eBay

mlhj87 · ‎10-26-2019

We have over 1000 listings of hockey cards.

Now - all of a sudden - to relist we have to add 6 specific pieces of information - Manufacturer, player name, team, grading, is it original (don't even know what that means) and what sport (hockey)

This is insane. This information is useless and is already in description.

We cannot list in bulk and are going to lose our monthly allotment of listings as it will take too long. Then - if too much time goes by - we will lose our listings as we can't relist fast enough.

Anyone else dealing with this? any workarounds?

Thx

ricarmic · ‎10-26-2019

I don't list in bulk, but yes I have the same problem, I tend to have fewer, 3 to 5 "new" ones, most of which don't really apply to my stuff.

Sadly no workarounds that I know of....

PS I think the "original" is vs "reprint" as I recall my cards days.....

mlhj87 · ‎10-26-2019

Thx.

Basically they are saying "we don't care you and your son have worked hard to create over 1000 listings (and have given us a ton of fees) - we have a bright idea. So now go and edit every one - one at a time."

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎10-26-2019

@mlhj87

Maybe update your higher valued or more unique cards first. Do it in small batches to ease your stress. From my understanding, any listings previously created with all these new added variables just show up lower in search but they still will come up.

Lastly, are those fields mandatory? if not you should be able to leave blank. In the past there were fields required to confirm for harddrives verifying each time you relisted they were erased. Now with GTC it magically bypasses that step. Similar to any items that were connected to Native cultures.

-Lotz

mlhj87 · ‎10-26-2019

They are mandatory fields, Completely unnecessary as the info is in description and/or the picture.

Can't even edit them in bulk.

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎10-26-2019

@mlhj87

Annoyingly quite often the suggestions in the drop downs are not correct or just plain inaccurate. When you are unable to add the token N/A - Not applicable, you end up at an impasse due to no fault of your own.

-Lotz

pjcdn2005 · ‎10-26-2019

It is crazy that they are asking for all of that. All you can do is update them slowly. You don't have to worry about your current listings as long as you don't have to make any revisions so if you don't have other listings ready to go,let your current ones relist.

tyler@ebay

There are many sellers on both sites that are affected and stressed out by this. It would have been better to have the ability to enter the new item specifics now but not require them for new or revised listings for 3 months.

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎10-26-2019

Long post from dot com but extremely well stated.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/LONG-set-of-observations-on-the-glitch-anyone-else-s-...

-Lotz

esclyons · ‎10-26-2019

they are now doing the same thing with coins, they are asking if the coin is certified or not,,

Guess what if the coin was certified, it would have been originally listed as certified. I have 1,000 plus auctions, that all have to be updated as items sell, and relisted, or auctions end..

So far, items that auto roll over, have not been flagged or ended automatically..

reallynicestamps · ‎10-26-2019

Take your time.

If your cards are listed as GTC, they will relist about every 30 days.

And if you did it right, a few will be relisting every day.

So.

Put your Active Listings in chronological order, About to Close first.

Correct the ones that will close today or tomorrow.

If you do 25 a day between you, you will be caught up and all correct by November 30th if not sooner.

Most of us did this when we had the big "no U$ listings on dotCA" a few years back.

reallynicestamps · ‎10-26-2019

This information is useless and is already in description.

The Item Specifics show up in Search and also in ~~Google~~ third party browser searches.

It also turns up in the left hand column when the buyer does a general Search.

Not completely useless.

re going to lose our monthly allotment of listings as it will take too long.

Ummm-- do you have another ID? Because you only have 283 listings on this one. That's not a problem, I have four active myself.

Also-- If your Store allows 250 monthly listing "free", you can list another 250 on dotCOM at no further charge. I'm not sure if eBay has noticed this yet.

mlhj87 · ‎10-26-2019

we have 300 live listings and over 1000 to relist

we get 500 listings a month so rotate through our 1300 we've created

Now they want us to edit them ONE AT A TIME and add 6 item specifics that are useless? the info is already in the description

there are many more item specific categories that they don't force us to input is it possible they could simply remove the mandatory status of the ones they are now forcing us to do as we try to relist?

silverpinups · ‎10-26-2019

Unfortunately there are no workarounds....

I have 810 listings to update so what I did was click on ending soonest and revised 40-50 listings a day (the first two pages... 25 items per page)

I'm almost finished... but since I consistently revised my items almost everyday it wasn't that time consuming.

I list in the Entertainment>Movie Memoriliblia categories and actually agree with the new item specifics (there are 3 new updates). It was also time for me to update some of my item descriptions anyways.

Good luck!!

hamsterstamps · ‎10-27-2019

I just spent two hours (time I can't really afford) updating 250 of my 1300+ listings. Not sure what benefit these "item specifics" will bring me - I am guessing none. It would have been nice if Ebay had given us a tool to bulk edit these listings - for example all my items are uncertified (a mandatory field) but I have to individually correct each of my listings. Also making the "origin" mandatory is insane - my stamps listed in the Rwanda section are, believe it or not, from Rwanda. Why not let this be a non-mandatory, or default it to the country specific category that it is listed in?

Back to work - thanks again Ebay, Worlds most aggravating marketplace.

reallynicestamps · ‎10-28-2019

Those Rwanda stamps were probably printed in France by -- oooh darn, I can't remember the name, starts with a C.

Fun fact-- we bought some UPU collections, the ones passed out to delegates at the conventions every four years, and came across issues from I think Cameroun which were not listed in Scott or Yvert.

Turned out they were the crude, cheaply printed, stamps actually used in Cameroun, while the pretty stamps in the catalogues were printed in France and distributed to new issue dealers directly. Only a few would go to the former colony for sale in the PO, the crude locally printed ones were the ones in daily use.

Courvoisier? Perhaps

hlmacdon · ‎10-28-2019

Item specifics (more appropriately product attributes) are important. When you have consistency in database field values for given product attributes you can index data properly and start doing some fancy things with search. Things that you either can't do or can't do efficiently strictly relying on processing the sort of inconsistent text input you get with item descriptions.

Very very few buyers scroll down pages these days so having robust filtering options is essential to get page hits and those are only going to come from product attributes. The more useful filtering options you can give a buyer the more you increase the likelihood of a sale. Buyers need a way to sift through listings quickly or they move on. Google, price search engines and the like also like consistent data that can be mapped to their corresponding product attributes or just plain indexed more efficiently.

The problem with how the Utah folks are handling this is they are updating product attributes on the fly, often without documenting changes, and in some cases going back and changing the field values that sellers have spent time already editing. Sales down? Check if they randomly changed the brand name value for no apparent reason. Changing one brand name item specific for a brand that was fairly prominent in my percentage of listings made an appreciable impact on visibility and sales. If you want consistent and growing sales they are very much important as they are key for ensuring your visibility is maximized and that you don't get penalized in best match for poor conversion rates.

If you have a lot of listings I'd consider a third party listing service that has robust bulk editing for saved or live listings alike. It's saved me quite a bit of time with these ongoing rolling changes to categories as you can select a group of listings based on a given text search then bulk apply an item specific to them. If you repeat the process of breaking down the changes into batches of listings grouped by search terms it can make for a time efficient way of handling this. Most of the major listing services are keeping updated as ebay rolls out the new item specifics for different categories as well as the ongoing changes to their field values. With the amount of times I've had to edit listings in bulk over the last few years I couldn't imagine trying to manage this through eBay's provided tools.

tyler@ebay · ‎10-28-2019

Thanks for the tag and the feedback @pjcdn2005!

Hi @mlhj87 - sorry to hear about the frustration you're encountering. We've been talking about required Item Specifics throughout most of the year in our Seller Updates (Early, Summer and Fall) and given advanced notice about the categories that would be impacted, and when.

@hlmacdon is dead-on when it comes to the 'why' behind this: standardized item specifics allows us to present potential buyers with more accurate filters and potentially open your items up to thousands of more searches. It also can help cut down on redundancies within categories (for example, the shoe category had 3 different spellings of 'culottes' because folks were spelling it differently).

I know that this background doesn't necessarily help you now, so to that end you could consider a bulk relist, using the option 'edit listings individually in bulk' to add the required item specifics. Another option is to consider a third party listing tool that could let you export and keep all your listings - that way you don't run into any time crunch. Thanks!

Tyler,

ricarmic · ‎10-28-2019

I got caught skimming the update, I did not realize the "stamps" category was under the "collectibles" category, that's my bad.

I do want to confirm, my situation is different from mlhj because I'm only running GTCs.

My understanding is that currently listed GTCs are grandfathered, and will continue to roll over until they are sold (or ended by me) whether or not they have the new required specifics. (So far mine are but I may have missed an end date for that too).

tyler@ebay

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎10-28-2019

@ricarmic

As a by the way, it seems if you attempt to update a running listing then those fields become mandatory. Only problem is the big IF you have those specifics handy to input them in accurately. Most difficult with OOAK items you may not have the original packaging for. Not Available would be an awesome work around in those situations.

-Lotz