MASSIVE BUG!!! OVER 500 PAID + INTERNATIONAL ITEMS NOT SHOWING UP!

[lookbuylove]

NOTE: I AM  POSTING HERE BECAUSE EBAY KEEPS BOUNCING ME AROUND THE TECH SUPPORT DEPARTMENT WITHOUT ESCALATING MY CASE PROPERLY. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY I CAN BRING ATTENTION TO MY ISSUE TO EBAY TECH WITHOUT BEING BOUNCED AROUND INSIDE AN INDIAN CALL CENTER FOR ANOTHER MONTH.

GOT YOUR ATTENTION? NOW READ....

I have contacted eBay's completely INEPT customer service. Repeatedly. over 4 days

I HAVE OVER 550 ITEMS LISTED ON EBAY

ALL ITEMS ARE ALSO UPGRADED WITH INTERNATIONAL VISIBILITY (.CO.UK) SET AND BILLED ON MY ACCOUNT SUMMARY.

For MONTHS my sales have dropped - up to 50% month over month. I could not figue out why, it's not until I was logged out that I noticed that ONLY between 51 and 53 of my items were showing up on my profile.  Every time you refresh the page, the number changes. within seconds. Goes up and down, up and down.

ALSO the SAME number of items were showing on all my profile (not store) pages and on my eBay UK Store.

ALL my items have international visibility on them.... only a MAXIMUM of 212 of them are  currently showing up on eBay UK. AND on my profile on .COM and .CO.UK

 I have called a HALF DOZEN times in 3 days and spent over 6h on the phone, and every HALF-WIT customer service you hire comes up with excuses instead of sending the issue to the dev team..

After 3 days of calling repeatedly, talking to MANY agents who had to all individually verify the problem, didn't listen to my answers, i was told that the creator of the ticket used my wrong username to list it, but that didn't matter, because every subsequent newbie I talked to was able to PERSONALLY verify the issue.. 

PROBLEMS WITH GENERAL NON-TRAINING

The last customer support agent took almost 10 minutes to find the ebay.co.uk store that I have. In fact, i had to SPELL IT OUT for her because she didn't even know how to get to eBay.co.uk and find the store. I got frustrated and asked to speak to her Manager because i was sick of talking to yet another a box of rocks.

The manager (like every other support person) asked for a sample item #.  After I told him that the previous support minion needed training and had no idea how to access the .CO.UK version of my store, he said "we will coach her". HOWEVER, when I told the manager to look up a sample listing with a paid InternationVisilibility on my store by ID, he argued with me, telling me that "You can't search for products on your store by ID."   I told him "Yes you can, please enter the ID number".... he responded "I don't want to argue with you, that feature was discontinued". I said "Just enter 12 numbers before you say that".. 3 minutes later, of course he was proven wrong, but not before telling me off. 

Immediately afterwards, i told him I am sick of talking to inept support agents, escalate me to your Supervisor (her name is Lynne). She created ANOTHER ticket (this time with the correct store name).

I doubt this ticket will get anywhere seeing as it's 1 office of people covering for eachother.

REF ID# 1-122876676260

Throughout this experience, i spoke to 3 support agents who promised to call me "very soon" or "today", but didn't. 

Almost ALL agents I spoke to, have explain a bull**bleep**, non-technical reason.

1. I have free shipping (yeah.. seriously. This one guy told me that it might not show up because i have free shipping set) 

2. They  are there, I can see them (outright lie on day 2)

3. No one seemed surprised that my profile had jumping numbers on refresh.

ALL CALLS ARE RECORDED. LISTEN TO THE CALLS.   PLEASE HELP ME. YOU ARE OUTRIGHT RIPPING ME OFF. CHARGING ME $100s (up to $1000s potentially) in fees. JUST THIS MONTH ALONE, I HAVE BEEN BILLED FOR 500 CURRENTLY ACTIVE POSTS THAT DON'T SHOW UP.

1. HOW FAR BACK HAS THIS BEEN GOING

2. DO I HAVE TO OPEN A DISPUTE WITH PAYPAL TO GET MY MONEY BACK OR ARE YOU GOING TO DO THE RIGHT THING?

3. FIX YOU BUGS!

4. REFUND THE MONEY YOU TOOK WITHOUT PROVIDING THE BILLED SERVICE

5. MOST of  your tech support is VERY POORLY trained. 

Again. I HAD to write this here because I believe that support is "containing" me and preventing me from getting this fixed.

[lookbuylove]

So what do  I have to do to get a response from support?

Seriously.. After days, support is screwing the pooch on this one

[lookbuylove]

Let's see what today brings

[lookbuylove]

3rd day of this post, and no one on eBay has still commented/noticed.

[rockz1101]

Time for pro bono legal with IT forensics expertise?

[lookbuylove]

As expected, I did not get the call after 24h that the manager promised.
Against.. eBay support let me down. At some point this goes from disgusting to just plain sad.,..

[lookbuylove]

I am quite irate by the fact that not one single eBay support clown who PROMISED to call back and gave me an SR# already has actually followed through. eBay support is a buffer, not a helpful service.

There was one thing I withheld from the last message after the support call with the manager. He instructed me to cancel my paypal payment contract with eBay to make the next payment fail. 

He basically instructed me not to pay my bill. I'm not sure what eBay policy is on managers instructing users to skip out on the bill.  What's more irritating is that it almost mirrors the response from the customer service.

I am going to give the manager another day to call me before i post the SR#

[lookbuylove]

I had to call back to eBay support because after giving  him 2 days, it's obvious that I won't get a call back.

I have TRIED to maintain my cool so far, but if being  a d*ck is all they understand, then that's the only option.  Every customer service minion says "i want to help you with this problem". But they can't. they have to access  tech dept. These support agents are little more than automated FAQ readers.

After stomping over the 1st minion. I have successfully stomped over a Supervisor. Now i am on hold for a manager. Being rude is the only thing eBay support understands.

At least that's how they are training their users.

[lookbuylove]

Knock Knock.. anyone from eBay monitoring this tread? 

[lookbuylove]

UPDATE ON THAT CALL

Every time I talk to a manager, They give me a new reason for my bug.

This manager on this call lied to me and said the following

"Because I am in Ukraine, Because my items are listed on US, And I want it showing up here and there and everywhere, it is causing a problem." 

These calls are recorded. Does eBay keep any quality control?

MANAGERS ARE JUST EARLY UPGRADED TECH SUPPORT MINIONS.

[lookbuylove]

This last manager told me that I should be happy with what I get, that expect too much. That I sell Items from Ukraine, but I have a Canadian store and want it showing in UK. Like it's some kind of privilege. I PAID for the listings.. YOU TAKE MONEY> YOU PROVIDE SERVICE... eBay needs to smack their managers with a trout.

[lookbuylove]

I have left comments on @AskeBay on twitter

I have also left extensive private messages on FB

Let's see how long this takes...

[mike_n_jing]

Sounds like it is time to visit bbb.org dude.... Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Hi @lookbuylove - We received your messages on Facebook and we're currently looking into this to see what's happening and what needs to happen to have it resolved. Please be on the lookout for our reply!

[lookbuylove]

Thank you. I responded there

[3145nebraska]

Hi there, lookbuylove, I just wanted to tell you that I appreciate your incredibly thorough and articulate outline of the problems you've been having and let you know that I relate. It's not much and won't directly help you, except perhaps psychologically, when you perhaps are reassured to learn that you most certainly are not unique in feeling as if you are being passed around, ignored, written off, etc, by eBay customer service, such as it is.

As I read through your entries and noticed the "hello, anybody home?" vibe,  I particularly felt bad for you as I have come to know this feeling all too well.

To be fair, around the 19th of October - otherwise known as the day we noticed our problem- I did put out a support thread somewhere in this abyss of customer service tales gone woefully wrong, and one kind fellow did reply. He responded with - yes, this most certainly IS something I've never heard of, and will absolutely need to be moved up the chain (or buried deep in the Earth) to eBay customer service, and he then provided the contact page information and how-tos. IE, how to move past the pre-derived handful of categories of fairly-easily-solved-problems-any-average-user-might-have-who-is-a-bit-inexperienced-running-an-eBay-site , past any potential category that might be remotely related to narrow it down, to finally be provided a phone number to call with the foreknowledge that the problem at hand WILL be far beyond the understanding of any support person who isn't a technical person in the web development, database, and applications side of eBay, where the bug invaded THAT is clearly  the freaking issue and the bug that will need to be fixed.

Our issue, while not related to yours, other than being an eBay, back-end "bug" of a highly technical nature, is also one for which the standard front-line eBay Customer Service -- ie, a call service in another country where ill-equipped but well-meaning folks are doomed to have to answer questions which are far -FAR  - beyond the scope of their ability to solve and are stuck with pre-prepared scripts to follow in order to ATTEMPT answer a select and limited array of questions -- the whole thing is woefully inefficient, ineffective and beyond frustrating.  
Just so that you may have context for OUR problem, if you'd like some light reading and outside amusement, you may check out the thread I started earlier today in utter exasperation here: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/All-of-our-1000-suddenly-relisted-on-October-18th-201....

Quite frankly, reading threads/posts such as yours and a handful of other sellers bemoaning the fact that the focus of eBay and their "support" is Buyer-centric and really under-serving of sellers in general, has brought me to the conclusion that if one has a truly technical malfunction of the type that only actual DEVELOPERS and application software engineers can solve, that one is then by default, just screwed. 
I won't bore you with the myriad details of the repeated calls that I made on the "service request" we opened the days after our entire database of listings inexplicably, and without action from any one of our three person staff, stopped themselves mysteriously on the 18th of October and then relisted themselves. I believe the exact number was 1008 listings. All but just a very few of which were good til cancelled and had been automatically relisting according to their thirty day cycles for many months without issue. In trying to understand forensically what happened I tried to appreciate HOW IT COULD BE that we may inadvertently stop 1k listings and relist without intending to or even be aware that it's happening - especially since I cannot bulk or batch relist anything exceeding one page of selections at a time. We were not using third-party utilities of any type, and virtually have been unable to understand why it happened in the first place.  Since the 18th, listings since then have seem to be ok, following their start date and moving through the month long good til cancelled cycle with appropriate time stamps. But everything up to and including the 18th all have October 18th as a start date, and are virtually one seconds / moments apart through the entire database of listings. (Something in eBay bakc-end obviously took the entire database of listings and set in motion a huge huge batch of relists simultaneously)
What I have been able to achieve through multiple Customer Service calls since are conversations with  about six separate non-native speakers of English (and I sincerely mean ZERO offense by that statement, but a language barrier when trying to convey an issue of a highly technical nature is a freaking NIGHTMARE) patiently explaining and re-explaining to me the nature of the GOOD TIL CANCELLED concept, as though I don't understand what it means. Aaaaghghghghghghghghghg!!!!!!
Around and around we went until I FINALLY got the MUCH PROMISED RETURN CALL wherein this poor, sweet, misguided and probably terrified of me woman explained that "yes, your listings all went live on the 18th. They are good til cancelled and hadn't sold. Those listings were all created on the 18th. We will now close the SR. Thank you."  
Except. THEY. WEREN'T.!!!!!!!!  They most certainly were NOT all created on the 18th, they were created at varying times throughout the past TWO years. What they WERE was mistakenly and simulataneously ALL STOPPED and then RESTARTED on that date. Since then we have created about 23 new listings, and please remember - that's a month ago now, and is fairly representative of the speed at which we create new listings. Yet, eBay persists in persisting that we literally created all of those listings in a single day. 
....I digress....Or, I go on, and on and possibly too far. I am generally a patient, positive, optimistic person with reasonable communication skills who is pleasant to others. However, this issue and the utter impossibility of landing a phone call with a human being actually qualified to fix this problem or send it somewhere where it may be addressed, has brought me to a level of frustrating almost new to me.  I keep thinking, I suppose eBay assumes we should just eat the insertion fees for all of the erroneously stopped and restarted listings. I assume the eBay would be more interested in this problem were it affecting 100-200,000 people instead of, apparently, just us. I assume eBay would be much much more interested in this problem were it costing THEM money. Yeah?  What's crazy-making is that not only do we have a giant batch of listings with no meaningful start date now, listings who have lost previous sales data that had been attached, as well as number of watchers, and in some case, the  ability to clear the qeue once it's sold out (few things sold out, had made it all the way to paid and shipped but until I added a UPS tracking number, STAYED LIVE and thus able to STILL SELL, until I added it. But, whatever, right?? Major "oh well" eBay!?!?!?!), our entire review process of re-examining just those listings coming off in 24 hours or less is just pointless now. 
I've not said anything to help you with YOUR problem, lookbuylove, but I did want you to know that you are not alone -- that there is another successful, money-making-business-for-eBay out there with a technical problem beyond the abilities of the incredibly poorly prepared and accountability shifting Customer Service department, and that we really and truly DO feel your pain. 
I think you did find a resolution somewhere in your writings - I hope I read that correctly. At this point my mind is numb as I searched high and low through the community forums hoping for an answer, and I sincerely hope your journey forth is less troubling and leaves you clear of eBay CS. 
Best, 3145nebraska- or, a storefront launched in a day.