is all about being Better Connected. It focusing on helping you sell more with product identifiers, easier international selling with new protections, communicating with buyers adding the ability to send them private offers and the inevitable category and Item Specific updates, which although we all hate site changes are intended in the long run to make your products easier for buyers to find.
There’s also some welcome news for sellers regarding the 10p fines that eBay announced in the last fee update.
Category and Item Specific changes
eBay are from the 1st of June, intending to make it easier for buyers to find your items and for you to list internationally.
| Books, Comics & Magazines | Cars, Motorcycles & Vehicles | Clothes, Shoes & Accessories |
| Collectables | Computers/Tablets & Networking | Crafts |
| Health & Beauty | Jewellery & Watches | Mobile Phones & Communications |
| Toys & Games | Vehicle Parts & Accessories | |
25 Responses
eBay…… YOUR NOT LISTENING TO US – THE SELLERS WHO ARE PAYING YOUR FEES.
WE ARE VOCAL ON YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE, YOUR “COMMUNITY BOARDS” and sites like TameBay. BUT YOU DO NOT LISTEN.
All of these updates – really? The best you can do?
DEFECTS – matters to US
GOOGLE VISIBILITY – Matters to US
CUSTOMER CARE – that have a brain, matters to US
FAIRNESS – Matters to US
WORKING WEBSITE – Matters to US
All of those above, plus lots more – matter to us and your doing NOTHING about it. Read your forums – take the hint.
Get RID of stupid systems and become a venue – eBay stands for “BUYERS YOU ARE GOOD AND SELLERS ARE BAD” – NOT FAIR.
eBay you NEED to start LISTENING TO YOUR MEMBERS. Your Community Board is a good place to do this. Who remembers MySpace? They didn’t listen either……..
Before updating any categories eBay need to do the hard yards and clean up the existing crud that is swamping many of them and ruining the customer experience.
Yet again we as sellers are expected to undertake more work to help cover up just how useless their search function and best match algorithms really are.
We will hold fire until we see the extent of the category changes but if it is a lot of work I doubt we will bother until we are good and ready and simply delist in the interim.
I sell used books on ebay. Categories? What book buyer searches by category? If someone wants a book on fifteenth century Mongolia, that’s what he searches for – he’s not going to go through pages of ebay crud to find a category number that sounds as if it *might* include the books he seeks. Especially when half the books will have been incorrectly categorized anyway! Just more ebay time-wasting navel gazing instead of correcting the many real problems. The sooner Alibaba buys ebay the better.
I have never searched by category I use the standard search box try a few variations on the name of the thing I am looking for see the useless results from Cassini and go buy from Amazon instead
eBay you are a joke cant you see the problems with eBay are you either so arrogant you wont change or too stupid you cant figure it out your users are telling you what’s wrong in your own community boards the things that need fixing are all listed reading and taking note is not rocket science is it
The update does say if there is no barcode for a category that asks for one, there is an option to say it is not applicable, but if you list something that should have it, then potentially your item can be blocked or removed.
Fortunately for myself, I list in the art category, so do not have this added layer of complication. If I were a seller with a shop and thousands of items, I think I would despair.
totally agree with the category responses, above.
who goes into a category and looks through?
yahoo used to be king of search and mainly used a “directory” drill down category style..
where are yahoo now as a search company, relying on bing for search thats what, and bing are behind google!
move on ebay!
also i sell mainly car brochures, which DO have manufacturers code, but not a barcode as such.. eg FA123 for ford advertising brochure.
will i have to include this, even though 99% of my buyers dont use them, and simply find my items because they like a brochure which covers there car? and dont collect every number from FA1 to FAxxxxx?
Notice how the 10p fee for unsold items (after 18 months) is being scrapped. I suspect their lawyers have told them of potential legal ramifications in implementing this, whilst PR are using it to suggest that eBay have actually listened to customer feedback. Well that would be a first!!!
“In March, we announced that we’d introduce a fee for renewing a listing that hasn’t sold within 18 months. This was to improve the shopping experience by removing clutter on the site.
We’ve listened to your feedback and have decided not to go ahead with this. However, we still encourage you to avoid outdated listings. We’ll keep working towards finding new ways to support you and help your listings succeed.”
Agree, who searches by Category. Far too general. Only people who are happy to spend hours browsing. If you want a Pontiac Firebird model you search for Pontiac Firebird in Diecasts and Vehicles.
In the meantime based on previous realignments, anything that doesn’t fit neatly into eBay’s new categories will be just dumped in Other, leaving the seller to find them and realign if they want to catch the browsers.
Emergency Vehicles have disappeared as a category altogether, as has Buses (one of the few categories where I can imagine someone browsing), so where are they going to go? Are they just going to be dumped in a category en masse? And who will decide which listings are put In Contemporary Manufacture and Vintage Manufacture? (Hardly anyone will ever use this differentiation) Is there a cut off point or date that is applicable, does the Ebay person making the choice really have the detailed knowledge necessary, how many mistakes will be made, and how much variation between one ebay person and the next. Are they actually going to consider the many hundreds of thousands of listings 1 by 1or just make a big assumption so that many products will end up in the wrong category. What a waste of time. Stop fiddling Ebay.
Everyone seems to echo the same sentiments but ebay plough on with their agenda. At what point will they listen to their sellers, or are they trying to drive their customers away in favour of the large retailers, who dont need ebay anyway and could drop them in an instant. Strange.
This product identifier update is a major change — being announced just 10 weeks before it goes live and will take down approximately 10,000 SKUs for us — and without any seller tools to support the change and make updates.
Building an inventory on eBay is a painstaking task that takes months to complete and get into good shape. To make this scale of changes in such a short time is a massive burden on our business — we’ll need to relist something like 200 listings a day for 10 weeks — approximately a staff cost of £20k.
The right way to do such a change is gradually, with lots of notice and with the right tools to support the change.
I think that its good to see how E-Bay is evolving to be easier and more helpful to the customers that use it.
I personally have always just used to main search bar to look for items i’m looking for, but this is another method i may consider trying.
These changes will force many sellers to barcode their items which will also enable them to sell their items on Amazon, so I imagine we will see a massive increase in new Amazon sellers due to these changes or am I missing something here?
Im confused?
How do you get a product identifier for unbranded clothing?
Any help would be apprechitaed
What’s happened to Tamebay. Where have all the ebay cheerleaders gone.
Ebay comments on here were nearly always possitive.
Not any more it seems, even the diehards are becoming disillusioned with the path ebay it taking.