Murphy's Law controls at eBay - or is eBay run by a bunch of monkeys?

With the latest round of changes at eBay, its frightening that a company which we depend on so much for our lively hood seems to be run with no real senese of coordination or roadmap and plan of action for mission critical site rollouts.

Murhpy's law states that everything that can go wrong will and at the worst possible time. Is eBay really to blame or are they just a victim of bad luck?? Lets examine the situation further.

Site Glitches

I couldn't help but notice all of the glitches and bugs over the past month with Best Match and related components over the past month.

Lets recap just a few:

1. DSR miscalculation about 6-8 weeks ago
   
2. Best Match sorting results upside down resulting in what was penned "worst match"
3. My latest discovery, on the eve of what I consider one of the biggest changes to date, FP30 or 30 day fixed price listings, Best Match is not de-duping the sort results, therefore sellers are monopolozing the pages and pushing alot of other sellers way down with no hope of ever making a sale.

Recently I read the interview with Jeff King regarding the flip flopping of best match results, here is an exceprt:

“We had a very unusual software bug that we unfortunately didn’t catch during our testing process. Essentially, it caused Best Match to sometimes sort items incorrectly over roughly the past 3 days, which is why the member mentioned in this post saw what they did. The members who did see these strange results were able to fix it by refreshing, but of course that’s not an acceptable solution to either us or them. We had teams working 24 by 7 to get this fixed as soon as we discovered it.”

He went on to say…

“We of course don’t want things like this to happen, and we apologize to all the members who saw this strange Best Match sort order. We’ve already changed our testing process to make sure that this won’t occur again.”

What I find really disheartening is that search is a mission critical component of the eBay site, yet they tinker with it daily and on a live basis, with no regard for the sellers who are affected by these bugs. Has ebay extended any courtesy credits or perhaps free FVF for a month by those who were affected? Thanks for the apology eBay, but we still have to put food on the table and pay the power bill.

I used to be a programmer myself by profession and certain applications were considered 'mission critical'. Things like credit card processing, etc. These systems rarely went down and when they did, it was code red, defcon 4, whatever you want to call it. It got everyones attention and it was taken care of as soon as possible with the most extreme sense of urgency.

What I don't understand is with the amount of money and resources that eBay has at its disposal, why is the site full of bugs on the live site? Several are very easy to spot. Many go on for weeks after being reported.

Perhaps the QC team got laid off and no one has filled those positions?


Lack of planning for changes rolled out


Scot Wingo talked about the lack of API interface for the new FP30 listing type in his blog today.

Well today eBay officially launched the Multi-quantity 30-day duration fixed price listing (FP30 for short).

I'm proud to announce that we are already not only supporting FP30 TODAY at ChannelAdvisor in both our MarketplaceAdvisor Standard and Premium offerings, but we've done some enhancements to take advantage of how the relist works so that our customers will be advantaged with their recent sales.

This was tricky because eBay hasn't had this in the API until it went live on the site at midnight PT, so we had to have a team working on this in real time to support it, test, it, etc. In fact, this new format won't be in the eBay sandbox for weeks. Clearly the business changes are coming faster than the rest of the company can keep up right now.

Congratulations to Scot and his team for getting the CA software to work with FP30. My question is, since this change has been planned out for well over a month or two, wouldn't it make sense for eBay to notify their 'Certified Partners' and let them know that the API is ready so that the launch of such an important change could be used by everyone?

Personally I use the Vendio software and at this time they do not support the FP30 option, nor have I read anything about such a listing type in any of their updates. (authors note: GET WITH IT VENDIO!!)

This puts sellers who use 3rd party tools at a real disadvantage. In fact, eBay's own Turbo Lister application wasn't ready to go until around 4:15 pm EST. Wouldn't it be in eBay and their partners best interests to work together and have everything ready to go for rollout?

The lack of planning and disorderly rollout really shakes my confidence in this once vibrant company. To quote Randy Smythe's interview from awhile back, eBay seems like its a huge ship without a rudder.

I kind of have to disagree with you Randy.

eBay is run by a bunch of monkeys. Haven't you ever wondered why ebay's site is primarily banana yellow?

Currently playing on my iPod (Gwen Stefani - "this beat is bananas.. b a n a n a s....")

DSR calculation error frustrates eBay sellers

Over the weekend, ebay announced  that sellers 30-day rolling DSR averages were not displaying correctly in the seller dashboard widget. Ebay initially told sellers that the problem was corrected, but later posted an announcement regarding the ongoing glitch.

DSRs Displaying Incorrectly

Ebay has now pulled the Seller Dashboard widget and announced that the best match logic will not use DSR's until the problem is corrected and went further to announce that seller discounts will not be calculated until the issue is resolved as well.

Nonetheless, several sellers have jumped to conclusions accusing ebay of DSR manipulation.

Personally I saw a sharp drop in my DSR averages which led me to believe something was not kosher. For example, my DSR average for the past 12 months for 'Item as Described' was consistently 4.9 or higher. This number dropped down all the way to under 4.7 in the matter of a few days.  Could this be because of the way DSR's are calculated on a rolling 30 day average?  Perhaps, but the number seemed very low from what I'm used to seeing, so probably not.

Seller's distrust of eBay is undersandable especially in this situation because of the way DSR's are calculated. Sellers don't see the raw scores from buyers and when problems like this rear their head's, sellers are quick to jump the gun.

I will commend eBay for stepping up and removing these items from the best match logic, however it does show how venurable sellers are to all of the constant site problems that eBay experiences. Sellers are always charged listing fees and have live auctions which are ending every minute and eBay's response in my opinion should be more swift and should result in some type of credit to sellers for the confusion and inconvenience.  After all, there is no sure fire way to tell how these bugs are affecting your bottom line as an ebay seller.   

Has anyone been negatively affected by the DSR calculation bug? How would you have handled this issue if you were eBay management?

Does anyone think its somewhat odd that this is even a bug?   

What is ebay doing updating DSR scores?