For an e-tailer, there isn’t a worse time of year to have major issues with your site than the run-up to Christmas, but that is precisely what eBay has been struggling with at the moment.

eBay calls it a "cross verification bug", essentially it is the link between a user's eBay and their Paypal account. While it may sound innocuous, it's actually quite devastating. Paypal checkout and even creating creating new auctions are both affected. Paying for an auction, having one of your own auctions paid for, and even creating new auctions are all not possible. So, er, thats pretty much 99 per cent of what you would want to do on eBay huh?

Part of the problem from a sellers perspective is that your buyer gets a right dodgey error message when trying to pay:

This seller cannot currently receive payments

If you Google this error, all the results say that the seller probably has a frozen account.

The bug/error also keeps you from creating new auctions. Every time you try to create one, you get a page asking you to verify your Paypal account (regardless if you have already done so … many times).

[Click image for full-size version]

Thankfully both eBay and Paypal are aware of the issue:

From Paypal:

We are aware of the intermittent error 3005 in the eBay checkout flow. We are currently working to get this resolved. Please send the payment using the PayPal checkout flow.

From eBay:

eBay Technical Support
Have you tried this little work around yet?
1. Log In to your PayPal account.
2. Go to your profile and add and confirm your bank account.
3. Once you have completed the process, please update your PayPal account by selecting “My Account”, then “Profile”, then “Selling Preferences” and choose “Auctions”.
4. Click on “Add” and enter your eBay User ID.

djhomeless
??

eBay Technical Support
This is a fix

eBay Technical Support
For your issue

djhomeless
My Paypal account has had my ebay details for a while

djhomeless
Do I have to resubmit them>?

eBay Technical Support
Yea

eBay Technical Support
and if that doesn’t work

eBay Technical Support
Call this number
1-402-935-2050.

eBay Technical Support
At this time you might want to call them and say you’re having an eBay cross verification problem

djhomeless
Any reason why my account has been flagged?

eBay Technical Support
Its not been flagged its a site wide bug

The Name of the eBay Rep removed/renamed.

Please note, the number listed above is not for eBay, it's for Paypal US. The eBay phone number seems to be as closely guarded a secret as the recipe for Coke.

Update

After further correspondence from eBay, it appears the issue with being unable to create new auctions was actually a seperate bug, related to eBay’s new safe harbour enhancements.

Geoffrey McCaleb writes content management systems for a living. His blog lives here.