Updates will take place at 3:00am EDT on Tuesday morning, May 6 2008, and Wednesday morning, May 7, 2008. Both updates should last no more than 2 hours each. During these updates, the system will be inaccessible.

Laris has recently recovered from down time which resulted from a systemic hardware failure that occurred in the early morning of May 1, 2008. The system was restored from its last complete backup (made several hours prior to the outage). As a result, any products added or listings launched in the time between the backup and the outage are no longer visible in Laris. Since Laris is now unaware of these items or listings, some buyers will not be able to checkout as they normally would.

Our tech team is now working to restore the data from the backup prior to the outage to the point when the hardware failed. This effort is already in progress; however, some ommissions may occur. As such, we have posted work-arounds below.

The following issues (and their remedies) may be experienced now that the system is back online:

Issue #1: Cannot see an item, order, customer, or listing that was previously created/launched.

Reason: The item, order, customer, or listing was created/launched in the hours between Laris’s last backup and Thursday’s downtime.

Solution A: Our restore should be complete in the next day or two, and this data will automatically become available.

Solution B: The item, order, customer, or listing must be re-created or re-launched manually.

Issue #2: My customer cannot checkout for an item they purchased.

Reason: The item or listing may no longer exist in your Laris account (same as issue #1).

Solution A: Ask your customer to wait a day or two before checking out, Laris support is now working to restore this data.

Solution B: Manually add the product to inventory and create an order for the customer to check out for. Give the customer instructions on how to check out for this order instead of the listing they won. Manually mark the listing as paid on the venue.

Solution C: If the item has fixed shipping, contact your Laris support rep to have them import the listing into Laris for you. Following this, the customer will be able to check out.

Issue #3: My customer already paid me via PayPal but the payment is not visible in Laris / I can’t ship the item.

Reason: During the outage, Laris was not listening for the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) sent by PayPal that tells Laris about the payment that was received.

Solution A: Contact your Laris account representative or Laris support to learn how to export all recent payments from PayPal and import them into Laris as a batch.

The Laris system was taken down this morning because of multiple hardware failures.  As we recover information from the failure, Laris will need to continue to be offline.

Our estimated time to be back online is 2.5 hours.  Some users may not be able to access data from the past 48 hours until tomorrow.

We apologize for any inconvenience and assure you that we’re working to get the system back online as soon as possible!

Tomorrow is Sell Center’s Official Office Moving Day!  We apologize for the very late notice.  The last inspection finally passed this morning.  What a process!

Unfortunately, this means that our phone system will be completely down starting Friday morning (25th) to Sunday night (27th).  If you need to contact us, please use e-mail and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.

info@sellcenter.net

support@sellcenter.net

Thanks for your patience!

Don’t forget!  Read all the info here.

Some listings have been appearing as “payment refunded” even though no payment has been made.  This means there’s no “Pay Now” button to redirect to our checkout!  It seems to be an intermittent, global PayPal/EBay issue for users of 3rd party systems.  More information can be found on the eBay forums here:

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000680658&tstart=0&mod=1207878022920

For the next hour we will be updating the EBay Category Selector to keep up with the many eBay category changes.  We apologize for any inconvenience caused!

Early February, PayPal announced it would be giving special benefits to powersellers. Especially of interest, transactions without confirmed addresses would qualify for Paypal Seller Protection.

Well, it’s finally come to pass. Just remember…you have to sign up for it! Enroll for expanded seller protection here.

Read the following excert from the eBay Powerseller Program Benefits page to learn more:

PowerSellers that reside in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Hong
Kong with a registered PayPal account in one of these countries that is linked
to their eBay account are eligible for expanded PayPal seller protection against
claims, charge backs, reversals for unauthorized payments, and merchandise not
received. The expanded protection covers transactions on eBay paid through
PayPal. It’s free, there’s no annual limit, and transactions no
longer require confirmed addresses to be covered.

We have enhanced the Inventory Upload/Update Spreadsheet file to include new fields.  If you are currently using a file to manager your inventory, please check for any changes.  Download the new file in Laris or here:

http://www.sellcenter.net/laris-wiki/Laris_Complete_Products_Import_File.xls

Update: Link above is fixed.

IMPORTANT:  We are getting continued reports of listings errors and malfunctions.  Much of this is due to an EBay mass category change.

As part of their continued restructuring, and based on feedback received from the seller community, eBay has implemented many category changes.The effected categories are Art, Sporting Goods, Computers & Networking and Toys & Hobbies. A complete list of affected category items can be found by clicking on the link below:http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/itemspecs.html

Laris customers who sell in these areas can view the new category structure on eBay Seller Central by clicking here.

Customers who need to make the necessary changes to their listings can do so, in bulk, by going through their Product Ads section.

We’re doing another mass upload to our system which will create some slowness for the next 20 minutes or so as the system handles the changes.  We apologize for the inconvenience!