@dbbooks wrote:
There's a SIMPLE answer. If you advertise a price you cannot UP that price by revising. If you have mistakenly advertised, then DELETE your ad and start again. That way this won't happen again!
From the outset, that seems simple, but it actually isn't. Ending an item every time the price goes up would render large portions of the site, including watch lists, and the search ranking system, virtually pointless (most sellers will tell you it is anyway 🙂 but sales history is one of the things that is known to carry weight). Saved search emails could also get quite annoying, because on a site like eBay, I daresay millions of prices are changed every day (especially when it comes to things like books - there is actually software available to sellers that detect price changes on items, and automatically match or undercut the competitor's price).
There are items that have been listed on the site for years, I have some myself that are 3 years old, and they would have been older if an eBay glitch hadn't caused every single listing in my store to end at once back in 2013. Ending them every time I need to change the price just isn't feasible, and would cause far more annoyance to more buyers. Prices change, sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down, it's par for the course in retail and the only thing that really happened here is that the timing of the price change was really unfortunate, but on the whole quite rare.
In other retail situations, sellers tend to have a close of business, so they can change prices etc when there is no possibility for a sale to be made. With shopping online there generally is no close of business (well, except for vacations and the like), which means some things simply have to occur during "business hours", when some people will be shopping - I don't sell internationally, so I can do those sort of things late at night in Aus, when it's very unlikely someone will be making a purchase. For a high volume seller who ships worldwide, they don't have that opportunity, and the only real solution for them, in the context of what I've written above, is to make the changes as and when they need to.
