eBay Padding Listing Numbers?

It looks like eBay is in more hot water with its sellers after reports have surfaced that they may be adding fake listings to boost the bottom line.

eBay on Tuesday admitted that a "bug" in its system had accidentally placed listings from eBay-owned shopping.com onto eBay.com late Friday night.

According to AppScout eBay blamed the false listing on a bug that was related to the gallery feature. A feature that has recently been offered to sellers for free and was supposed to go into effect February 20.

eBay admits the error and has said "when we wrote the code to implement that fix in the database table, there was a string that was left on there that populated and sent shopping.com listings onto ebay.com". The error sent 5,000 listings from shopping.com to eBay in the form of auctions.

Sellers pointed to the listings snafu as evidence that eBay was inflating its numbers to make up for losses sustained during the recent boycott. When the bug first emerged on Friday, the spokesman told a reporter that it was actually a planned test.

"But it wasn't a test. It ended up being a bug," he said. "So I ate a little bit of crow on that."

Sellers have not been convinced, and some are taking actions by forwarding "fake" listings to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

"I have been collecting all eBay's padded listings and forwarding them to the FTC so they will investigate them," one forum poster wrote.

For more information and further reading checkout the full article at Powersellers: eBay is Padding Post-Boycott Numbers