eBay shoppers and particularly eBay buyers are annoyed after a back-end outage has kept shoppers from searching and from viewing sellers’ stores for most of the day. While the site posted a workaround that makes it possible for users to search, it’s unlikely that most casual shoppers will find and use the workaround.

Industry blog Auctionbytes has been watching the situation, and made the same observation:

UPDATE: 6:12 pm EST – eBay replaced its previous Systems Announcement posts with one at 2:59 pm PST that suggests a workaround:

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. Likewise, if you receive a 0 results page for title search and choose the title and description box and re-run the search, you’ll see the appropriate results.

Does eBay think buyers are going to first of all, find this announcement, and second of all, follow these convoluted instructions? Surely eBay is not paving the way to get out of calling it an outage?

eBay’s outage policy only covers auctions scheduled to end during or shortly after the outage, so the majority of current listings will not be included under this policy. Watch for eBay’s reputation to take a major hit after this incident.

Major Search Outage Leaves eBay Shoppers Empty-Handed (Thanks, Dale!)

(Photo: erikg)

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