Tamebay understands that the rollout of mandatory eBay Product Identifiers, scheduled for February, will be delayed until later in the year across the world.
We believe that all eBay sites will be delaying this roll out. UK sellers will be officially informed early next week. The original eBay plan can be found here.
It started in Australia and then Ireland. Both countries announced that they will not be introducing the new mandatory Product Identifier rules in February as announced last year. We wrote about that earlier this week. And, we are told, that this delay will apply to all eBay territories. Announcements are being staggered by market, it seems.
You may have been working hard to comply with the new rules. Or you may need more time. In any case, if you have implemented some or all of the new Product Identifiers it will hopefully already be reaping rewards. (let us know.)
David Brackin of StuffUSell says of the u-turn: “eBay are to be congratulated on having the maturity to step back from the brink on this initiative rather than press on with something which will be painful for many sellers to implement and hurt sales.”
“Sellers are best placed, with marketplace support and guidance, to judge which product listings need additional information to help in search. In the most competitive niches, sellers will do almost anything to get higher rankings in search – this is incentive enough with careful guidance and the right tools from eBay. In other areas there may only be a single instance of the item up for sale globally – hardly worth creating a catalogue listing when you are automatically top of every search.”
David does rather touch the nub of the eBay problem here. With the vast majority of new and branded goods it’s easy to provide a Product Identifier. With old and retro, antique items etc it’s all but impossible on occasion. The eBay approach has hitherto been inflexible.
Whilst the notion of Product Identifiers is essentially a good one, the implementation for eBay needs rather more finesse that the deal on the table.
The hope is that this hiatus on bringing forward the new rules gives eBay adequate time to provide the required flexibility that many sellers need.
What do you reckon?
9 Responses
Rather than product identifiers, Ebay should be working on some buyer identifiers.
They’re a bunch of gobbledeespeek loons.
New system after new system… delay after delay! It would help if I could actually add EANs to all my products, but while going through them i find some will add and others the system simply makes them disappear. I know they work, we have a full inventory system here, and they all work else where, just that once again we have issues with ebay.
Ebay New Ideas… New Issues.
Maybe they should just concentrate on those postimng hundreds of the same listing with just one letter etc different in the title? Just the other night i scrolled by about 30 versions of the same things by the same seller…. a different letter here, a penny differnce there… spam spam spam!
As a one man business and seller of refurbished used and new old stock items product identifiers is an impossible nightmare quite frankly. If Ebay thinks that its possible to obtain even a part number for a 40 year old nos cycle part from Japan then I wish they would tell me where to obtain it………
yes after absolutely busting a hump to be compliant when they said we must be compliant, we are now reaping the reward of diminished sales.
expect nothing else from ebay, ever. absolute shower of clowns.
Hopefully they’ll drop it entirely. A waste of time 🙁
I sell the same (unbranded/own brand) products on Amazon and ebay. Amazon has the identifiers. Ebay just has “does not apply”. If product identifiers are so great, how come my ebay sales outstrip my Amazon sales by factors upto 20 to 1, for the same product, at the same price?
When this idea was first thrust upon us by Ebay, I spent hour after hour going through my listings and, when there were part numbers, barcodes, etc I used them.
However, I also had many hundreds of listings of items where no such identifiers were available, so I used the “Does not apply” option.
Are we now being forced to buy/make up/ or otherwise obtain these numbers for the “Does not apply” listings? What happens if we don’t/can’t do it? Top-rated seller whip again I guess.
in another fantastic ebay-only turn of awesomeness, having all my identifiers done ages ago, ebay have ended half a dozen listings this week for not having identifiers, even though they have EAN’s and UPC’s, and just after saying they’d delay the requirement for identifiers.
i love working with these geniuses.