"We looked everywhere." appearing on EVERY SINGLE PAGE (issue)

[wickmesh]

Over the last few days, while attempting to browse and search ebay normally, more than once I've encountered a situation where every function on ebay stops - and every single page I've visited (item listing, search page, My ebay Summary, Items won) reverts to the (infuriating) "We looked everywhere." error page.

It's as if either:

(A) ebay as a website has crashed, and whilst the back-room services are rebooting, this page is all that the front end will serve in response to any request of any kind.
(B) the DOS (denial of service)* protection employed by ebay has been dialled up way too high. Like prevent users from actually using the site kind of high...

The only fix I've found is to walk away for 10 minutes, then come back and try again. Unfortunately, I feel most casual buyers will have gone to Amazon within 5 minutes of this happening. (I'd hate to be a seller having my auction end within this 10 minute period... as there are still plenty of buyers who only place bids in the dying seconds of auctions.)

I always use ebay.co.uk - I'm using Firefox 108.0 (64-bit) on Windows 10 22H2.

[I have a list of 20+ bugs to report - after typing up a rant on a different forum I decided to be more useful and record the bugs I encountered whilst using ebay (since early November) - and frankly the ebay.co.uk platform is awful. My time is valuable, I'll report some of them here and see what happens, if ebay take note and the results are positive (bugs start getting fixed) I'll take the time to report more issues.]

* I've had multiple issues with ebay's DOS protection preventing legitimate use of the website before. I've had ebay representantives saying "wE dOn'T uSe DeNiAl oF sErViCe PrOteCtIoN" or "wE dOn'T uSe AkAmAi" which appears be the company line - but is also 100% false. Please don't try and pull this one.

[douglaspuglas]

At 2pm today there is an hourly chat with the community team where they allegedly try and answer ebayers problems. Why don't you vent to them, it probably won't do any good but it's worth a go.

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Chat-with-the-eBay-Community/Weekly-Chat-with-the-eBay-Community-Tea... 

[ducatimondo]

We get the "we've looked everywhere" message a lot when trying to send message replies to buyers.

It usually happens if you are writing a reply and get distracted, from a phone call, customer coming in the shop, courier collection or delivery etc, so the reply doesn't get sent straight away and you come back to it.

I now habitually copy any message I am sending onto my clipboard before hitting reply. At least if I do get that page, then I don't have to write the message again.

Seems like if you leave the message reply open longer than maybe half an hour, then it doesn't work. Would be nice for an eBay cookie to last more than half an hour, but hey ho, they make what they make and it'll make no difference asking for it to be changed as it never will be. Not too bad if you are sitting in an ivory tower and just doing that, but if you are busy spinning 10 plates at the same time as most of us small business' usually are, then you are going to get the glitch.

We also often get the "we've looked everywhere" message when we are looking around the help pages, like they have updated what the pages are called but not bothered to update the links. Basic schoolboy errors that are so annoying...

I used to get eBay to call me to report these issues, as we can't call them. Now I don't bother, what is the point. You try and explain it to someone that doesn't even seem to know how to use eBay themselves and then nothing will happen anyway. There is no technical department you can speak to, the customer service agents you can speak to only seem to want to get you off the phone again as quickly as possible, whether they helped you or not. Instead I figure that I might as well shrug my shoulders and leave em to it, if they don't want it to work properly, then okay.

This is the same for most technical issues, what is the point telling them there are problems, they never fix them and you are wasting your time, 20 years doing this has taught me that if nothing else.

[wickmesh]

Thanks for the attempts to help - but no response from ebay themselves, bug still definitely present on the site.

Is this the right place to report bugs or am I wasting my time?

[ducatimondo]

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@wickmesh wrote:

Thanks for the attempts to help - but no response from ebay themselves, bug still definitely present on the site.

Is this the right place to report bugs or am I wasting my time?

---

It often feels like you are wasting your time, I can appreciate that as you often feel like you ask and ask and ask and nothing happens.

The best place to ask is the weekly chat with the eBay team, though it is only available between 2pm-3pm on Wednesday afternoons, so can be a little frustrating if you are busy then or forget and have to wait till the following week.

You can see previous discussions with the eBay team here

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Chat-with-the-eBay-Community/bd-p/WeeklyChatwiththeCommunityteam

Looks like there isn't one this week coming due to Christmas, but the next should be Wednesday 4th Jan.

I have had some good help there and a lot of other members seem to get things sorted too, so definitely worth a look. Try to post a question as soon as you can at the start as you will likely get a reply quicker, that you may then also be able to counter reply to, as the chat literally just switches off bang on 3pm.

[wickmesh]

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@ducatimondo wrote:

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The best place to ask is the weekly chat with the eBay team, though it is only available between 2pm-3pm on Wednesday afternoons, so can be a little frustrating if you are busy then or forget and have to wait till the following week.

---

That's really useful of ebay. REALLY useful. Schedule the one hourly chat per week at a time most people are busy working. It's like they don't actually want to hear about any issues. They don't exist if ebay ignore them, right?

[wickmesh]

This is getting beyond a joke.

Now every single day whilst normally browsing the ebay.co.uk site, the site goes down.

That is I'm browsing/searching for/looking for items/attempting to add them to my custom lists and every page becomes the utterly unhelpful "We looked everywhere".

Actually, I'm wrong. As the attached screenshot shows, not every page - the ebay.co.uk homepage shows a much reduced "Where's all the stuff?" page. It hints that basically the site has crashed, and claims the rest of ebay "is fine" (which is a lie).

What's going on?

- Is ebay's code so bad that the site crashes daily? (Given the myriad bugs, that's very likely.)

- Has ebay not bought enough servers? (Again, likely.)

- Has ebay turned the DOS protection up so high that it kicks in and stops users actually using the site? (Highly beliveable.)

If there's any good news, it's that the site seems to come back quicker now. It's in the order of a minute or two, not 10 minutes.

(FYI when looking at the screenshot you'll see I block that ******* annoying kid in jacket picture, because (1) I see it so often and (2) it sums up for me ebay's competence. I'm sure some marketing person thought they were really clever when they picked it.)

If it's coming across that I'm getting rather fed up, then well done, you've read the tone of my post correctly!

[steveball]

Nearly 3 months later and still happening several times every day, unuseable.

[flomantiques54]

My feeling is that they are focusing on the mobile device use, Which I believe is growing at a good rate.  They want this segment of users to have a good experience so they will continue using the APP.  This at the expence of the desk top users.  I have heard that these "we can't find it anywhere" errors don't appear on the mobile app.  So my feeling is they intentionally let desktop users suck it while mobile app users fly free and easy.  So, I feel this has been done intentionally and someone needs to be transparent, so everyone knows what's going on.  But so much is wrong with Ebay right now that this forum post goes off into nowhere.  For God;s sake, the person I'm replying to doesn't know I replied until they return to this exact page to check.  Every other forum in the world notifies you when someone replies, or there is any activity on this thread.  S yea, they don't want things to work.  They don't want people knowing what's going on.  They probably doon't have the people needed to solve this sort of issue and are happy with it like it is.  I wonder if ebay itself is in the throws of collapse.  Grab your popcorn and sit back for the big show.  Reality is much more interesting than fiction these days.

[steveball]

Another 3 months later and still happening several times every day.

[bugman_uk]

Same here - site will work fine and then randomly "We've looked everywhere" page pops up for every page I try ... wait 5 minutes and it all comes back working fine.  Really annoying. 

[Windows10, Edge, all patched correctly]

[steven9165]

Same for me, click once "We looked everywhere" shows. sometimes i go back then when I try again its OK. But if I click Open Link in New Tab or Open Link in New Window whenever this happens it finds the page OK, its a bit like the double click trackers

[twomuchstuff-1]

Having the same problem. Search for an item ie: Shoes in womens shoes and get the page "We looked everywhere" tried it on other sections as well and the same happening.

Why is this a regular problem over the last week or so?

How do ebay expect you to search for something you are looking for when it will not load the pages.

Very frustrating.

[coh2000]

I'm in the US and I get that message too. *September 17. 2023.

Tried to get into Ebay to bid on an item nearing end of auction but could not.

Tried Edge and Google with same results.

When I did get in, I see others had bid during the same time I could not even get into Ebay.

So, I lost because I could not bid.

[parts-rk]

Having the same issues constantly, I use Brave browser basically the same google chrome, contacting eBay ir pointless, because most of the customer support knows less than I do. And 90% of their messages should be read is "*bleep* off I will not report anything to anyone." 

[cornishchough]

Although it no help I'm getting some comfort as my Ebay has been behaving erratically over the past couple of weeks. Have the Ebay backroom boys been tinkering again - Bob

[techtomic]

I get the site "crash" with the same Error Page whenever I upload some photos to a listing. It blocks the whole session til a timeout is reached. If I open another browser eBay is running fine though, so it seems to be your browser hitting a threshold and blocking the session.

It's incredibly annoying when you create a new or updated listing, spend time uploading and editing everything, then submit and it crashes. Best way is to create or update all the information first, save, then go back and do photos in small batches.

Ebay must do better as we are supposed to rely on it for our businesses, and pay handsomely for the privilege.

[elusia]

This is so anoing. Trying to put 20 new products.And from the morning I did just two of them. All the time this *bleep* error. DO SOMETHING zjEBAY