The tale of The Emperor's New Clothes  is an apt way of describing the current eBay. They are now naked. The latest attempt to convince everyone in the marketplace they're wearing a spiffy new suit was covered by ReadWriteWeb in a post entitled, "Is eBay Artificially Inflating Listing Numbers? " by Josh Catone. 

The article details what appears to at best, a programming error, and at worst, a fraudelent attempt by eBay to inflate their listing numbers. This is important since eBay really makes a big deal of using their listing numbers to show how well they are performing. 

Yes, I understand that eBay has inflated listing numbers before. It happened earlier this year and at the time eBay said:

...the code actually rolled out three hours late, so there were a certain number of listings ... that didn't get gallery free, so we were going back and fixing that. What happened was, 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 that it shouldn't have. 

So, four months later the same issue appears to happen. You might believe it if eBay hadn't made several missteps in the last year. The missteps have lead to lower listings, which means eBay's stock price will probably take a dive. The stock is close to a 52 week low and the quarterly results are coming in the beginning of July.

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