"We looked everywhere" and "Where's all the stuff?" when listing items for sale too quickly

[nujik]

I've been on Ebay for almost 25 years and this is a new one on me. 

When I'm listing things for sale quickly, I seem to run into some sort of spam/bot protection. I will suddenly get a message "We looked everywhere. Looks like this page is missing. If you still need help, visit our help pages" with a link to go to the homepage. If I then click on the homepage, it brings me to another error, this one has a very basic Ebay interface with an error "Where's all the stuff? Our homepage is down, but the rest of eBay is fine. We'll have it back up in a moment". Any attempt to do anything from here will result in Error 1 or Error 2.

Now, obviously ebay isn't going down every time I try to post stuff for sale. I'm able to access ebay on my phone, other computers, etc.. This is clearly some sort of faulty protection system. As far as I can tell, it locks me out for about 10 minutes at a time. It's hard to gauge because if I try to do ANYTHING on ebay, it seems to reset this invisible counter - unbelievably infuriating.

Is there any way around this? I'm literally just entering items for sale by hand, using a desktop and Firefox browser (also tried Chrome, no difference). I usually only have a short amount of time to enter my listings, so being locked out for 10 minutes at a time is insane and pointless. If I have a lot of items to list, it will happen multiple times per session, sometimes doubling the length of time it takes me to enter my items for sale. 

There's got to be some sort of workaround for this, it makes the ebay selling experience awful and frustrating. I'm always trying to strategically time my clicks to avoid hitting some magic barrier. Stepping on eggshells, afraid to look at my Overview or Listings page in case I might incur the wrath of the Fake Error Messages. Even if it could tell me how long I'm locked out for, or how many more clicks I have until I trigger some protection - ANYTHING. Anything would be better than this current system.

[crypto1280]

I get the same. If I list 4 items quite quickly (in 20 minutes) or check around 8 sold items (in 20 min) it looks like some overzealous spam/bot protection kicks in and stops me. Another browser open at the same time works ok so it isn't just some eBay server rebooting or something. I have to wait some minutes or use a different browser or IP address until it lets me in again.

Definitely eBay DDoS or bot protection or something similar, dialled up too high.

[mbub253]

I've had it! I keep getting the where's all the stuff message after I write an ad and go to publish it...it just loads and loads but never publishes. So I lose everything I wrote and have to start over! I have been copying my ads and pasting them in emails so if it does happen, at least I haven't lost my final draft...but I forgot again this time and they did it to me again! G'**bleep** them, I'm so sick of ebays crap!

[nujik]

So is there any point to posting in this forum? It's been four months with no change, in fact it's getting worse. Now I'll trigger this faulty bot protection after just one listing sometimes. Then I've got to wait the 10 minutes or so for it to go away so I can do a second listing. Really fun when I've got 700 listings to input.

[movieman990]

This has been happening to me in January, 2024 on a frequent basis. Apparently no one here knows what is going on...least of all ebay. 

[sophisticated1]

Same thing has been happening to me periodically for maybe a year or so. I can't access anything including purchasing and printing postage. I gave it a 5 minute "time out" just now and then came back to try again. It let me do one search for my SOLD and then the same thing - wouldn't let me do the postage for that same item. I had to cut & paste to get to google so I could find maybe out if it's only happening to me... but apparently not. Very annoying and time consuming.

[zpddodah]

I guess eBay has bigger fish to fry than helping users access their pages!!!

Happens multiple times in a day and the only cure (clearing cache, ctrl F5, clinking on other eBay pages, using other browsers, closing eBay and reopening don't work) is to close eBay and come back later.  Grrrrr.

How long can eBay ignore this?

[marshabo777]

A week ago I started to have this same issue.  So frustrating!  

How do I report this to Ebay?

[nujik]

Good luck. I've talk to support about this and they just say "yeah yeah" and say they'll fix it. Obviously nothing has been done.

[bennotbill]

I noticed last year that the general problem seems to be that eBay is on a go slow.

I'd schedule a listing and have to wait half an hour before I could view it to check. Any earlier and I just got the "we looked everywhere".

[agsperformance]

i've been getting these too recently, really frustrating...

[djbuckaroo]

This isn't a complete solution but it's a work around. If you get stuck like this then turn your WIFI off and on to get a new IP address. Then (sometimes) it will let you continue. 

What's happening to me is trying to post a listing when this happens and it gets stuck and never lists. 

To get around that I'm changing the postal service now everytime as it won't let you do this also. 

So if this is happening to you then try and change the postal service before you list, at least you don't lose the listing this way.  

[3lines]

Having struggled with this problem on desktop I resorted to using the "Seller Hub" tool. I don't like it and don't want to opt in permanently because it is far too cluttered but found it worked where the "My eBay" selling tool did not.

My interpretation is that sellers are being encouraged (coerced?) to use apps with all the difficult default settings and / or the seller hub with all of the automated analytics that businesses may like but private sellers find so cumbersome.

[nujik]

Looks like the problem is actually getting worse instead of better. Last two days, I get locked out of ebay for 5-10 minutes every time I put in a single listing. I have about 400 listings to enter. I don't know why ebay is trying to block people from making listings on their site but it's completely insane.

[animalprint101]

I just started to have the same exact problem. I have tried 3 different browsers and cleared cookies and cashe . No help. Seems to happen more in the evening. Very frustrating. I opened a ticket with ebay support. We will see if that works