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Hello Canadian eBayers!
This is our weekly chat. You can start posting at your convenience, we will join you at 1 PM Eastern as usual.
"Lately all GSP items seem to have vanished from eBay.ca. Is this a permanent change or is it temporary? Was this done to placate irate Canadian eBayers?"
If that statement is correct (and my own observations suggest it is) the question becomes: is it fair to sellers? American sellers pay a fee to have their listings seen, they follow eBay's suggestion to use GSP, and they are punished by not having their listings seen. Is that fair to them?
Can the same thing happen to Canadian sellers losing visibility on other eBay sites, including the most important eBay.com?
Good morning,
I have to pose my question and leave today but can you tell me what progress has been made with the UPC and Product Identifier issues that I flagged last week? My listings where they were added as custom Item Specifics in May are still not being recognized as such when the item ends and needs to be relisted. Therefore, I am doing all this work again by hand.
And what explanation can be given for the fact that I'm needing to do this two weeks earlier than expected? I had allotted time after June 29 to make this happen; the final two weeks of June were reserved for something else entirely.
What are we to do when the information in the Product Catalogue is hilariously incorrect? Please see the following example:
This is for Hot Wheels on a Canadian card from the toy year 2014. Mine include http://www.ebay.ca/itm/2014-Hot-Wheels-71-DODGE-DEMON-216-250-HW-WORKSHOP-diecast-Mattel-1971-muscle... and many others and the difference is in the MPN.
Also, Validated Tracking on parcels going to the USA aren't being counted when they are part of a combined shipping order that has resulted from the ebay.com cart not working for Canadian listings. Twice now, when I've had buyers make two purchases from ebay.com and then pay for them separately, I pack the items together in one order and refund the postage on the second item so that it ships free with the first. But when I upload that tracking number (and it is a trackable service) the items count as separate orders despite being in the same order BUT only one of the two tracking number subsequently validates. It skews my percentage, making it lower than it should. I'm trying to reach Top Seller Plus on ebay.com and the Validated Tracking requirement is holding me back because it is miscalculating my percentages. How can I get this fixed?
Thank you,
Maureen
When viewing my "Selling Manager", "Sold" page, the default in the "Actions" column is "Sell Similar" (until the item is paid by buyer.)
eBay changes the "Sell Similar" default to "Mark as Paid" four days after the transaction if unpaid by that time.
Why is that?
Don't you think "Mark as Paid" may be confusing to some less experienced sellers who would read that as meaning it has been paid by the buyer or the buyer changed the field to mark "Paid" (maybe payment is in the mail, or... or...
@vintagenorth wrote:
According to what the "blues" are saying on the .com product identifiers discussion board, entering your UPCs will give you a boost in search and by not entering the UPCs they will slowly drop down in search. If my items are in a category NOT requiring UPCs should I enter them anyway (even though they are not in the eBay catalogue) and will this give me a boost in search? Or will this impact me in search in a negative way?
Hello vintagenorth,
It's a good idea to add the UPC code on your listings even if you list in a category that doesn't require it. There is nothing bad that can come out of it, it will help you in eBay search and it may help your items show up in off-eBay search like Google as well.
@00nevermind00 wrote:
Hello Raphael,
Lately all GSP items seem to have vanished from eBay.ca. Is this a permanent change or is it temporary? Was this done to placate irate Canadian eBayers?
Hello 00nevermind00,
This is part of a buyer oriented test we are running, something we do from time to time. Unfortunately I can't share more details for now.
@00nevermind00 wrote:
Over on eBay.com, GSP items can still be seen but there seems to be fewer of them (maybe it's just my imagination?) And it now seems that any GSP item under C$50 or so shows up with zero "import charges". Are the charges being waived on items between C$20 and C$50 or are they being folded into the shipping fees? If they are waived, how did that happen? Who is footing the bill?
Not exactly sure about this one, let me try some out and I'll update this post.
@00nevermind00 wrote:
There seems to be a lot of tinkering going on right now with the GSP (on both the buying and selling sides.) What can you tell us about what is going on? Nobody seems to know anything and it's hard to answer questions correctly on the boards when you're in the dark.
Most features on eBay get looked at continuously so we can improve and build on what works. Sorry I don't have all the details on what's being looked at or tested for GSP but we have very competent people on it who have the success of the program at heart, both from a buyer and from a seller standpoint. We're in good hands, I promise.
A few months ago eBay announced that they will stop access to Omniture traffic reports on June 30th (next week) by sellers paying a monthly fee for their store.
Do you have any information you can share at this time about a replacement?
@pierrelebel wrote:
"Lately all GSP items seem to have vanished from eBay.ca. Is this a permanent change or is it temporary? Was this done to placate irate Canadian eBayers?"
If that statement is correct (and my own observations suggest it is) the question becomes: is it fair to sellers? American sellers pay a fee to have their listings seen, they follow eBay's suggestion to use GSP, and they are punished by not having their listings seen. Is that fair to them?
Can the same thing happen to Canadian sellers losing visibility on other eBay sites, including the most important eBay.com?
Hello Pierre,
As I said earlier, this is just a test. For all but the largest results sets, the GSP items are still there, just lower in search results. Also this only impacts a share of the traffic on eBay.ca. This test shouldn't have any material impact for any US seller.
"This test shouldn't have any material impact for any US seller."
????
The listings by American sellers are NOT seen by Canadian buyers and... "shouldn't have any material impact for any US seller"
Maybe I need another cup of coffee because I do not get it.
@mjwl2006 wrote:
Good morning,
I have to pose my question and leave today but can you tell me what progress has been made with the UPC and Product Identifier issues that I flagged last week? My listings where they were added as custom Item Specifics in May are still not being recognized as such when the item ends and needs to be relisted. Therefore, I am doing all this work again by hand.
And what explanation can be given for the fact that I'm needing to do this two weeks earlier than expected? I had allotted time after June 29 to make this happen; the final two weeks of June were reserved for something else entirely.
What are we to do when the information in the Product Catalogue is hilariously incorrect? Please see the following example:
Hi Maureen,
I apologize, this past week has been crazy busy and I haven't been able to test the bulk edit tool with your UPC codes yet. With that said, the listing you provided here as an example seems to be 100% compliant with the new required Product Identifiers, plus it seems like the catalog info is accurate on it. Am I missing anything?
@mjwl2006 wrote:
Also, Validated Tracking on parcels going to the USA aren't being counted when they are part of a combined shipping order that has resulted from the ebay.com cart not working for Canadian listings. Twice now, when I've had buyers make two purchases from ebay.com and then pay for them separately, I pack the items together in one order and refund the postage on the second item so that it ships free with the first. But when I upload that tracking number (and it is a trackable service) the items count as separate orders despite being in the same order BUT only one of the two tracking number subsequently validates. It skews my percentage, making it lower than it should. I'm trying to reach Top Seller Plus on ebay.com and the Validated Tracking requirement is holding me back because it is miscalculating my percentages. How can I get this fixed?
Thanks for bringing this up, Maureen. I don't think the US Standards team are aware of this, which can potentially impact US sellers as well. I'll take this to them and let you know what they say.
@pierrelebel wrote:
When viewing my "Selling Manager", "Sold" page, the default in the "Actions" column is "Sell Similar" (until the item is paid by buyer.)
eBay changes the "Sell Similar" default to "Mark as Paid" four days after the transaction if unpaid by that time.
Why is that?
Don't you think "Mark as Paid" may be confusing to some less experienced sellers who would read that as meaning it has been paid by the buyer or the buyer changed the field to mark "Paid" (maybe payment is in the mail, or... or...
I can't speak to the reason why this happens. For what it's worth, Selling Manager is not a beginner tool and I'm confident that the vast majority of sellers who use it would know what Mark as Paid is, and how to figure out if they were really paid by the buyer.
@pocomocomputing wrote:
eBay Business Policies
Are these going to be mandatory as announced in Seller Update of 2013? Nothing mentioned about Business Policies any more.
I opted into Business Policies accidentally in May this year when clicking on an information link in Turbo Lister. Somehow the BP was turned on and the next morning I had BP on all my active listings (not in TL). I was a little upset over this but since it was done, I explored BP that were made. I cleaned them up, made titles that meant something to me as well as descriptions.It took a few days to understand what happened and how to use BP.
I am now pleased that I use BP. But I only had very few listings active so figuring out the mess that a BP migration makes was not that difficult. For a seller with many listings, a switch to BP can seem to be a nightmare. Confusing as to what happened and how to use BP and fear that shipping cost are wrong for some items.
I had a couple of listing with my Free Shipping policy but with overrides with a cost. These listing were not free shipping but somehow the consolidate polices grouped these items in the Free Shipping group but with an override to charge. Very scary since I thought Free Shipping was on items with shipping cost. The items were grouped together by shipping services used I believe. I made a separate shipping policy with the cost to be clear to me.
At the time in 2013, I read mostly bad reviews of Business Policies in the forums by sellers. Nothing much since then. Did a lot of sellers switch to BP or ebay shelved the BP migration for now?
Hi pocomocomputing,
You basically described the exact reason why BP has been put on hold for now. Without getting into too much detail, the architecture for all the settings that BP touches make it impossible for BP to be simple, except for brand new sellers with no listing history at all. Until this is figured out, no one can opt in anymore.
@rose-dee wrote:
Hi Raphael,
Are you able to speak about what happened on this site last Thursday evening?
I'd like to know why the eBay.ca URL was hijacked by a URL that began with "my.ca/paradise..." when I attempted to log in at about 9:00 p.m. (Atlantic Time) last Thursday using the eBay.ca bookmark that I set myself and that I've been using for months. Aside from the nefarious URL, I wasn't able to access any of my seller pages. This whole incident was rather scary. I immediately signed out, but when I tried to sign back in again (this time by typing in eBay.ca directly), I couldn't get past the bogus "paradise" URL.
Every other time I've used my bookmark, before and since Thursday night, I've been directed to the normal eBay.ca site (sign-in page). However, prior to last week, the sign-in page was flipping back and forth in design. By the way, did you get any follow-up from the sign-in team, as you mentioned last week?
I'm not concerned about the procedure to log on to eBay.ca so as to avoid risky sites. I do know how to do that. I'm also not terribly worried about the site being down for technical reasons, or being unable to access seller pages temporarily. This incident on Thursday evening was in a different realm altogether. The "paradise" URL appeared that evening during a narrow time window, never before and not since.
That URL had to have been input by somebody, somewhere out there, and I can't imagine anybody at eBay to have deliberately -- or even accidentally -- replaced the normal eBay.ca URL with such creepy wording (unless of course it was internal sabotage).
What was going on? Can you even share that information? If you can't, I'd prefer you be honest and simply say that eBay can't (or won't, for whatever reason) tell us what really occurred rather than say it was the result of something that happened "during regularly scheduled maintenance".
The stock response about maintenance makes no sense in this instance: does regularly scheduled maintenance normally include hijacking eBay's own URL? And why would eBay even be undertaking possibly disruptive or risky maintenance in the middle of Eastern time zone prime time on a weekday night? There were posts on the .ca discussion boards the next day from others who saw the "paradise" URL, not just myself. I understand from reports on the .com site that a similarly bizarre episode occurred there too.
I've changed my password anyway, because the incident was just too creepy not to have looked like a hacker intrusion.
Hi rose-dee,
Before anything else, I'd like to congratulate you for how alert you are with these things. I'm not joking when I say it's surprisingly rare! It's always a good practice to be safe rather than sorry.
With that said, what you saw was an unfortunate technical issue that sent users to our internal testing site when they clicked certain links in the header (this is what that paradise URL was, it's a mock eBay site we use to test things, completely harmless). I appreciate that it may have looked scary, but no one was ever in danger and no hackers were involved I promise. It was all on the eBay domain.
@pierrelebel wrote:
A few months ago eBay announced that they will stop access to Omniture traffic reports on June 30th (next week) by sellers paying a monthly fee for their store.
Do you have any information you can share at this time about a replacement?
Unfortunately I don't know anything about what will replace Omniture.
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