eBay said Thursday it has fixed a glitch that caused search results to display out of order. Sellers have reported in recent days that the default Best Match sort were causing their listings to be placed lower than they should have been on search results pages, costing them lost sales.

eBay only displayed a message about the problem to users who tried to report the problem through a web form on the site rather than on its Systems Announcement Board set up to announce scheduled site maintenance and system issues. eBay used the company blog called The Chatter to report on Thursday that it had fixed the problem.

In the blog post, Jeff King, eBay's head of the Finding team, said:

"We had a very unusual software bug that we unfortunately didn't catch during our testing process. Essentially, it caused Best Match to sometimes sort items incorrectly over roughly the past 3 days, which is why the member mentioned in this post saw what they did. The members who did see these strange results were able to fix it by refreshing, but of course that's not an acceptable solution to either us or them. We had teams working 24 by 7 to get this fixed as soon as we discovered it."

So is the issue now fixed?

"Yes, we've fixed the problem, and Best Match is working properly again for all searches."

What are we doing to make sure this doesn't happen again?

"We of course don't want things like this to happen, and we apologize to all the members who saw this strange Best Match sort order. We've already changed our testing process to make sure that this won't occur again."

While eBay said the problem occurred over the past 3 days, some sellers reported they had experienced sporadic problems with Best Match sort for about 2 weeks or longer. Said one such seller who said he began reporting the problem to eBay on August 27, "The problem did change somewhat over the period of the two weeks, most likely the fix for the first problem caused the most recent iteration of the problem."

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