If you’ve been worrying about how you’ll add product identifiers (GTIN – EAN/UPC/JAN/ISBN) to your multi variation listings you can stop now. eBay have scrapped the roll out intended for the 1st of September and say that they’ll delay implementation until some time next year.
In all likelihood the reason for the delay is not a lack of will, it’s probably that technically eBay simply aren’t ready. Whilst you can add a product identifier to single item listings, currently only the parent of a variation can be assigned a product identifier. It’s not possible to add them to child listings. eBay acknowledged this saying “This is in response to some technical issues our sellers have highlighted when trying to add this information. We’re looking into the issues and apologise to those affected for any inconvenience caused“.
Insisting sellers do something that’s not possible would of course be ridiculous, just as ridiculous as going ahead and fudging the issue by forcing sellers to assign one GTIN to all variations of a product when each different size or colour should have their own unique GTIN.
This is of course something eBay should have realised long ago, and it’s not something that’s not been highlighted multiple times. We’re guessing that at some point in the future the technical weenies will do what needs to be done so that GTINs can be uploaded to all child listings on eBay.
In the mean time this will of course put a dent in eBay’s plan for a more catalogued approach which they’ve said is vital to drive traffic from search engines. Google for instance isn’t interested in product feeds with Product Identifiers missing, so sadly it might be some time before your products start appearing in search across the web.
Edited to add
For an update from eBay with more background information now read Insights from eBay on Product Identifier delays
13 Responses
Utterly shambolic. eBay are so far behind the curve with this, they deserve to be lagging behind the eCommerce growth rate, and significantly behind Amazon. This should have been done 7 or 8 years ago.
I personally think that it’s an almost perfect example of the difference between Amazon and eBay management. For the last 10 years eBay have been running around like headless chickens while Amazon took a strategic, planned approach and left eBay way behind.
This is not entirely true. EANs can be added to each of the variants now via UI. I’m suspecting eBay might have troubles with larger volume merchants who might not be able to add this data via API/other means.
I had this problem two months ago (had to remove children identifiers) but there errors are not appearing now.
I have been trying to add the correct bar codes to listings for a while now and just cracked it this weekend!!
The problem was that the file that ebay suggest you use in file exchange didn’t do the job as it appears that there are several places (DB Table within ebay) to add a bar code and therefore the uploaded file didn’t put the barcodes in the right place.
I found this out when trying to find out which of my 6000+ listings didn’t have barcodes, by creating a new turbolister DB and downloading all the current listings then exporting them from turbolister into an excel file which showed that there were 4 columns (2 x UPC & 2 x EAN) that could be populated with barcodes, which i have since found out are in different tables, one being the item specifics table and the other being a product information table.
The company we use to control our online listings & sales orders, have adjusted their code to put the correct information in the correct place and we have just finished completing the uploads.
Well at least we are ready when they do implement it.
We have broken the listings down into 3 categories (all our items have barcodes):
The ones that have to have their barcodes in place now and are compulsory (Toys and Games Cats)
Items that have a place on the SYI form to add a barcode but is not compulsory but will be in the future
Items that do not have a place to add a barcode on the SYI form but as we have them, we would like to add them.
All good fun
Lee
i attempted to use file exchange to upload all the available barcodes i have.
coincidentally ebay thought this would be a great time to decide items can only have one entry in several fields, which used to be multiple entry – e.g glass and chrome tables, can now be glass OR chrome, not both.
if the item had multilpe values in any of these fields, you cant edit it through file exchange, so i need to do 1,000+ manual edits. i think not.
Did I speak too soon?
“The Item Specific value ‘MPN’ was dropped because the child values vary and the item specific cannot be submitted as a variation.”
If you use the bulk edit tool on the desktop site there is a place to enter in the product identifiers for each child item.