I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that more listings that were already identified in the eBay Product Catalog (books, in this case) have been generating “Product Not Found” errors when I re-list them manually.
Until today, I haven’t really spent much time trying to fix the broken links, but today I spent some time trying to re-discover the same items I had already found in earlier catalog versions.
I don’t know if it’s a server-side change outside your control, or a change in the API, but it certainly looks like the results are much broader and fuzzier. For example, I used to be confident of one or two hits when entered the first couple of words of a book’s title, and the publication date. Now there are dozens or hundreds of returned results from the same kind of search.
If it’s a server-side change in the search settings, I guess there’s nothing any of us can do. But if there is an API expansion, could you check to see if there’s a way to narrow the product search results intentionally?