w~~_7.JPG "pjcdn2005"){kind=avatar}
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 
@rose-dee wrote:
raphael@ebay.com wrote:
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.
First, so good to see you here again!
Second, I have to agree with everything 'pinetreecottage' has said, being in almost exactly the same boat.
While I'm not specifically worried about the "product grouping" that will be taking place, what I am very concerned about, as a OOAK/vintage seller is the effect that items with UPCs are already apparently having on my visibility.
Let me explain what I've been seeing. I regularly sell what could be considered high-demand items in my category, in the $200-$300 US range. I still list these mostly on .com. Prior to a few months ago, if I listed one of these items it would almost always be high up on page 1 in search results. What has begun to occur recently is that Chinese sellers, with "sorta, kinda, wannabee" inexpensive, look-alike goods of inferior quality are listing in my category and monopolizing the first 2 or 3 pages of searches. What I suspect is that they've discovered that if they have UPC codes, they'll move up to the front of the line. They also use the ploy of listing very close, but not exactly duplicate items to multiply their visibility. These are not stellar eBay sellers, based on their FB history at least.
The only sellers who (quite understandably) manage to get ahead of this tsunami seem to be a handful of U.S. sellers who have US TRS and a perfect, or near-perfect, FB score. I've maintained top customer service, 100% FB, and 0 defects throughout my nearly 15 years on eBay. True, I've lost my TRS due to eBay's recent policy changes in this regard, and due to a lower sales volume in 2018, but does that merit page 3 or 4 visibility behind a bunch of hucksters? Yes, they are selling of course.
I worry about what "product-based" visibility will add to this already tenuous situation, and that buyers will no longer necessarily see the best, top-quality sellers first, since visibility will no longer be primarily merit-based.
On the other hand, I see desperate sellers in my categories who are now turning to selling digitally-delivered items in normal eBay categories (which I thought was verboten).
I would really like to know if you can tell us what eBay has in mind with regard to "grouping" OOAK/vintage items? And why, why, why, didn't eBay start up a specialty channel for such sellers (excluding, of course, the mountains of Chinese manufactured dross)? They could have given Betsy a run for her money. Has this never been considered?
All in all, I see a bleak future for me here, and I do think 2018 will be the end of my long selling career on eBay. EBay is now focused on the big and shiny. It's got to the point where it makes little difference how perfect I am or what I list. I'm not saying this with any rancour, just resignation. I feel it's better to prepare to accept the inevitable than to be gob-smacked.
Hello rose-dee,
Good to see you again too 
Even though I don't have line of sight on what is being conceptualized for the productization of OOAK and unique items yet, here is my read on what PBSE will do for the problems you are facing today.
In a nutshell, I think it will great help sellers with quality products cut through the noise that we see in a listing-based world. It will be a lot harder for people to game the system and multiply their visibility with borderline duplicate listings because eBay will ensure that the catalogue is free of duplicate products and we will make the product grouping ourselves. This will ensure a true value-based ranking as per what buyers are looking for.
This brings me to another point you touched: what will ranking look like in PBSE. You can already observe this in real life on eBay.com. If you search for any of the products we announced as the first step towards PBSE (from the last Spring Seller Update) and group the search results, you will see what the product based shopping experience looks like. For example, look for an iPhone X, a Nest thermostat or a Dyson humidifier and take the time to clock through and look at what offers are presented as the best value. You'll see that it isn't always about the lowest price, but rather best overall value, which is not just driven by price, but also item relevance (against the search ran by the buyer), shipping time and cost, return policy, item condition and as always, seller performance. As you try these searches, please remember that once we launch the first phase of PBSE in May and June, the experience will get a lot richer as more and more sellers list against the catalogue.
With all that said, we still have a lot of work to do before we tackle any category where OOAK and unique items are offered, and as we move towards that in the next months, the learnings we will gather from rolling out the new experience to "easier" categories will be tremendous. To echo something Griff said in a recent webinar touching on PBSE, this will be one very important thing that eBay will do differently from other, competing marketplaces: figure out how unique inventory fits in a product-based world. We will do it and we will get it right.
-R
@momcqueen wrote:
"You're not seeing your listings in grouped search yet because your listings aren't associated with any product in the eBay Catalogue."
Okay, yes. Except other sellers and their products are being included in that Grouped item. What did they do that I did not? This is the nature of what concerns me, that I have been excluded. My item, the Frank that I cited, is an American product imported be me with an American UPC that matches the other American UPCs for the new items selling on ebay.com and those sellers and their items are included but me and mine are not.
In short, your listings aren't attached to any product in the eBay catalogue, but theirs are. But that's not as bad as it may sound, at lease for now. Let me explain.
When I search for "Disney Pixar Cars Frank" on eBay.com and group the search, I get a very disconnected experience. There are what seem to be multiple product entries for the same Frank toy, all with very different titles and some of them even have different models (not Frank) when I click through to get to the Product page. This is because the UPC code 887961047639 connects with more than just that Frank model in our database. Whether this is accurate or not doesn't matter for the sake of this discussion, it illustrates the cleanup work that we will need to do before PBSE can come to the Toys category and explains why the search tests you are conducting will not be satisfactory until we do that cleanup work.
To reiterate: until your listings are matched with a product in the eBay catalogue, you will not find your listings in compressed search results.
@momcqueen wrote:
i.e. Their items are matched with the Product Card in the catalogue for that particular item. But my identical item is not. The reason cannot be simply that there is no card for it, because the card appears. When that search was sorted as Grouped, there was data, there were items like it. Just not mine. Mine was excluded. Therefore it cannot be as simple as there is no card entry for the item, because I saw the card myself containing dozens and sometimes hundreds of other sellers' identical (or even less suitable) matches. This is the nature of my concern. As far as that Catalogue card is concerned, I could have written it because my data is extensive and correct. Yet excluded.
Just so we are clear: if your listing is not matched to a product from the eBay catalogue, it won't show in compressed search. That's a fact. As we've observed by searching on eBay.com, there are (multiple) product cards for the Frank toy and those should be consolidated into one (that will be done before we bring PBSE to the Toys category), and I don't know why you aren't able to find those product cards when you list on eBay.ca, that's something separate that I will flag with the appropriate team. But when it comes to you not seeing your listings in compressed searches on eBay.com, it is because your listing isn't matched with anything from the eBay catalogue. No matter how complete or rich your information is on your listings, grouped search isn't looking at it, it only draws from the structured data in the eBay catalogue and only shows listings that are matched with those catalogue products.
@momcqueen wrote:
Okay. That makes sense. To some extent. But when I begin a new Frank listing from ‘scratch’ I’m not given the option of accessing any existing ‘Frank’ Catalogue Card. Is that because the card is limited to eBay.com-created listings alone? And not available on eBay.ca?
What I would recommend there is to use keywords to search the catalogue instead of the UPC code. You don't even have to redo a listing from scratch for that: you can revise and ad the catalogue product. If you can find the product in the catalogue from eBay.ca, it should show up in the appropriate product card when you search on eBay.com.
@pjcdn2005 wrote:
To reiterate: until your listings are matched with a product in the eBay catalogue, you will not find your listings in compressed search results.
Hi Raphael, you've been missed. 🙂
Regarding your last paragraph, why are buyers even given the option of grouping their listings for items that are not in the catalogue? Wouldn't it make more sense to have the 'grouped' options for items that are actually shown when the buyer clicks on the grouped option?
Hi pjcdn2005, great to "see" you again 🙂
In Maureen's example which we were discussing earlier, some of the listings are showing in the grouped view, only those that are matched with products in the catalogue. So it's not that the items aren't in the catalogue, it's that not all items that match the search query are referencing the catalogue.
The throttle we are using to stir the buyers' search results is whether we default to compressed results or not, rather than showing the button or not. Since buyers usually click the least amount of times, this should work great. Once we move a category to PBSE, we will start by asking sellers to match their listings to the catalogue product in order to complete their listings, and those with GTC listings will have to revise to become compliant (we will provide on-platform tools to facilitate that). Only once enough items are complaint (% TBD) will we think of ramping buyers into the new experience.
Hello again.
I've tried to both revise and create a new listing for 'Disney Cars Frank' and there is no Product match available to me.
Ditto for the workflow when I used the UPC although I know you said not to do that if I wanted to achieve results.
Now, just for giggles, I'm going to try this on ebay.com and report back.
So now, on ebay.com, I see evidence of a Product Card.
Literally one in four of the suggested Item Specifics are incorrect. It's not a 'car' and it's not certainly not 'LEGO' because it's a diecast vehicle and I've never before seen the 'Cartoon' category associated with it. 'Pattern' doesn't even make sense, nor does 'shape' or 'type'.
I realize that creating a Product Catalogue for every imaginable item on earth is a huge undertaking, but if all these cards are this flawed, what is the point?
Long, long ago when you and I first discussed this endeavour to add Item Specifics to all listings to facilitate the creation of a Product Catalogue to bring everyone's items into line with one another, you offered assurances during the Weekly Chat that this task had been outsourced to a credible, experienced business entity or entities. Yet when I look like at a product card such as this, it strikes me as the work of panic-stricken teenagers just trying to shove everything into one open drawer to get it off the top of their bedroom dresser because mother is coming. As in, it doesn't matter if it belongs there or not as long as I can say I cleaned my room and it looks as if I might have done it. Unless she actually looks.
Who is responsible for fixing this mess?
And all my listings been excluded in even the ebay.ca Grouped results because my competitors listed on ebay.com and mine weren't allowed to co-exist with theirs in the match. That's kind of offensive to Canadian sellers. I list on ebay.ca, I sell on ebay.ca and my items are located within Canada but only American sellers will show in a Grouped listing on ebay.ca of this item for Canadian buyers. That's hardly ideal to my short- or long-term business viability. No wonder my sales performance completely tanked while this Grouped option was available in search.
Hi Maureen,
Thanks for taking the time to test on eBay.ca and eBay.com and sharing the results.
Unfortunately there is information I have to address this specifically (how the eBay catalog will be corrected when info in it is wrong, and how we will add products that are missing), but all that is coning in an announcement very soon so I'm going to have to wait for that before I can discuss this. Sorry, I wish I could spill the beans now but I prefer still being here to discuss this further after the information's out. 🙂
@momcqueen wrote:
To reiterate: no product card whatsoever to be found on ebay.ca for this item despite that it showed Grouped results in search regardless of whether it was a revision of an existing Frank or a new listing for Frank altogether. Product card found only on ebay.com. Details of said product card incorrect.
@rose-dee wrote:
raphael@ebay.com wrote:
The throttle we are using to stir the buyers' search results is whether we default to compressed results or not, rather than showing the button or not. Since buyers usually click the least amount of times, this should work great.
I'm sorry Raphael, but I've read the above sentence 3 times and still can't make sense of it. In plain English please??
Once we move a category to PBSE, we will start by asking sellers to match their listings to the catalogue product in order to complete their listings, and those with GTC listings will have to revise to become compliant (we will provide on-platform tools to facilitate that). Only once enough items are complaint (% TBD) will we think of ramping buyers into the new experience.
Can you please describe exactly how eBay plans to make OOAK/vintage/antique items compliant? This is the thing that most worries me -- a sort of ad hoc, lumped-together definition for something that is truly unique in the world.
I like 'momcqueen's' analogy -- kids shoving stuff willy-nilly in drawers so the place looks tidy, even if the drawers are a mess inside. EBay forcing OOAK items into "product drawers" so they can try to make them function within a concept that doesn't apply to them in the first place.
Hi rose-dee,
Apologies for the complicated answer. What I meant by that was, we control whether buyers see traditional search results or compressed search as a default. Right now, there is a test running with a tiny sliver of buyers on eBay.com seeing compressed search as a default, and only when they search for the products we have announced in the last Seller Update. The rest of the buyer population still sees the old experience as a default, even if the "Group search results" button is there. Lastly, the overwhelming majority of buyers never click that button (or any extra buttons for that matter, they just come to buy), so there is very little risk in showing that button in the first place.
Regarding the OOAK items, as I stated before, there is nothing I can share around that yet as I don't have that information. All I can say, based on the conversations I have been part of on this subject, is that whatever the solve will be, it won't be "shoving OOAK items in product drawers."
-R
@rose-dee wrote:
On the second point, my greatest concern is that my most important products (my line of truly unique-in-the-world sewing patterns) will have to be lumped in (presumably by a predetermined code of some kind) with other items by eBay designers who may think the items look or sound similar, but may have little or no understanding of the category. I fear the end result will be to create false competition where none existed previously.
Apples of different colours and sorts can be grouped together as apples, and oranges together as oranges, but how does one create an equivalency amongst items that literally have no comparison? Put another way, I know that I really have only one remotely similar competitor in the world. Will eBay know that when they group my items by some type of arbitrary code?
Hi rose-dee,
Even though I don't know exactly what the future holds for OOAK and unique items, I really believe that once we get there, you'll see that none of that will be a problem. No one is looking to arbitrarily lump together items that don't belong together. No one is planning to group all search results no matter what it is the buyer is searching. When I say that we will solve for unique and OOAK inventory, I mean to find a way to display those in a productized experience, but without losing the uniqueness and appeal. Antiques shouldn't sold the same way cell phones are. Moving to a product-based experience will allow us to reflect that, as opposed to today's one-size-fits-all marketplace.
