OOAK / vintage inventory issue

[panoply57]

When our OOAK (mostly vintage/antique, and all "used") items sell, in addition to processing the order, we then must process the inventory to take it out of stock. 

We were told we could go to Account Preferences --> Selling Preferences, then Uncheck YES on the Out-Of-Stock Option. However, it resets at least once a week. So every sale on eBay must be processed twice on our end: once for the sale, and again to manage inventory.

A few months ago, we read about another seller with even more inventory than we have, who had a similar experience and was considering some dramatic measures. It is hard to believe this is a problem unique to our account, as it happens EVERY week, during our brick-and-mortar busy weekends. So between Friday and Monday there seems to be some sort of system reset that forces all inventory to stay in stock instead of ending when it sells.

Or perhaps other people selling one of a kinds mostly have small stock and it's no big deal? In our case, we now dedicate at least 2 hours a week to simply managing eBay inventory online, to accomdate the many quirks eBay has implemented over the last 3-6 years. It also takes longer to juggle all the pieces as eBay requires more from 3rd party integration. Neglectful choices like this have us concerned that eBay is going to stop supporting vintage items, and other products without inventory numbers in their catalog (aka, eBay--the new Amazon!). Some of our customers are encouraging us to look at Etsy, and perhaps eBay wants Vintage sellers to leave. At this time, we're hoping that the time and money we've invested here will see continued upgrades (and less of these time-sucking pseudo-improvements), and are hoping things settle down at some point so we can put less time and money into marketplace management and can return our focus to actual selling again.

If you've found a solution, or experienced something similar, we'd love to hear about it!