Hi, all. In case you missed it, the most recent Seller News article talks about how the product-based shopping experience categories will be expanding in the future, with details to be provided in the May 2018 Seller Update.
Please use this thread for any questions or comments you might have on this topic. We may have a special guest in store who can answer some of your questions 
Thanks for setting up the thread, happy_pigeon!
Hello Canadian eBayers! It's been a while 🙂
As happy_pigeon mentioned, I'm here as a special guest this week to help you with any questions around the new listing requirements as eBay transitions to a product-based shopping experience. I'll do my best to come to the thread often and address everyone's questions and concerns as best as I can, but please bear with me if I don't get to your question right away.
Looking forward to catch up and discuss the new product-based shopping experience!
@momcqueen wrote:
Good afternoon, Raphael. It's nice to hear form you again.
I have serious misgivings about the Product-based search as the new pages do not include any of my items even where there is a match to the Product. As you may know, I don't have access to most of the ebay.com catalogue when listing on ebay.ca and, therefore, my items show nowhere when Results are Grouped.
It's reached the point where I can pretty much tell when the team is testing those Grouped results in my areas of items because I will go from heavy sales to no sales whatsoever with nothing in between. This is abnormal for me.
What assurances can you offer that ebay Canada sellers won't continue to be left in the cold like this?
Hi Maureen, nice to see you again 🙂
First off just to clarify, we aren't testing compressed search results at this moment. The option is there for buyers to use but there won't be any changes to the default search type until we turn that on for the specific products listed in the announcement from February. Based on that, and as counter-intuitive as this may sound, I doubt that fluctuations in your sales volume were due to the product based shopping experience.
With that said, I'd love to dive deeper to see for myself what you are experiencing. Could you email me at raphael@ebay.com (not a forum message please) and give me a few item numbers that presented problems when you tried to find them in compressed search? Please also include what keywords you used to search.
Thanks!
-R
@hlmacdon wrote:
What most will likely want to know is how items which do not readily conform to UPC/MPN formats are going to be treated given that there are categories where that consist of items that fall on either side of that equation.
From a look at the phase 1 product lines it looks like the emphasis is more on brands than it is categories or products. Should we expect the same as this rolls forward?
"Throughout 2018 and 2019, we will expand the eBay catalogue in phases—and provide you will sufficient advance notice and tools to help you list with the catalogue efficiently and effectively. With each phase, we'll invite you to contribute your expertise and suggest edits to improve the catalogue and help ensure that products in the catalogue are accurate and up-to-date."
What could possibly go wrong there? Crikey.
Hi hlmacdon,
This is a question that comes up a lot, as you may imagine. As you pointed out, we are starting off with the easier products. What we announced in February as a first step are product lines that we were confident that we could make "perfect" in the eBay catalogue, for example iPhones, which are pretty clear cut in terms of being able to ensure we have all existing models with all possible permutations and correct specs. From a shopping experience point of view, these are also highly "search-compressable", meaning we can confidently group listings into productized search results.
Soon, we will announce the next step in this transition, which will expand to categories that include product lines are still pretty clearly defined from a catalogue data standpoint. This will take us to the end of 2018. More details on this will come in the next Seller Update.
As we move to 2019 and beyond, we will start solving for less "search-compressable" categories and products and how those fit in the new product based shopping experience, up to and including the unique, OOAK items. We will announce the finer details for this in due time, but for now, if you're selling in any of the categories for this type of unique items (Collectibles for example), you don't have to worry about this and trust that we will give you ample notice before you need to do anything.
@pinetreecottage wrote:
So those of us old timers selling eclectic pre owned/collectible items are going to just fade away. I've been selling here for more than 15 years, and lately, (since the beginning January 2018, I'm lucky to sell one maybe two items/month. If ebay would make an executive decision and simple announce that we are no longer welcome here, rather than keep stringing us along, with one promotion after the other.
When it is suggested that the collectible buyer is not there anymore, that's not so. Instead of sending us sellers into oblivion, take advantage of the current trend of re-use, re-cycle and re -invent. Go to any antique/flea market fair, and watch people buy anything NOT made in China.
Remember why and how ebay originated. Someone in the corner office, seem to have issues with anything pre owned.
Well, that was my 2 cents worth. I feel with my length of time as a seller, I have the right to voice an opinion.
Hello pinetreecottage,
We are certainly not looking to lose the unique, one of a kind inventory and sellers like you who offer them. I'm saying this both for short term and long term. As I said earlier, we are currently solving for the commodity, widely available inventory because this is much easier to move to a product based marketplace. Later, we will start tackling more and more unique inventory and I assure you there will still be a place for pre-owned, collectible, hard to find items.
@momcqueen wrote:
Hello again,
My initial tests with the results shown under Grouped listings have excluded anything I list on ebay.ca from results shown on ebay.com even when those UPCs match. At what point will Product Categories supersede and transcend the site on which they were created? If they don't, as in if that is not at all the intent, there are implications for item visibility which will impact seller viability.
Threads:
https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/So-Many-Listings-with-No-Views/m-p/395231
Just one of the listings I used to run my experiments in search was this one. It didn't show on ebay.ca in Grouped Listings either but since ebay stopped running the Grouped option, I cannot re-create the results for you. https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Disney-PIXAR-Cars-FRANK-the-COMBINE-diecast-RADIATOR-SPRINGS-Theme-11-14-DEL... or item
232682657870. Regardless of the listings I used, even when the UPC was valid and matched, I showed nowhere on either ebay.com or ebay.ca.Thanks,Maureen
Hi Maureen,
Can you specify exactly how you tested this? What was the search query you used on both sites? I would like to try for myself.
One thing I can say for now is that we haven't really worked on the Toys category yet, whether from a catalogue coverage and quality standpoint or in terms of grouped search results. Toys is part of the categories we are unlikely to tackle for the time being, and we will provide ample advance notice before we make any changes there or in any categories we haven't touched yet in the context of Product Based Shopping Experience. What this means is, until we announce anything relating to the Toys category, you don't have to worry about this because buyers will not be put into a grouped search experience. When we do get there, we will come in strong with learnings from the previous deployments and I'm confident you will see a much better experience.
Hope this helps!
-R
@momcqueen wrote:
Thank you, Raphael. My search terms were, on both sites and in all cases that I can recall, 'Disney Cars Frank diecast' which as a buyer would be the terms I would use to find this product should I be searching to acquire new stock. I picked that particular character as my search test because he is one that is both in demand and (somewhat) readily available, although the counterfeited (cough, I mean 'tributes') from China were indexed as one would expect while mine were not. Also, Frank is not a character for whom a card in the Catalogue presents itself when listing, as is the case with 98 per cent of Cars, Cars are not part of the catalogue yet.
Again, my concern stems from being included and visible in normal search results to invisible in Grouped results which I notice are no longer offered as a filter choice at top right as they were for a time.
You might recall that all my Item Specifics were added to my listings in advance of that point in time when UPCs were beginning to be made mandatory. They have been integral to my listings since the initiative was announced.
I ran some similar tests using random LEGO minifigure characters and came to the same conclusion I had been similarly excluded so my theory is not that it is a flaw with the listing as much as it is something particular to me as a seller. Or the site from which the listings were created. I would offer that if you picked any of my listings with the correct Product Identifiers and tried to find them in a Grouped search on either site, you would achieve the same results as did I.
Complicating matters is that Canadians and Europeans often have completely different UPCs for the same product as do Americans. My items are sourced from both within Canada and The States so I carry a mix of the two. If you need assistance with that, let me know. With the toys that I carry, it affects Cars more than any other product line. In Canada, there is one UPC shared by virtually every character in the line (similar to Hot Wheels) but the differentiating factor is the MPN whereas the same character in an American package has its own unique UPC and MPN.
The Frank example I used above was an American-based Frank so it had its own UPC. Yet it did not display in either site when Grouped.
I had not yet experimented with international Cars who all share one UPC per line per manufacturing year before the option to search by Grouped disappeared again for the regular user. I cannot tell you how those products behave in Grouped searches.
Hi Maureen,
Thanks for the additional information. It is as I thought: You're not seeing your listings in grouped search yet because your listings aren't associated with any product in the eBay Catalogue. This is a hard requirement for inclusion in the product based search experience (PBSE). It's none of your fault either: as you point out, the specific items you are selling aren't in the catalogue yet. When we get to the deployment of PBSE in the Toys category, the story will be different as you will be able to find those in the catalog and match them to your listings, which will make your listings show in the PBSE experience.
Watch for our upcoming announcement, the next Seller Update will have a lot more information about what the future looks like with regards to how we will transition eBay from a listings based marketplace to a product based one, how the eBay catalogue will be enriched with a lot of products that aren't currently in, etc.
-R
@lotzofuniquegoodies wrote:
So if I have translated the above message correctly, until the system catches up to itself, certain listings will/have become more difficult to locate. Would that be a variation of listing discrimination for a large quantity of current eBay sellers?
-CM
Hi cerebralmonk,
I don't think your translation is accurate. What I said was, we are moving carefully through the transition from today's listing-centric marketplace to tomorrow's product-based experience. How we do that is by small increments, which allows us to figure things out as we go without breaking the business. In other words, when we turn on the new product based shopping experience for any specific products or in any category, it'll be after we gave sellers a chance to align with the new requirements and match their listings to the correct products in the eBay catalogue.
Maureen's tests are not accurate because her listings are in a category where this pre-work hasn't been done yet and where the buyers don't see the new experience, so when she goes in and tries to find her listings in the new experience, it is for that reason they aren't there. The silver lining is, buyers aren't shopping that way yet.
-R
