If you’re wondering why your items aren’t selling, or why if they do sell they’re not fetching the price that you expected, it may be down to a major glitch on eBay spotted by a TameBay reader.
This has serious implications for sellers. Firstly sellers won’t know if your product is brand new, or if it’s been used and is ten years old. Possibly even more serious is that if a buyer uses the product finder in the left hand side bar of search to view just items listed as “New” then your item won’t be seen (even if it is “New”) if your item condition has since been lost.
Spot the Difference
Apparently eBay Customer Support were aware that the issue was affecting some listings on eBay.com and eBay.de, but have only just been made aware that Item Condition is missing from some eBay UK listings.
Having checked on eBay UK, I’ve seen dozens of listings in multiple categories where the Item Condition is missing so it’s not an isolated problem. The only thing I don’t know is how widespread the glitch is, but as an indication, in the Music category, 876,035 listings out of 2,357,719 are missing their Item Condition.
If you spot a missing Item Condition on your own listings or when browsing let us know in comments below which categories are affected.
25 Responses
hurrah about time they got rid of some of these new or used stupid conditions
cant for the life of me work out how an item with a pre 1900 item specfic can be anything other than used
though youi need to add used in some categories
Item condition is not mandatory in all categories on .co.uk.
I might add your example shows vintage green dress
VINTAGE!
now is that new, or used, fried, or boiled,
I guess that explains my confusion from last night. I was planning on a major update this weekend so I ran a script that should have produced same results if everything was working correctly. On about 1% of listings I got different results and concluded that much of that was due to eBay not enforcing conditions on categories which required conditions. I didn’t even think it could have been a glitch removing those conditions.
I reported the missing “item condition” to eBay over 3 weeks ago. They told me to use the bulk editor to amend my 1800 listings. I tried to do just that but when I select just 4 items with missing item condition I got an error message saying “listings cannot be edited in this layer” which means that it is not possible to bulk edit. It is also not possible to do it manually as the condition field is not longer available & I tried it again just now & it’s still not working. It’s not possible to change it with Turbo Lister either. They really have messed up big time this time! I would also like to mention that the condition descriptions used in the collectors records, books & magazines industry worldwide over the last 40 years, have been totally ignored by eBay. All this trouble has all been for nothing as record sellers & magazine sellers will not be using their system anyway. I will just state Used & then in the item description I will state the industry grading system that they have ignored. It’s very embarrassing for eBay how much they do not listen to sellers & how they keep on meddling with categories & fields that should have been created years ago. It’s not entirely impossible to create several fields for stuff that has not even been invented yet! They have a setting for “no returns” but no mention of the fact that anything can be returned if it’s faulty! Private sellers do not understand this & will never read up all the rules on distance selling regulations & this must be pretty obvious to eBay.
Here are the worldwide grading systems for books & records used in the industry for over 40 years.
https://www.recordcollectormag.com/advertising.php?type=listings-help
https://www.collectors-club-of-great-britain.co.uk/magazines/articleitem.asp?magazine=12&article=134
I list in the Glass section of Pottery Porcelain and Glass and at the moment about 20% of my listings are showing — i.e. not specified
In the Stuart Crystal Category it is showing 706 listings of which 6 are New, 16 Used and 465 Unspecified which= 487 – so where are the other 219 listings.
I have over 60 Stuart listings all are I.S. Used but they would not show up on the search – no wonder my sales have been down for three weeks!!!
I suddenly have 457 cd’s with no condition listed. As they are all different I will have to edit them all individually to submit the new options for used.
There is another point. At the end of the day ebay/Paypal make their money out of our success. If they make a dogs breakfast of something such as the current condition fiasco it will impact on ebay/Paypals turnover and ultimately profit. So there is no justification for such a dogs breakfast being allowed to continue. So ebay Officials should give a priority to putting the resources into sorting it out. If sellers cannot because the system will not allow us to then it has to be ebay that does. After all if hundreds, thousanmd or perhaps millions(ultimately) of buyers cannot find what they want on ebay and that part of the reason is that such as condition is missing they will go elsewhere. Which will mean that other sellers will make the sales and ebay/Paypal will not collect their percentages.
Item condition has been missing from Music >records for the past 5-6 weeks.
New/sealed vinyl records from past decades do not turn up very often but they still press vinyl for some of today’s tunes.
e have lots of never used, unopened, and perfect condition “antiques” but non of the buggers are new,
new to most other than the pendantic and awkward means up to date, recent, latest,
I think it depends on what the New/unused stock item is Chris.
Some stock have ‘Fasions/Fads’
Example: Years gone by Consol games Sega/nintendo etc produced games that sold immediately as they came on the market as the games manufacturers upgraded their consols the games become unfasionable. A few years later a fad came about whereas it was ‘fasionable’ to play the ‘retro’ games on their old consols rescued from the loft – The ‘retro’ games were selling for more than the original retail price !