regarding eBay’s new 14 days returns policy, to which sellers must adhere after the 1st May.
She outlines two possible methods of “bulk editing” your listings:
1) download all your live listings into Turbo Lister, bulk-update the returns policy, and re-synchronise with your live listings.
2) via My eBay:
- define a return policy in My eBay under My Account > Site Preferences > Business Seller Preferences > Show Business Seller Information on View Item (it isn’t necessary to select to show your business info on the view item page)
- go to Active Items in My eBay, and select all items which do not have bids/purchases
- click Edit
- under Business Seller Information, select the box for Business Return Policy
- on the next page select Business Return Policy > Update to all
Either of these methods should add a 14 day returns policy to any listings you have without BIN purchases or bids, but sellers who use SIF format will still be unable to edit any listings which have had purchases. Regarding this problem, Kerstin says:
items cannot be edited if they had purchases. They will have to be ended at some point, revised to include your return policy and relisted. Fees for SIF items are charged every 30 days, so I would advise to end SIF items close to the end of their 30 day period. This way you will not incur extra fees. It is acceptable that active SIF items will not have the correct returns requirements immediately after the 1st May but they will have to be in line with the requirements by 31st May.
(Emphasis mine.)
Sellers using GTC can at least thus end listings as they are due to renew, and relist them with an updated returns policy. It’s a pain, but it’s not quite as much of a pain as it could have been. That said, if eBay want to encourage sellers to upload their entire inventory to the site, how about making more elements of SIF listings – P&P, for example, payment methods and returns policies, or even listing template – editable without having to constantly end and relist.
31 Responses
I would suggest that Kerstin has never tried to bulk edit the returns policy of many listings in Turbo Lister.
That part of it just doesn’t work very well.
More often than not, the returns policy will not bulk edit. It might show you that it has done it, but checking individual listings, you might well find that that it has done nothing to the majority of the listings.
Leigh, you are spot on correct – I’ve just tried it and it did not work with any of my 30 trial listings. Most just failed; 5 it said were updated but they had not changed from my old 7 day policy.
Manual updating, here we come…
What a real pain in the butt this is. TL is not a viable option, I have nearly 700 active shop listings, (luckily over 200 ended last week-end) – so I cannot bulk edit them, some have sales some not, and they are all on 90 days, it would take longer to go through it and remove the ones that have had sales,….so its either bulk end them and relist – not an attractive thought, I am going to hang on until mid May, as a lot more will have come to the end of 90 days and then will see what happens, – if ebay could not get the bulk edit right then they should allow 90 days grace, with all new listings being in the 14 day policy – how hard would that have been for them?
Or perhaps the easiest thing would have been to set GTC listings so that when they relist, any with 7 day returns would have been automatically changed to 14 day returns.
Bulk updating in TL is generally more reliable if you only bulk edit ONE listing format at a time.
Attempting to bulk update one auction, one BIN and one SIF (especially if some are single items and some are multiple item listings) generally fails.
Chris: the 30-odd listings I just tried to edit were all BIN.
I thought TL was set so it *couldn’t* bulk edit across different formats, actually. I’ve always gotten a popup error when I’ve tried to do that.
Oh you know what… it’s so long since I’ve tried to bulk edit knowing it’d fail I’ve never seen that message 😳
The bulk on all BIN should work though, I guess I’ll have to do mine soon. 🙁
What Leigh and I are both saying is that it *should* work but it *doesn’t*. People should not assume a success message from TL re. bulk edits is accurate.
Oh FFS I’m not even going to look at doing mine tonight! Forget about the edit failing – I can’t even attempt to bulk edit mine. The nice little “edit” button is greyed out X-(
I’m only an occasional user of TL so it may be that BULK EDIT is something else but if your talking about EDIT MULTIPLE ITEMS then it worked on my 150 or so listings a few days ago. 🙂
Did have two crashes though and the backup was corrupted so lost all my old data. 😡
Well I’m sorry but TL is bloody useless 👿
Forget live listings, I can’t even edit my listing templates in bulk without either getting missing postage errors or best offer below bin price errors (and that’s even on sodding auctions that don’t have BINs, FFS) 👿
It’s about time eBay built some tools that worked. TL bulk edit is worth than useless as it just wastes my time trying to get it to work.
I am so delighted that they are not going to enforce the ruling until the end of May. I only ever put items in the shop for 30 days at a time, so as I have changed the Returns on all my listings from as soon as it was announced this means that as my SIL listings finish, I can just revise as I relist, instead of having to go into live listings.
I DO feel sorry for you lot with GTC listings to sort out…. 😥
I have to agree with your comment Sue, that “if eBay want to encourage sellers to upload their entire inventory to the site, how about making more elements of SIF listings … editable without having to constantly end and relist.”
Also agree that TL needs to be made a lot more effective – apart from the obvious difficulties in editing return policies now, it also has a tendency from time to time to strip out the picture from a listing or the p&p costs, not to mention my particular bugbear of combined p&p (which I’m sure TL is at the bottom of).
Ebay is by far the most time consuming sales channel of the three that I sell on – that is the biggest reason for me not to list my entire inventory on it.
Spoke too soon, just had a combined invoice charge double postage due to one of the listings not having the *apply my rule* box checked!!! 😥
How long will it take ebay to change the listings once they have been edited? I just spent ages bulk editing (ticking 260 flaming boxes) and nothing looks like it has been changed as my returns text box has the same info it had before and the 7 days box is still there.
Couldn’t work out how know which listings don’t have the APPLY MY RULE (postage discounts) set . Only way I came up with was to export TL to spreadsheet and find them in there!!!
Is there a better way?
I think that’s the best way, sorry to say, Ed. Half my checkboxes for postage discounts are greyed out in TL anyway… another day, another glitch 🙄
I did try using file exchange yesterday to change some prices and all seemed to go well until I realised the first digit of each price was missing!!! So for example 85.80 became 5.80. Had to quickly correct them all by hand. 😆
Turned out to be because the price column contained a £ sign by the way.
Anyone found a quick way of doing this yet?
Mark
Hey Mark, I’m *so* tempted to leave eBay to pull em for me 👿
I am trying to use the Ebay option and that will not allow me to do my .com listings.
I have a 7 day return policy upon reciept of goods in my listings already (14 for Europe and 30 for worldwide).
I assume that is not good enough?
Why didn’t Ebay just insert a standard seller return policy in all powersellers listings themselves?
As they have specified it, surely a standard one would have helped us all and we could edit as time goes on.
And how are they going to police this?
I have a fraudulant seller copying two of my listings at the moment and it is over 20 hours since I reported it through Live Help and email…
…So how are they going to police this policy?
I agree it needs to be in place, but they could have helped with it, instead of the current situation, which has created headaches for us all.
Mark
I totally give up! 👿 TurboLister is a crap program as far as bulk edit goes. Errors that I’ve received when trying to bulk edit templates (NB that’s templates NOT live listings) are
Postage not specified… WTF has postage got to do with the returns policy?
Best offer lower than start price… Yeah so one BIN listing has an error so it fails to edit the returns policy on another 100 listings but doesn’t tell me which has the error!
Best offer lower than start price… on a bloody auction!!!! Why is it that TL still thinks auctions with no BIN can have a best offer on it? It’s frustrating enough when you’re trying to list an auction and it refuses, but when you just want to edit a return policy it’s more than a little annoying!
When I manage to edit ten or twenty listings why does it report the return policy as “(Multiple Values)”??? No it bloody well isn’t! I just changed it to be the same in “Edit Multiple Items”. Either TL worked and they’re all the same so it’s not multiple values or it didn’t work and TL is crap. I’m fed up with checking templates to see if it worked or not! 👿
I used to love TL, now I’m not sure I don’t hate it. Certainly it doesn’t feel as shiny as it used to 😥
To get around the Best offer value problem Chris, just edit in bands of value.
I have just done the over £100.00.
Then the over £80 for instance.
Then it seems to works, so it is obviously not recognising the difference between the start price and best offers across listings and treating them as one listing, if that makes sense.
Try it 🙂
Also as suggested before I have banded the changes into sites and categories as suggested elsewhere.
I am now synchronizing and all seems to be going well.
Please also note, I use Turbo from .com and update it to list on the UK as well.
I found the UK Turbo had too many problems.
So it may be worth trying a fresh install of turbo from .com if all else fails.
Mark
Although the synchonization box insists I have 1700 listings when I have in fact just over 1000.
Ebay need a new listing tool.
Turbo 2 is full of bugs.
A complete rebuild from the ground up is in order possibly?
Is Turbo beyond patching up?
I suspect that may well be the case.
The big problem with Best Offer on TL templates is that when you change format from a fixed price with Best Offer to an Auction it doesn’t appear to wipe the Best Offer prices entirely on the first hit. It’ll often try to keep the Best Offer auto accept/decline prices without even having a BIN price on the auction and fail to change format.
Can’t wait for TL 3.0 to be released!
All done…
I sychronized my listings in TL.
Then edited the listings in batches (changing the text – I already had the 30 days set).
Then sychronized them back.
All updated and changed.
Now that is with the Turbo from .com.
But relatively painless all in all.
Very pleased…
The odd prayer probably helped as well…
Is TL3 on its way Chris?
Hello all, I am very sorry to hear that you are having trouble to bulk edit listings through Turbo Lister. We would like to investigate this issue but need some real user data for this.
It would be great if those users that reported problems here, could send me an email to [email protected] and let me know
– their eBay userid
– a description of the issue as precise as possible
– if possible item numbers that cause the error described
Thank you
It is not just with Turbo Lister but also SMP. Neither methods work. eBay has given a deadline but not given the tools to make it possible to comply (realistically). Perhaps this belongs on the eBay boards but as Kerstin has posted…..
TL3 Mark? I didn’t say it was on the way, but for sure Mark Lewis was talking vaguely about new tools during his presentation at the Catalyst Conference earlier this week.
I don’t know if it’s TL3, I’d say FE features are more or less integrated into TL now so I can’t see much development there, or maybe they’re working on something entirely new.
Your guess is as good as mine 🙂
I would love to see a split edit window…
Where you can have insertion point for standard texts and pics…
If that makes sense?
Then you could import via excel and just change the part of the description that needs changing.
Wanders off to find software that will do that…