This came up for me last year around this time, and again this year: My image server SSL certificate was ready to expire in about 10 days. And at about that time (± 3 days, I am unsure of the exact timing) my eBay sales dropped suddenly to zero. I’ve checked, and have no messages from eBay directly about it, though I do have some warnings from my hosting company/SSL provider.
Also, I’ve mainly been using the GarageSale free service over the last few weeks, so I don’t even know what proportion of my listings have images at my servers. I don’t know the schedule for the garagesale SSL certificate renewal.
Anyway, I’m mostly curious: It feels as if my listings stopped being seen about the time when a new listing would have ended after the SSL expired. In other words, when a listing would have lasted longer than the active SSL cert.
I’m wondering if there’s any evidence that might be the case?
If I am not wrong, time ago I must have read something somewhere about ebay excluding http listings from results, maybe in the time they decided to exclude also listings with watermarked images (years ago). It sounds the same matter to me.
The interesting thing here is that my SSL certificate was still valid for another 8 days—so it would have expired during the listings that suddenly stopped selling (that are all 30-day fixed price listings).
My point is: Maybe they preemptively stop returning items in that last… month or so of a certificate’s life?
Are you suspecting that eBay is downgrading your listings visibility, because some of your listings included images served via an expired SSL certificate?
I never heard of this, but if eBay is actually doing this, shouldn’t they be re-scanning your listings constantly, so they can be sold again once your SSL issues are fixed? Otherwise they’d lose money on each sale not made.
Not generally paranoid about this sort of stuff. But yes, basically, this is my suspicion, since this same thing has happened 3 years in a row now, right at the point where my SSL has been expiring.
And my suspicion is not that the SSL was expired when they downgraded. My suspicion is that it was going to expire within the lifetime of the listings.
Can I ask, @ilja, when is the GS image server SSL renewed? (I know I can probably work it out, but it’s more complicated than I have bandwidth for right now).
That same sort of gap appeared in the last week of February in 2024 and 2023, too.
