With the Spring Ebay 2017 seller update are you changing anything?

[musicyouneed]

I used to have free shipping to Canada. There was an incentive to have free shipping as I got 20% off, well now it is going down to 10% so not as much of an incentive to keep free shipping.  So am slowing going through and removing my free shipping to Canada.  The price has gone down of course as I have shifted the amount to the cost of shipping.    Now that might change in the future but for now, no more free shipping. 

[momcqueen]

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rose-dee wrote: I had the US TRS Plus badge on .com for many months, and it made no significant difference in sales that I could attribute solely to getting the badge.  

When was that?

I just took a look at one of your listings for a pink 1950s style hat and noticed it referred to more photos in the listing but none were available. Is that an 'active content' problem? You might want to review it. 

[rose-dee]

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@mjwl2006 wrote:
Yes. But the gist of it is there, and the user doesn't have to navigate from eBay to view it. It's also a useful challenge to sellers to optimize their descriptions for ease of translation by not using as many contractions or colloquialisms.

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Well, you're right, the gist is all that's really necessary anyway in most cases, especially for the very few times a buyer might be translating the description in this way, from his or her non-native site.  

Although simplicity is always effective, I would never avoid using idiomatic English in my descriptions merely in order to faciliate eBay's computer translations.  That seems pointless, even counter-productive to me, if the majority of a seller's buyers are likely to be English-speaking, where everyday, colloquial language will actually sound appealing, lively, and personal.  Otherwise the item description could end up reading like an English-speaking automaton -- or like text intended to be optimized for translation.  

On the other hand, I completely agree with you where a seller is communicating via email with someone who is not an English speaker.  Keeping the language more or less at a grade-school level and avoiding contractions or other common English usages is a good idea, especially since it's likely the person at the other end may try to use Google to make sense of it. 

[rose-dee]

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@femmefan1946 wrote:

"GIGO"

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Huh?  Translation please. 

[momcqueen]

GIGO = computer programmer geek slang for Garbage In Garbage Out. 

[momcqueen]

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@rose-dee wrote:

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@mjwl2006 wrote:
Yes. But the gist of it is there, and the user doesn't have to navigate from eBay to view it. It's also a useful challenge to sellers to optimize their descriptions for ease of translation by not using as many contractions or colloquialisms.

---

Well, you're right, the gist is all that's really necessary anyway in most cases, especially for the very few times a buyer might be translating the description in this way, from his or her non-native site.  

Although simplicity is always effective, I would never avoid using idiomatic English in my descriptions merely in order to faciliate eBay's computer translations.  That seems pointless, even counter-productive to me, if the majority of a seller's buyers are likely to be English-speaking, where everyday, colloquial language will actually sound appealing, lively, and personal.  Otherwise the item description could end up reading like an English-speaking automaton -- or like text intended to be optimized for translation.  

On the other hand, I completely agree with you where a seller is communicating via email with someone who is not an English speaker.  Keeping the language more or less at a grade-school level and avoiding contractions or other common English usages is a good idea, especially since it's likely the person at the other end may try to use Google to make sense of it. 

 

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I was a writer by trade, so my advice wouldn't be to suck the life from Item Descriptions but to write deliberately. 

[rose-dee]

 

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@mjwl2006 wrote:

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rose-dee wrote: I had the US TRS Plus badge on .com for many months, and it made no significant difference in sales that I could attribute solely to getting the badge.  

When was that?

I just took a look at one of your listings for a pink 1950s style hat and noticed it referred to more photos in the listing but none were available. Is that an 'active content' problem? You might want to review it. 

__________________________________________________________________________________________

The TRS Plus badge I had was a while ago now, at least 3 years, perhaps 4, before the more onerous tracking requirements were introduced.  I can't remember the exact date (so much goes on here that it's hard to recall), but I know I lost it a few months after they stopped accepting Light/Small Packet ID numbers as tracking numbers.  It made no measurable difference when I got the badge, and no measurable difference when I lost it.  So I didn't bother trying to keep it. 

Mind you, things were so much easier overall on eBay then.  

As for the listing you mention, yeah, I've been letting some listings languish because frankly I've been focused elsewhere and not very much on eBay over the past few months.  I just hang out here more or less for old time's sake, to keep up with the news and chat with my seller friends.  I suppose you could say I've more or less given up on actively pursuing eBay the way I used to.  The rewards just don't justify the input anymore.  I think the listing you mentioned was re-done fairly recently though, so I'll take a look to see what happened.  

I've never personally included any active content in any of my listings, although I've chosen to allow Auctiva to insert the scrolling galleries.  However, it appears Auctiva is soon going to be automatically revising and updating any listing that was generated with the old, active content scrolling gallery.  So I'm just going to wait until they do that and then check over whatever listings are left.  

Sorry, I guess we're way off topic now...

[rose-dee]

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@mjwl2006 wrote:

I was a writer by trade, so my advice wouldn't be to suck the life from Item Descriptions but to write deliberately. 

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OK, so we've got two writers disagreeing (I was a professional translator for many years, so I've seen both sides of the equation).  

Deliberate writing is a good thing if you're preparing a trade article or a government paper, but I personally don't think it's a good style for eBay listings where you want to sound personable, even chatty, and create excitement and interest that will generate sales.  

Your listings actually prove this point, in that they are lively, colloquial, idiomatic, and (at least in my estimation) very engaging and appropriate for the type of items you sell.  In my experience creative, interesting and targeted English that does its job well doesn't produce a great machine translation.  I just have fun laughing at machine translation efforts, knowing how very difficult it is for even a human translator to do credit to an original piece of writing. 

In fact, the more creative and idiomatic an English text is (and therefore the more appealing to English speakers), the less likely it is that a machine will make correct sense of it all.  The way I see it though, correctness is not the point with eBay translations, the point is to transmit the general meaning as a convenience to assist the buyer.  I think most people, reading a machine translation from another language into their own language, will give the result a lot of latitude, and understand there is going to be a bit of nonsensical content.  

As I said above, the computer translation of your listing was actually surprisingly good overall, and a French speaker will get all the necessary meaning.  Programmers have been trying to teach machines to translate language since the late 1970's, with varying -- often hilarious -- results, but it's getting better.  The main problem that has never been solved is context, although as I mentioned, I think eBay's translations have an advantage in that they're dealing with a lot of terms and phrases common to online selling.  That does make the computer's job a little easier.