Disappearing listings

Hi Paul,

To answer your question:

Yes, this happens often, where an items in a group just disappears. It does not happen because I am deleting items, they just are gone, poof. But they still exist on eBay, so I am often made aware of it when a customer buys an item that I didn’t see in GS, so I couldn’t end the listing when it sold out. Big customer service problem.

I have a current example:

Our listing for the Paiste “C” Floor Gong Stand for 22" Gongs (ST48122) only exists on eBay, but when I search for it in GS, it is nowhere.

So now, the only way I can have any control over my product is to delete the existing version one eBay, and create a new item in Garage Sale.

I have even tried ending and relisting in eBay, and it still will not show up in GS.

When I relisted the item within eBay, the item also stays in the correct section that I assigned it to in GS. (Paiste Gong Stand Section)

Also, I have just replaced the older version with the new one you shared, and it still does not show up.

Thank you.
I am using a Mac OS X El Caitan
GS 7.0.8b2 (797)

Hello all and sorry for reply.
So…

  1. they are all 30-days listing that where previously relisted automatically by GS
  2. no, they expire and relist on their own
  3. it crashed until some release ago, there was a bug when manually relisting (@ilja should remember)

I am talking about disappearing from the regular group. If a listing is in the trash, for me it means it is rubbish so no worries if it actually disappears

@paul notice that one thing is emptying a trash full of expired items, and a very different thing is emptying a bin that SHOULD contains expired ones but ACTUALLY contains (also) some active listings that for some mysterious reason where moved there instead of expired ones. So please take in consideration to insert a warning that inform us about active listings in the bin. It’s normal that deleting deleted items they go forever, but if deleted items are “deleted” because of some bugs… I cannot imagine it and a window which tells inform us would be very very very important… don’t you agree? Also consider that, although hard to happen, active listings may be moved to bin for mistake (not this case, but could happen)

Sure, I am talking about this and only about normal active listings (in regular group) that have disappeared. Why? I don’t know, and less more how…

@Gongs-Unlimited it’s exactly my problem as I showed in my screenshot above. So I am not the only one… I just don’t understand one thing. Why do you say it’s a problem? Well, it is :disappointed_relieved: , but I mean, if the listing in GS is gone for mysterious reason while it is still active in eBay, shouldn’t it be still available in your stock? It is just disappeared in GS and if the active one goes sold (as it happened to me), the active expires and that’s it, you just won’t have a photo and a green listing in GS. It’s actually a problem, but not a stock one, in my opinion, if I correctly understood the matter…

@fedege96 eBay is one of only 6 seller stores we utilize for selling our products. We don’t offer all of our products on eBay, just some.
Let’s say we are out of stock of an item, but I can’t see if it even exists in Garage Sale, I will not know I need to end the listing, as I cannot recollect all of the listings that I (or colleagues) have created.
On several occasions a person purchases an item, that I did not know I needed to be ended because I didn’t know if was active, as it had disappeared on GS.
So to be extra careful I have to now check GS and eBay for active listings, and at that point, how much time and energy is GS actually saving me?
I hope that helps. Thanks!

Yes, I was going to agree with Gongs, if you are also running a physical store or have items posted on multiple outlets this is a huge problem as you lose control over your inventory.

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Ah now I see! So you sell on different site. I did it on Delcampe but listings were synched so I did not have to worry. Of course I don’t know how you can handle such a situation for it with such a high number of listings. I will stay only on eBay as long as GS won’t support synching… it would be impossible to track every sale…

I tried using the new version, but I am still not having any luck. Items are disappearing still. Do you have any other suggestions?

AGAIN! Now I can be a little more careful @paul . So…

  1. there were about 500 listings to be relisted. GS did not yet auto-relisted them, so they were lying expired somewhere. I did not relisted them manually
  2. there were 20-30 unrelisted items for some error (they were highlighted by the smart group, the problem was related to the image server). Since some months the number of error in relisting is enormously increased and it’s almost always the same “setting of the server is missing”. So, I manually relisted them and in the meanwhile GS started to relist (on his own) the 500 expired.
  3. GS crashed (I sent you the report, as name I used my nick in this forum)
  4. I opened again GS and I discovered that in the bin reappeared 2 listing I deleted this morning
  5. I relisted manually the 20-30 listings that where expired. They were correctly relisted.
  6. In the meanwhile GS restarted to relist the 500 expired listing
  7. at the end of all relisting, I have 5 not relisted for this error.

It says that there is still an identical listing active in my shop so it was not relisted… BUT :cold_sweat: the active one was JUST RELISTED by GS since in eBay it is active from 20-05-17 and time was exactly when GS relisted it. Although this, in my GS I only have that expired listing (with the error as shown in photo) AND NO ACTIVE!!! This is a serious matter…

I have just made a specific check of all active listings in my eBay shop, at this moment there are 56 active listings which actually does not exist in GS, there are no correspondence at all, like they were never created, never existed. It’s an atroce problem because how many listing have already expired and then will disappear forever from eBay?? This 56 listings will expire shortly and then… ?? Obviously they won’t be relisted and I will loose them… I would need to check thousands items in my archive to exactly know how many goods I have in my (real) shop which actually are missing in my (eBay) one. @paul please do something asap, my number of listing is decreasing and now I know where they are going … somewhere hidden in GS, just disappear and so don’t relist :scream:

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YES! I sympathize with your pain but I am so glad to have backup on this now!

I had thousands of items that have been just taking up room when I thought they were for sale. I re-created them and at least 100 have disappeared again.

I tried to re-import those listings from “My eBay”, but the result is 56 listings whose image are not changeable (like they are fixed images, if I delete them I am not able to replace new image), so I cannot modify them and I will need to relist from zero, but it’s extremely time and patience consuming. What a mess…

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I have a news. Some days ago I manually ended a listing because I sold the item not in ebay. Then I discovered that listing was still active in my shop while I did not have the correspondence in GS. So, this morning I stopped the listing from ebay site since I didn’t have it in my GS. After some times GS crashed, this is the report:

As soon as GS reopened I found this warning:

Now I have again the listing active in my shop and it is reappeared also in my GS. What to say?? I ended it again from GS and now I hope it won’t happen again. In the meanwhile, the previously told 56 active listings without any correspondence are expired and disappeared forever. Are we all crazy or this is a concrete problem??? The silence from the team is worrying me…

Indeed, @fedege96, I am also concerned that I can no longer trust this software, and may end up discontinuing using it if there is not a serious attempt to fix this issue immediately.

@paul, has the GS team been discussing this issue over the past few days? Is there more information you need from us to move forward with a fix it?

We added a special repair mode in the just released GarageSale 7.0.8 Beta 3:

It works like this:

  • Hold down the control key on your keyboard when starting GarageSale
  • check the “Find Orphaned listings” checkbox
  • Click “Continue”

GarageSale will now check all your listings if they are part of the current group hierarchy. You won’t see the main window while this process is going on, but you can look at the Console.app window from output from GarageSale. We will log a status message every 1000 listings checked. If orphaned listings are found, those are put insert at the end of your current hierarchy.

This process takes about 5 minutes for 60,000 listings on a MacBook Pro with 16 GB Ram and an SDD. Depending your Mac’s speed and library size, your milage will vary.

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@ilja :raised_hands:

That’s the result… the first time I opened only 2 orphaned listing were found, but they have nothing inside, are completely empty, no photo, no design, nothing except title. Actually there are at least 56 lost listings… @ilja please say something, is there any way I/we can help you???

If your lost listings weren’t found by the “orphaned listings” repair function, they are not in the database.

But it’s highly unlikely that GarageSale deleted those by itself, because the only code-path that calls delete on entries in the database is the “Empty Trash” command.

My guess is that the listings were never actually written into the database because of an unknown error (bug in the database, problem with the file system, disk way temporarily full), and GarageSale did not report the error.

Can you recall if you listed the items immediately after creating them, or was there some time between creating and listing the missing items?

It’s extremely difficult to remember the precise situation when I created them since it is at least 4 months ago that these 56 (now missing) are running in my shop. It means that these listings must have been relisted at least 3 times, so it means that they disappeared in my database in the last month. So I would say it is impossible to say the exact situation when they were created since they were automatically relisted by GS (when/how… this is not possible to know). If there is something I am totally sure, it is that since January I am not listing new items from zero (except some, but they are not affected) and the running listings are the same as before. Surely the bug must come from some problem in the auto-relisting (I repeat, I am not creating listing since last year for many reasons, so the items were auto-relisted and have been at least for 3-4 times each one). When I created them (so in 2016), I have no doubt, I listed them as soon as after creating (I use one “model”, so I fill title, photos and description and list it immediately, it doubles, the active goes in the correct output folder and I am ready to modify the remaining inactive listing to go on). Is it useful in some way??? I spent more time in looking for bugs then working, and it is a serious problem :pensive:

I can surely say that this is not the case as many of my missing items were never listed at all but waiting for more items to be added

So do you mean that your orphaned were still inactive??

Yes. There doesn’t seem to be any difference between active or not.

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