What’s New in This Release
Version 3.8.4 brings seven targeted fixes that address important operational issues affecting order management, profile switching, and listing accuracy. This maintenance release focuses on improving reliability for stores using WooCommerce’s latest High Performance Order Storage system, refining how profile changes are applied to products, and resolving several edge cases that could impact listing quality and order processing.
If you’re running a high-volume store with WooCommerce HPOS enabled, managing multi-variation products with Out-of-Stock Control, or regularly switching between listing profiles, this update resolves several issues that may have been affecting your workflow. While these are technical improvements, they translate directly into fewer manual corrections, more accurate listings, and smoother order processing.
Major Improvements
HPOS Order Search: Finding Your eBay Orders Just Got Easier
WooCommerce’s High Performance Order Storage (HPOS) represents a significant architectural change in how WooCommerce stores and retrieves order data. Many established stores have been migrating to HPOS for its performance benefits, particularly when managing thousands of orders.
However, if you enabled the “Use eBay Order Number” setting and recently migrated to HPOS, you may have noticed that searching for orders by their eBay Order ID stopped working. The order search would simply return no results, even though you knew the order existed in your system.
This happened because WooCommerce changed how order metadata is searched when HPOS is enabled. Version 3.8.4 updates WP-Lister’s search integration to work correctly with HPOS, ensuring that when you search for an eBay Order ID in your WooCommerce Orders page, you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Why this matters: For stores processing dozens or hundreds of eBay orders daily, being able to quickly locate a specific order by its eBay Order ID is essential for customer service. When a buyer contacts you about their order, you need to find it immediately—whether they provide the WooCommerce order number or the eBay transaction ID. This fix ensures that your order search works reliably, regardless of which WooCommerce storage system you’re using.
Profile Switching: Making Configuration Changes Stick
Listing profiles are one of WP-Lister’s most powerful features, allowing you to define different settings for different product categories. A jewelry seller might have one profile for “Buy It Now” listings with free shipping, and another for auction-style listings with calculated shipping.
A recent update introduced an issue where switching a product’s listing profile wouldn’t properly update the product-level auction type and listing duration settings. If you switched a product from an auction profile to a fixed-price profile, the product might still retain its auction-type setting from the previous profile. This could lead to confusion about which listing type would actually be used when the item was published to eBay.
Version 3.8.4 resolves this by introducing a more reliable method for syncing profile data to product metadata. When you apply or switch a profile now, all relevant profile settings—including auction type, listing duration, and condition—are properly synchronized to the product’s metadata fields.
The business impact: This fix is particularly important if you regularly rotate products between different selling strategies. For example, you might start a product as an auction to gauge interest, then switch it to fixed-price once you’ve established a market value. Or you might have seasonal products that you list with different durations depending on demand. With this fix, you can trust that when you switch profiles, all the relevant settings change accordingly—no manual verification needed.
Out-of-Stock Control: Better Support for Multi-Variation Listings
eBay’s Out-of-Stock Control feature allows you to keep listings active even when the item is temporarily unavailable. This is valuable for maintaining listing history, SEO ranking, and watchers while you wait for inventory to be replenished.
For variable products with multiple variations, this feature becomes more complex. Previous versions of WP-Lister could encounter issues when trying to revise a variable listing that had Out-of-Stock Control enabled and some variations at zero quantity. The system would sometimes attempt to end these listings instead of simply marking the out-of-stock variations as unavailable while keeping the listing active.
This release includes two related fixes that improve how WP-Lister handles quantity validation for variable products with Out-of-Stock Control:
- Improved quantity checking logic that properly recognizes when Out-of-Stock Control is enabled and allows zero-quantity variations to remain in active listings
- Refined validation that correctly evaluates quantity values, including edge cases where a quantity of 1 could be misinterpreted
Real-world scenario: Consider a clothing retailer with a t-shirt listed in multiple sizes and colors. When the Large/Blue variation sells out, they want to keep the listing active with that variation showing as unavailable, rather than removing it entirely or ending the listing. With Out-of-Stock Control enabled, buyers can still see the full product range, add the listing to their watchlist, and make a purchase when the item is restocked. These fixes ensure WP-Lister correctly handles these situations during inventory updates.
HTML Entity Handling: Cleaner Variation Attributes
Product attributes sometimes contain special characters—ampersands, quotation marks, accented letters, or other symbols. When these characters aren’t handled properly, they can appear as garbled text on your eBay listings: M&M instead of M&M, or 5" instead of 5".
This issue occurred specifically with variation attributes in variable products. If you had a size attribute like Men's Large or a color description containing special characters, these might display incorrectly on eBay due to HTML entity encoding being applied multiple times.
Version 3.8.4 adds proper HTML entity decoding before sending variation attributes to eBay. This ensures that special characters in your variation options display correctly on your eBay listings, matching exactly how they appear in your WooCommerce store.
Why accuracy matters: Accurate product information builds buyer confidence. When variation attributes display correctly, buyers can make informed decisions without confusion. This is especially important for specifications that include measurements, model numbers, or brand names with special characters. Clean, professional-looking listings contribute to higher conversion rates and fewer buyer questions.
Technical Fixes
Variation Pictures Validation
When processing variable products with image variations, WP-Lister now includes additional validation to ensure variation picture sets exist before attempting to access them. This prevents a PHP error that could occur when working with certain product configurations where variation images weren’t properly defined.
This is a defensive programming improvement that makes the plugin more robust when handling edge cases in your product catalog. If you ever encountered an error mentioning getPicture() during listing creation or revision, this fix resolves that issue.
Tracking Information Structure
Fixed a PHP warning that could appear in debug logs when processing order tracking information. The warning occurred because a specific field in the tracking data structure wasn’t being initialized. While this didn’t prevent orders from being processed, it could clutter your error logs.
This is the kind of housekeeping fix that keeps your WordPress installation cleaner and makes it easier to identify genuine issues when troubleshooting.
How to Update
Updating to version 3.8.4 is straightforward and won’t interrupt your selling operations:
- Back up your site before any plugin update (best practice)
- Go to WordPress Dashboard → Plugins
- Find WP-Lister for eBay and click Update Now
- The update will complete in seconds
If you have automatic updates enabled for plugins, WP-Lister 3.8.4 may have already been installed. You can verify your current version by checking the Plugins page or looking at the footer of any WP-Lister admin page.
No configuration changes required: This release doesn’t introduce new settings or change existing behavior—it simply makes current features work more reliably. Your existing configuration, profiles, and listings remain unchanged.
What’s Next
Version 3.8.4 represents our ongoing commitment to maintaining a stable, reliable platform for your eBay selling operations. While we’re always working on new features in the background, regular maintenance releases like this one ensure that the foundation remains solid.
Our development roadmap continues to focus on three areas:
- Enhanced compatibility with the latest WooCommerce updates and WordPress core
- Performance improvements for high-volume sellers managing thousands of listings
- Workflow refinements based on feedback from active sellers in diverse markets
If you encounter any issues after updating or have suggestions for future improvements, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team. Your real-world experience helps us prioritize development efforts and ensure WP-Lister continues to meet the needs of professional e-commerce sellers.
Questions About This Release?
If you have questions about any of the fixes in this release or need assistance with your WP-Lister configuration, our support team is here to help. Visit the support section of your WP-Lab account or contact us through the help desk.
Thank you for choosing WP-Lister for eBay as your multi-channel selling solution.