eBay to customers: We're not worthy, no really we're not worthy

Saturday the front end of the truck busted and bargain shoppers were met with errors, slowness, delays and then nada.

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml

They started off at, instead of their weekly one day maintenance, a shove from Nov 19th 11pm PST to Nov 20th 1am. Then on Nov 21st first sighting was at 5am and then at 3:28pm PST they finally acknowledged it. Hmmm sound familar?


Their first formal announcement that's being published/replaced is (note: I don't recall seeing the workaround in the original message so I question whether that was originally in there):

**Original: Issues with Search results and eBay Stores***


November 21, 2009 | 03:28PM PST/PT

Due to errors in some of our backend systems, members may be seeing different errors in Search. This could be that "We were unable to run the search results you entered. Please try again in a few minutes" or a blank page, or simply the browser being unable to display the page.

This is also affecting the ability to access eBay Stores through search directly, and sometimes from the store URL.

Workarounds - Buy It Now Search and Advanced Search
If you use the Advanced Search option at the top of the page, and type in your search query and click the title and description box and then run the search, the results for the title and description search will be returned.

Alternatively, if you receive a 0 results page for title search and click the Buy It Now tab (or choose the title and description box and re-run the search), you'll see the (Buy It Now or title and description) results for your search query.

Please note that we are working as quickly as possible to get this resolved. Thank you for your patience as we continue to work to resolve this.

Now this is more like ebay thinking a little narrow minded. That their customers actually are regular shoppers during a holiday season. First they need to get in, which most of them didn't. And then you have to expect them to go fetch a system announcement. Ebay didn't put up any error code messages to alert that shopper that there was a problem on their end. Instead shoppers had to wonder whether it was their computers (way to waste peoples time) Now granted, some of them got in, but when they searched they got ZERO RESULTS. How's that for a hint. Get lost Shopper, we don't want your kind.

Quoted from trade site Auctionbytes:

The unanticipated technical issue resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago. The company said the technical issue, once identified, was easily fixed.

Yah..
1. That's called poor planning. Unanticipated = We made a stupid error in judgment and made this mistake
2. The fact that that once they figured it out it was easily fixed supports #1 above. You're really stupid.
3. eBay couldn't code their way out of a paper bag with their sloppy enhancements. I think maybe the delay of communication involved some motivational speaker to get the team to believe what they were about to stand behind in order to retain users.


I'll probably come back to this later, I wonder whether ebay had control of their system to even put up a customized error message to state the outage. For long time shoppers of ebay, this is classic. Like Meg Whitman era. They brought out Lorrie Norrington who seems to be low exec on the food chain. CEO John Donahoe must be packing his bags. He should. eBay made strong commitments to the net about this never happening again. Stupid, but then again you are owned by your statements so a stupid commitment means a stupid management team.

eBay is back up and running. So they say. Ask regular users of the site and they've got ZERO confidence in that. Zero, kinda like what their search results were returning. They said it was because of a surge of listings. I think that was the only excuse they could use at the time.