An AuctionBytes survey about eBay's recent outage show sellers are concerned about eBay's site stability and feel the company did not communicate the outage in a timely fashion to buyers and sellers.

On Saturday, November 21, 2009, eBay experienced an outage of the search and browse feature on its site (link to news story). AuctionBytes conducted a survey on November 22 - 23, 2009, to determine how sellers were impacted by the outage and how they felt eBay handled the situation.

Full Survey Results
The full survey results can be found online (note there are multiple pages, see navigation buttons on the bottom of the pages).

Respondents reported that they sell primarily using the fixed-price format (38%); primarily using the auction format (35%); or sell about equally in both fixed-price and auction formats (27%).

Learning of the Outage
The majority of respondents first learned of the eBay search outage when they encountered the problem when using eBay (62%), and another 15% read about it on the eBay Forums.

Only 1 percent learned of the problem by reading it on the eBay Announcement Board, and only 0.2% learned of it by reading it on eBay's corporate blog (eBay Ink).

The remaining 21% read about it on non-eBay websites or blogs in the industry (11%), websites or blogs outside of the industry (2.8%), or "Other" (0.07%) (this was after factoring in those who said "Other" but specified industry websites or blogs).

Fewer than 1% first read about the outage on Twitter.

When asked whether eBay communicated the outage in a timely fashion to sellers, only 1.6% said yes (88.7% said no, 9.6% said don't know).

When asked whether eBay communicated the outage in a timely fashion to buyers, only 1.6% said yes (75.2% said no, 23.1% said don't know).

Impact on Usage
As far as the impact on using the site, 89% had problems searching; 84% had problems browsing; 52% had problems listings or chose not to list because of the site issues; and 52% said they encountered problems when shopping on eBay.

While 55% of respondents had listings set to end during the search outage, 86% felt the technical issues impacted their sales, and the same amount (86%) felt they were entitled to a refund of seller fees on listings running during the outage, whether or not they were scheduled to end that day.

Sellers Show Initial Skepticism

When asked the following: "eBay has announced it would issue full fee credits for affected items, and said it would assess the economic impact of this issue and would compensate sellers appropriately. How satisfactory do you rate that statement?" 51% said "not satisfactory."

When asked the following: "eBay has announced it would issue full fee credits for affected items, and said it would assess the economic impact of this issue and would compensate sellers appropriately. How confident are you that eBay will make sufficient compensation to sellers?" 74% said, "I do not believe eBay will adequately compensate sellers affected by the outage."

(Note that eBay subsequently announced it was working to ensure that sellers and buyers whose transactions were affected by the disruptions would be made as whole as possible, writing, "This includes listing fee refunds and protection against negative or neutral buyer feedback as well as detailed seller ratings (DSRs) lower than 5 stars for impacted sellers, and coupons for buyers of items that were impacted by the disruption." eBay is also allowing sellers to cancel Auction-style orders that closed during the outage or within an hour after the outage.)

Confidence in Site Stability
Respondents were asked to indicate their level of concern that eBay's site will remain stable through the end of the year - 86% said they were somewhat or very concerned.

Other results include respondents' views on whether they believe they are entitled to a refund and whether they believe eBay's technical issues impacted their sales or would impact their feedback left buy buyers.

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