Sellers have identified a glitch that affects shoppers' ability to find all relevant items when searching within eBay Stores. Sellers noticed the problem as early as July 10, though some have been complaining about eBay's search function for months.

eBay did not update its Systems Announcement board to alert buyers and sellers to the problem. However, "View and Report Site Issues," which is accessible through the "Contact Us" feature on eBay.com, carried a notice of the problem Friday afternoon.

Sellers noticed that searches in their eBay Stores did not bring back all results and realized that searching "Titles & Descriptions" (T&D), which is the default setting on eBay Store searches, would bring back fewer results than unchecking the T&D box and conducting a search. (Searching titles and descriptions should bring back more results than title searches only.)

eBay's suggested workaround in the Friday afternoon post was to uncheck the T&D box when entering words into the Store Search box. But even if shoppers became aware the search was failing to bring back all of a Store's listings, which is unlikely, they would be even more unlikely to find eBay's suggested workaround.

And, as one seller pointed out, unchecking the T&D box would also limit results, since the search would look only in listing titles for the keyword, not descriptions. "...Unchecking the T&D box is NOT the solution I need," the seller posted.

The seller who reported the problem to AuctionBytes via email on Friday expressed a frustration that has been growing in the seller community since March, when eBay rolled back "Stores in Search":

"So I now really believe that there are multiple problems - and that the inconsistent and missing results have imploded because the databases and synchronizing/mirroring problems have exacerbated a series of problems they introduced in the February search change, April switchback and June store search change experiments. Even after years of enduring Ebay's Quality Assurance failures that have allowed them to get away with rolling out huge problems in changes with basic functionality, I believe that they have outdone themselves this time."

After an inquiry about the problem on Friday afternoon, an eBay spokesperson told AuctionBytes she would investigate the issue and have an answer on Monday.

A Thread in the eBay Discussion Boards about the Glitch:
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=2000176685