering. I wonder if I was misremembering or if it used to be less clear about the criteria?
short_circuit.lineman61
·1 year agoI have many listings 7, 8 10 years old still active never ever got a message that they were removing one
lacemaker3
·1 year agoThey aren't all necessarily going to be removed when they reach one year old. It says one year "or more".
I believe that eBay probably uses an algorithm to judge the amount of interest in the item, perhaps using views and click-throughs. But they don't publish anything about this algorithm.
quicksilverdiecast
·1 year agoWait, as a seller you list the item, depending on the type store you have subscribed, you pay ebay to list items, auction wise or buy it now wise, so if they remove an item, should not a credit be issued back to the seller...if of course there were no listing violations
mam98031
·1 year ago@elizabeth@ebay.com
@kyle@ebay.com
@devon@ebay.com
Does Ebay still remove older listings as described above? I thought they stopped doing that years ago.
kyle@ebay
Hey @mam98031 and @dhbookds eBay does still remove old listings as you mentioned here. But what isn't mentioned in that screenshot is that we also take into account buyer traffic. So if you have an item that hadn't sold in more than a year, AND it's generating little to no buyer traffic, there's a good chance it'll end up being removed.
dhbookds
·1 year ago@kyle@ebay thanks........but are sellers notified when listings are removed?
kyle@ebay
Hey @dhbookds I have confirmed that email notifications should be going out for these type of removals.
lacemaker3
·1 year agoHi @kyle@ebay, so that is basically what I said here, then:
kyle@ebay
Hey @lacemaker3 I must have missed that post earlier. But you were right on the money!
jonathanbrightlight
·1 year agoThere's no exact criteria, but I believe I've even seen in a policy document somewhere (though I'm having trouble finding it right now, probably because I don't remember the wording clearly enough) that older listings without enough activity may be removed. I can look right now and see listings that have been active for 10+ years from some sellers, while other sellers have come to the boards and reported things removed that were 1-2 years old (I don't recall any that were more recent than that).
We don't have the space for items to sit around that long, so we just manually purge items after around a year. That kinda just avoids the question of whether eBay would remove them if we left them up longer and didn't get any/enough activity on them (presumably meaning views and possibly other interactions).
kensgiftshop
·1 year agoYears ago, I would get an email saying that so and so item has been listed two years without much activity and will be removed on a certain date.
I don't know if they still send those emails or not?
mam98031
·1 year ago@jonathanbrightlight
They did announce that a few years ago and started to apply it until so many sellers objected to it, they finally stopped doing it. A couple years later they tried it again and the sellers reacted the same way.
I don't believe Ebay is doing this again. There would be far more than one seller complaining about this.
If Ebay removes a listing, the seller should get an email notifying them of that and why it was removed.
This will however be an interesting conversation to have with other sellers that may have stuff to say about this too.
dhbookds
·1 year agoThere are various programs (6 bit comes to mind) that I think can "synchronize" listings which I would assume could add in any that are deleted without cause. Channel Advisor is also one that I know handles large accounts........at least they used to..... They cost $$, of course.
I've often thought that keeping up with the # of listings each day would "indicate" losses, but would not help in identifying which ones....
short_circuit.lineman61
·1 year agoI have listings get unlisted all the time, I have tried tracking # of listings to see if I could catch it happening and what I found when I tried this is that the number of active listings with available qty changes both ways for no apparent reason, at least if you just click on "sellers other items"
dhbookds
·1 year agoSorry, I wasn't clear about keeping track........ listings #'s will change just due to being renewed each 30 days........ I meant trying to keep track manually...... 10 new ones today, 4 sold....based on the number in active listings on seller hub.....I believe (could be wrong) that the # of active listings there isn't effected by the renewals..... but again, the number isn't going to help identifying which ones are missing.
I've never had any go away.....many been relisting since 2020, when I relisted everything........and frankly, I've never seen anyone mention a notification from ebay saying something was removed due to longevity.
reallynicestamps
·1 year agoAt one time eBay notified us if an item had been 16 months without activity.
That was useful because I could review the listing and either update or remove it.
With my long tail and small items, long term storage is not a problem.
A return to the 16 month notice would be a benefit.
lacemaker3
·1 year ago@dhbookds, sorry but you're mistaken about that. Listing #s do not change when the listing renews each 30 days. That is one of the advantages of GTC listings; they keep the same item number so they don't lose their history in search engine results outside of eBay.
They will only get new item numbers if you end the listings and relist them.