ebay.com’s 403 error page scored 78 on Inspectrosite
By Johnny · Byteslip · scan run
After google.com, wikipedia.org, hawaii.gov, and amazon.com, I pointed Inspectrosite at ebay.com — the address people type. It came back with 78 out of 100, grade C. That number is real, but it isn’t a score of eBay’s marketplace homepage.
Quick disclosure: Inspectrosite is Byteslip’s own free browser tool. The badge above is just a picture of the score from our scan, not proof of anything (anyone can type a number into a badge link). The real record is the scan itself, and you can run it again here.
A redirect, then a 403 error page
We started at https://ebay.com/. The server sent a normal HTTP redirect to https://www.ebay.com/. Inspectrosite follows those, the same way it did for google.com → www.google.com and amazon.com → www.amazon.com.
What came back was not the marketplace. Akamai — the response named Server: AkamaiGHost, and also sent x-cdn: Akamai — returned HTTP 403 and a ~1.7 KB branded error document titled “Error Page | eBay.” The visible copy says “SORRY,” then “Something went wrong on our end,” includes a reference id, and asks you to go back and try again. The footer credits “Copyright © 1995-2026 eBay Inc. All Rights Reserved.” There are no script tags. A background image is referenced in CSS only (https://secureir.ebaystatic.com/cr/v/c1/4xx-bkgd.png); there are no <img> tags.
That page is a small, well-formed HTML document: doctype, lang="en", charset UTF-8, a normal viewport meta, a title, a <main>, a <footer>, and a <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">. “SORRY” is a <p class="error-header__headline">, not an <h1> — which is why the heading checks failed.
It ran 52 checks: 24 passed, 13 warned, 4 failed, and 11 were info only. The HTML came back in 1755 ms (including our proxy), the document was 1.7 KB (1739 bytes), and the inventory was 0 scripts, 0 images, 0 stylesheets, 0 links, 0 forms, and ~17 visible words. Detected tech (info only): Server: AkamaiGHost.
Side note on Amazon vs eBay: Amazon’s edge returned HTTP 202 and an AWS WAF JavaScript challenge, which Inspectrosite treated as a reachable page (pass) and scored 82. eBay’s edge returned HTTP 403 and a static error document, so reachability itself failed, and the score is 78. Both are “what the scanner was served,” not the shopper’s storefront.
The four fails, in plain language
All four match an error document that never meant to be a homepage.
Page is reachable (HTTP 403)
The server returned
HTTP 403. Browsers may show an error page. For Inspectrosite, that means the reachability check itself fails — unlike Amazon’s 202 challenge, which still counted as reachable.Missing meta description
No
meta[name=description]. For a short “something went wrong” page, that isn’t surprising — but the check still fails it.No <h1> heading
There is no
<h1>. The big “SORRY” line is a styled paragraph (<p class="error-header__headline">), so assistive tech and the heading check don’t see a page title heading.Page is set to NOINDEX (hidden from Google)
Found
meta robots content="noindex,nofollow". On an error page, that is expected and good practice — you don’t want Google indexing “Something went wrong on our end.” Inspectrosite still flags noindex with homepage-oriented advice (“If this is the live homepage, remove noindex immediately”) because it scored the document it received. This is not a claim that eBay’s real marketplace homepage is hidden from Google.
Thirteen warnings, grouped
- Fetch and structure: HTML fetched in 1.75s; no headings at all; 2/4 landmarks (header, nav, main, footer) — main and footer only; no
<script>tags detected; very little visible text (~17 words). - Head and social tags: no canonical URL, no favicon link, no theme-color meta, 0/3 Open Graph tags (title, description, image), and no Twitter/X card tag.
- Security headers on this response: this 403 reply didn’t send
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff, clickjacking protection, or a referrer policy. It did send HSTS (Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000, 365 days). Those warnings apply to this error response — not a claim about the live marketplace’s headers.
What looked solid about that small HTML file
78 is a check average, not a grade of eBay
Inspectrosite’s score is an average of the checks that count: a pass is worth 100, a warning 60, a fail 0, and info checks are left out. So 78 tells you how this one 403 error page did on our checklist. It isn’t a grade for eBay as a company, and it says nothing about buying or selling on eBay.
Side by side with the earlier notes: google.com scored 75 on the real search homepage; wikipedia.org scored 89 on the real portal; hawaii.gov scored 67 / portal 91 because the short URL was a meta-refresh hop; amazon.com’s bot-check page scored 82. eBay’s 78 belongs with Amazon’s story: the scanner scored what it was served, which was not the page a shopper sees. One score only — 78 on the error page. We did not try to bypass Akamai or invent a second “real homepage” score.
Scores change
This is one scan, taken at 2:46 AM Hawaii time (HST) on November 6, 2026. eBay can change what it serves the proxy, and Inspectrosite gets updates too. A re-scan may still get the error page, or someday the marketplace. Re-scan ebay.com, or try your own site.