Some unhappy eBay sellers have been looking for evidence of foul play from the auction site, believing eBay tried to mask the effect of a recent boycott. When Shopping.com listings appeared on eBay.com last week, sellers pointed to it as an example of eBay attempting to boost listing numbers.

After the company announced a slew of changes on January 29, some sellers participated in a 1-week boycott of eBay starting February 18th. Sellers, analysts and reporters began analyzing listing counts to try and measure the effect of the boycott.

AuctionBytes reported on Saturday the existence of a thread on eBay's discussion board from a user who noticed a large number of Shopping.com listings had appeared on eBay.com (http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2008/3/1204379814.html). eBay spokesperson Usher Lieberman initially told AuctionBytes they appeared due to a test, but on Monday, said he was incorrect and that the listings were the result of a glitch.

On Tuesday, Lieberman explained the nature of the glitch. Programmers rolled out code on Friday evening that was meant to credit certain listings that were eligible for free Gallery. The credit was due to them because eBay had promised sellers Gallery would be free for listings started at a certain time of day, and the code had been rolled out 3 hours past the deadline.

Lieberman said the programmers inadvertently caused the Shopping.com listings to appear on eBay.com when it created and launched the script to credit the sellers' accounts for Gallery fees.

Lieberman said fewer than 35,000 listings were affected by the glitch.

However, he had no explanation for the fact that when AuctionBytes looked at one Shopping.com selling account on Saturday morning, it indicated the seller had over 80,000 listings on eBay.com. One seller claimed on Saturday that he had captured screenshots that showed there were many more Shopping.com listings on eBay.

Lieberman said eBay has always been conservative without a hint of financial scandal in its life. eBay reports the number of registered users and number of listings to the SEC on a quarterly basis. Of the accusations of listing count manipulation, Lieberman said, "To think that we'd do that now is outrageous."

PCMagazine picked up on the story and reported on seller accusations that eBay was "padding listing numbers." (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2273210,00.asp). Interestingly, the story addresses the complaint from sellers that discussion threads discussing the issue had been removed. "eBay denied that any forum deletions were intentional. If any posts were taken down "it was accidental," the spokesman said. "We're not afraid of hearing from our community and allowing them to post and discuss things and be angry on our boards," PCMagazine wrote.

AuctionBytes previously reported that several discussion threads had been removed, including one linked to in the original blog post published on Saturday.

Most sellers are likely taking little notice of the dust-up. Those who are suspicious may be unlikely to be satisfied with eBay's response.