| Sat Sept 15 2007 015:03:12 |
 Warning: Bad Data in eBay Completed Search
By: Ina Steiner
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eBay has acknowledged a glitch with its Completed Item search feature that brings back bad data. eBay sellers use the data to help them make critical business decisions, such as inventory acquisition, listing and product pricing. The feature is also used by buyers to help them make purchasing decisions based on past selling prices.
Here is an excerpt of a letter I received from a seller on Wednesday telling me about the problem:
I have shown the problem to the Ebay help desk at least 15 times in the last 18 days. And their response is that it is a known problem and that Tech is working on it. The help desk staff advised me that Tech was made aware of the problem on August 21st and as of tonight the results still can not be trusted.
The list will come back showing items as not sold, when they did actually sell. It may come back with items listing as sold but showing the wrong number of bids and final sale price. Or it will come back missing days or weeks of data for some sellers.
In almost every 'conversation' with live help I have asked then to please post this information to the systems announcements because buyers and sellers make business decisions based on historical sales data for items. They have refused, and my letters to the technical support group have gone unanswered.
I have become so frustrated with this bad data that I have begun the complaint process through both the Pennsylvania Attorney Generals Office and the Santa Clara District Attorney's office.
Ebay had been knowingly supplying false information for the last 22 days, and refuses to let the community know of this problem.
Someone posted a thread about it on September 8 on the eBay discussion boards. No eBay employee responded to the concerns on the board.
eBay spokesperson Hani Durzy confirmed the problem on Friday. "We know it's happening, we've been working on it. We've rolled a fix to the site. But at this time, the issue is not completely resolved by that fix, so we're continuing to work on it. It's in the process of being resolved, but it's not completely resolved."
So why no posting on the Announcement board? "It's something we chose not to announce on, but rather address as it came up if people were to ask," Durzy said.
Asked about the fact that people are making business decisions based on bad data without knowing it's bad data, Durzy said, "We understand. The thing we're doing right now is working to fix it, first."
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