Problem with private messaging?

[bigskysell]

I'm wondering if anyone has noticed a problem with the Ebay private messaging?

I've had a lot of customer & prospective customer conversations suddenly stop, mid-thread, over the last week or so, for no apparent reason. And then never hear from them again.

This is very unusual because I've had this happen about half a dozen times while setting up custom bundles for people. In other words, they came to me specifically requesting to purchase items. But then the conversation never finishes. I've also had this happen with customers after purchase. Same thing.

Either I'm imagining this, there is nothing wrong, and customers behaviors have suddenly changed over the last week.

Or there is some sort of problem where some messages are not getting delivered. Perhaps ones containing keywords. Or perhaps random ones. Or perhaps some threads simply stop communicating with each other for some technical reason. Like a flag was flipped.

I don't know. I'm just wondering if anyone else has seen this?

[ckimodog]

@bigskysell 

Over the weekend I had a customer message me and stated they had messaged me a few days ago concerning an item they wanted to buy.  I looked in my email and my Ebay messages....nothing.  I check my email daily too. So there may very well be a glitch (again).  Hopefully Ebay is on top of it.  Communication is so important and the last thing a seller needs is something else to hinder sales.

Happy Selling to you!

[dbfolks166mt]

There are issues with the messaging system and I have had a couple of problems with messages showing up late, i.e. a couple of days after they were sent or not showing up at all. There was another posting about this issue a few days ago apparently it is still happening. 

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Ebay-messaging-has-not-been-working-causing-issues-with-buyers... 

[dhbookds]

just want to confirm that you are looking ON ebay....in your messages......Not depending on emails in your email server? 

[wastingtime101 · Accepted solution]

Hey @bigskysell. Contact customer service and ask them to add your account to ALERT14632

There's a site wide tech ticket on this, but as you've discovered, it's hard to tell if you're impacted or if you just ran into a few buyers that changed their mind. Better to get added to the ticket than not.

[bigskysell]

Yes, it's through the private messaging feature of Ebay - both through the app and the messaging on the site. I don't use the emails.

[ckimodog]

@wastingtime101 

Thank you!

[wastingtime101]

No prob - you should get added to the ticket, too @ckimodog. More people reporting, higher priority for a fix and this issue is significant.

[ckimodog]

@wastingtime101 

Yes, I will.  I'm not getting on my phone either.  Thanks again. 

[bigskysell]

Thanks. Any suggestion for how to best contact them? Should I try Facebook for Business or some other method?

BTW, since posting my question above, I was able to contact a customer of mine and they went through their messages and confirmed that they were not receiving all of the conversation.

Which is really unfortunate. Had I not been able to get in contact with them again, I would have lost that sale.

I'm 100% positive I lost about half a dozen sales last week due to prospective-customers thinking I did not reply to their message or that I did not follow through with creating & listing a bundle we had agreed on.

Sigh. 😞

[wastingtime101]

Use any method you like. It's an easy one, just asking for your account to be added to an existing tech ticket so no special service is needed, any rep can handle it. Fastest method is chat or callback on this page:

https://www.ebay.com/help/contact_us?id=4002&st=10

But if you prefer you can send a DM on twitter or fb - you'll have to wait for the link to verify your account and all that. Chat at the link above will be fastest.

[bigskysell]

Thanks man. Very much appreciated!!

[bigskysell]

Just to follow up, I contacted Ebay support, and basically: the dude was helpful, looked up my messages, acknowledged the problem, apologized, said they are aware of the issue, and they are doing everything possible to fix it soon™.

I would have copied and pasted the exact reply, but the bottom of the chat window said a transcript of the conversation would be sent to my email - so I figured I would copy and paste the pertinent text from there... but I never got it. Doh! :smh: (I should have known better and just copied it when I could have.)

In any case, I saw people arguing in the other thread about whether this really was an issue or not, and I can tell you YES there is definitely an issue. And it is a serious one. This has flat out cost me hundreds of dollars in lost sales in just the last week. If either you or your customers have been feeling like one or the other of you have been randomly ghosting each other, it's probably because some messages disappeared into the void and have not gone through. Contact support through the chat link shared above and bring it to their attention so we can hopefully get this fixed. The squeaky wheel gets greased.

[wastingtime101]

Keep trying to message those buyers. Go to their FB page and click send message and select "this is not about an item" to see if it makes a difference.

Check your email spam folder if you don't get a copy of the chat transcript.

[toch_6405]

Hello, as a buyer, I have actually just experienced this, me and the seller was having a conversation and in the middle of it my message suddenly shown as not delivered, however I believe that the seller didn’t block me and he could still send me messages, maybe the pm system in eBay started to stop frequent chats idk what is going on either.