eBay

nouhaven · ‎10-21-2025

Hello,

There appears to be a glitch affecting the Sold listings directory at present - data from 2024 and older is appearing within the Sold listings as though they were sold in October 2025. When viewed from the Sold directory, the sale date appears as normal, but when the item is clicked on it shows a new, erroneous date in October.

As an example, https://www.ebay.ie/itm/306226940718 originally sold on March 29 2025 when viewed on the Sold listings page, but clicking on the item shows a sales date of October 6th 2025 instead. In a fast-moving market like trading card games, this has had a large knock-on effect as price tracking is being affected on many other websites. I am unsure whether this is affecting other item categories, as this is the area with which I am most familiar.

lacemaker3 · ‎10-21-2025

That seller currently has 83 items with that exact title in their "Sold items" list, and 7 active listings with the same title as well. So they clearly have a lot of them available.

This does not appear to be a glitch.

That listing item # 306226940718

https://www.ebay.com/itm/306226940718?&nordt=true

Start: Mon, 07-Apr-25 02:06:21 UTC (6 months ago)

End: Tue, 07-Oct-25 02:06:21 UTC (14 days ago)

This listing sold on Mon, Oct 6 at 7:06 PM.

One of the sold items has the same item number, and was sold on Apr 12, 2025. So it either had a quantity of 2 originally, or the quantity was increased after the sale on Apr 12. The last one was sold on Oct 6. This transaction may not have been paid for, or may have been cancelled. There is no way to tell for sure.

nouhaven · ‎10-21-2025

Hi lacemaker,

This same item ID also has the sale date of March 29th 2025 when viewed in recent Sold history. This has been a recent change to behavior of the platform and has been widely discussed in collectable communities - this is not how it displayed a week ago and it has affected price tracking applications significantly.

lacemaker3 · ‎10-21-2025

@nouhaven wrote:
Hi lacemaker,

This same item ID also has the sale date of March 29th 2025 when viewed in recent Sold history. This has been a recent change to behavior of the platform and has been widely discussed in collectable communities - this is not how it displayed a week ago and it has affected price tracking applications significantly.

I don't see a sale for this item # on Mar 29. It sold first on Apr 12, 2025. It was started on Apr 7, so it could not have been sold in March, before it was listed.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_dkr=1&iconV2Request=true&_blrs=recall_filtering&_ssn=psa&_oac=1&_nkw=306226940718&rt=nc&LH_Complete=1

The second sale for this item # on Oct 6, for the same price, $69.99, which appears to be unpaid or the transaction has been cancelled, is quite unusual.

Although when I was just checking the seller's sold lsiting (looking for a sale on Mar 29, which I could not find), I did see some other listings with the same title, which also appear to have recent sales that have been cancelled.

eBay's sold items list has always been very inaccurate, and is not a good source for pricing information. eBay Marketplace Research is more useful, because it is intended for pricing research. This is available for sellers, from the Selling Hub. This shows that there have only been 20 sales of this exact title in the past 3 years, so the eBay sold-items list is very exaggerated.

https://www.ebay.com/sh/research?marketplace=EBAY-US&keywords=%222022+pokemon+jpn+sword+%26+shield+dark+phantasma+%23073+full+art%2Fpikachu+psa+10%22&dayRange=1095&endDate=1761088201527&startDate=1666480201527&categoryId=0&offset=0&limit=50&sorting=-datelastsold&tabName=SOLD&tz=America%2FNew_York

nouhaven · ‎10-21-2025

Hi lacemaker,

Thanks for the time put into this. I think I pulled up the wrong item ID there - as you can understand it's a bit confusing with many similar items, item 306163530807 was the one initially "sold" on March 29, now indicated as sold on October 7th.

The issue is that this behavior of recent Sold items affects numerous other services for price tracking. While there is a workaround, some recent change has affected how these listings appear.

Continuing to look into this, only this seller is affected and every single one of the affected listings is in the PSA Vault - an Ebay-partnered service where this seller holds the item securely. Potentially when the item is sent from the PSA Vault to the original buyer, it is finally logged as a completed sale. I will also contact PSA regarding this as it is also their service, as something has gone wrong on one of their ends.

lacemaker3 · ‎10-22-2025

@nouhaven wrote:
Hi lacemaker,
...

The issue is that this behavior of recent Sold items affects numerous other services for price tracking. ...

Any app that uses the eBay Sold items for price tracking is going to be very inaccurate. It has never been intended for that purpose. It has always been inaccurate in multiple ways, for example:

it shows transactions that ended with a sale, but were never paid for
it shows transactions that were cancelled after the sale, whether the cancellation was started by the buyer or the seller
when an item is sold to a best offer, it shows the original asking price, not the actual sale price
it only shows items that ended "organically", not items that were ended early by the seller (for any reason)
it doesn't show items that have the "out of stock" option enabled, where listings can stay active (but unsearchable) as long as the quantity available is zero
there are probably other issues as well

I don't think an additional reason is going to make much of a difference either way. eBay knows about these inaccuracies, and has not corrected them in the past 20 years, so they are not going to correct them now. They often make changes which can affect the display of results, though.

That seller shows more than 80 "sales" (so-called) for that exact title in the past 90 days. But there are actually only 20 verified sales for that exact title in the past 3 years. So any algorithm that is using their sold items is completely unreliable, and has been for years.

That seller seems to have a great many listings that are "sold" but are either not paid for, or are cancelled. I wonder if they are using the eBaymag app, which automatically creates duplicate listings on eBay international websites, and manages the inventory for the seller by ending all the duplicate listings whenever one of the listings is sold. That would be another contributor to the inaccuracy of eBay Sold listings.

Edit:

Taking a closer look at the seller, it looks as though that user ID IS the PSA vault. That would suggest that all items stored in the vault will be listed by this seller, if the owner decides to sell their item. That would explain why they have so many of the identical card.

https://www.ebay.com/str/psa?_tab=about