Thanks, Pierre. I read that on Friday. It was reassuring to see the powers-that-be from ebay stress how very important a task this is; I have agreed with that all along. We NEED product identifiers in order to stay competitive as an online marketplace. I figured out half a year ago that there was something funny going on when I couldn't find my stuff on google but an identical item from amazon would show up 19 times before anything from ebay (usually a dotcom listing expired six months ago) would show in the google search results.
My issues are not with Product Identifiers but how they have been adopted on ebay.ca.
I spent a considerable amount of time investigating the impact of the new requirement for me when it was announced. None of the issues I raised with the faulty ebay.ca Product Catalogue have ever been addressed and the workarounds I was told to make to correct the lack of a UPC field entirely prior to mid-June did not help. Then came the requirement on June 15 two weeks earlier for me than it was supposed to be. The UPCs that I had entered prior to that did not roll over and so I had to do them all again. PLUS the ones that I had tried to add via the Bulk editor vanished as soon as I hit submit. Then the next ones that I tried to enter were rejected as invalid. Then I raised for the second time that the details in the Product Catalogue for a listing that probably covers almost thousand different Hot Wheels is incorrect.
What else? Or, the Sell Similar feature wiping data from the UPC field of a hundred listings; that was fun but half my fault as I should have guessed as much before I hit submit. I'm sure that I'm forgetting some other parts of this saga but no matter, it's nearly irrelevant now. I have only 115 more listings left to revise (many for the second time because the custom UPC data field I created in May and early June does nothing but sit there like another line of text on my listing) and then I am done with it... until some bug comes along and wipes out all the Item Specifics we've entered or whatever catastrophic event could make this worse.
If I didn't feel so strongly that Product Identifiers were important, I would have stuck DOES NOT APPLY to each one of my 820 listings and left it at that.
Happy Monday!
