Item Specifics - Not necessarily required

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

FYI warning to one and all to this it applies to. eBay is tinkering again with adding more item nuisance specifics.

Categories involved: 

• Movies
• Collectible cards

[recped]

In what way are they tinkering? More "recommended" or more "required"?

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

Recommended. Every time they do this I get bombarded by them. I've also had situations where they have modified old specifics and/or changed the character limit on previously filled in specifics corrupting the original data. 

[femmefan1946]

Any Recommended IS can be ignored.

Any Required IS must be filled in.

Huh.

Almost every category I sell in has NO Required Item Specifics. Just Recommended.

And with Books, even the ISBN which is a Requirement can be filled with N/A.

Just an observation. YMMV.

Since IS are supposed to be what SEOs "see" and what earn internet wide visibility,  it may be worthwhile to think about whether some rando on the web is actually likely to Search with the term you can't be bothered to fill.

But again, your mileage may vary.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

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@femmefan1946 wrote:

Any Recommended IS can be ignored.

Any Required IS must be filled in.

Huh.

Almost every category I sell in has NO Required Item Specifics. Just Recommended.

And with Books, even the ISBN which is a Requirement can be filled with N/A.

Just an observation. YMMV.

Since IS are supposed to be what SEOs "see" and what earn internet wide visibility,  it may be worthwhile to think about whether some rando on the web is actually likely to Search with the term you can't be bothered to fill.

But again, your mileage may vary.

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@femmefan1946 

The suggestion I made several years ago was to make the do not show flag option build into the listing tool vs stand alone. Most times those requests come long after the item has been put in a bin. In some cases because of out of package majority of that info is only found by major research. 

For some sellers they don't like those MIA category specifics as left open so they try to their best to clear. Similar to messages. I am aware of one seller that has missing suggested specifics for 800 listings. They basically just gave. The reason I check is to see if modifications have been made to the original specifics names.