eBay are changing both search results and listing pages under the new eBay PBSE (Product Based Shopping Experience). In search results products will be grouped together and then when the buyer clicks an item of interest they’ll land on a new eBay PBSE Product Page where they can either make a purchase immediately, click (bizarrely into a page with no back link) to view the description or click to see what eBay calls ‘details and exclusions’ to see the full listing.
Back in September, Tamebay reader Tyler pointed out a glaring error which could mislead buyers and is still live on eBay today. It’s an undesirable side effect of rolling up listings onto a single product page and it’s not unique to the new eBay PBSE Product Page – it’s an issue which has been impacting Amazon merchants for years.
The issue with multiple sellers all adding different details to their listings is that eBay might take an image from one listing, a title from another and item specifics from a third listing and amalgamate them all into one master listing in the product catalogue which everyone then lists against.
In this instance, a single seller is supplying a lot of 10 bags of coal. Their listing doesn’t even appear on the new style product page but every other listing for single bags of coal does. The price for 10 bags of coal is displayed as £14.30 but when you buy you’ll only be receiving a single bag. If you go hunting for the listings for 10 bags you’ll find it’s priced at £135.40, but you’ll have to click to see all listings in order to find it.
This particular instance appears to be exacerbated by the face eBay are rolling out the new eBay PBSE Product Page for listings which aren’t yet included in the PBSE experience. Now, you don’t just have to worry about listings which eBay PBSE is live for, but also check how your non eBay PBSE listings are being displayed.
It’s likely that listings not included under eBay PBSE are being matched to an older catalogue by GTIN and it’s unlikely that you’ll even be able to easily submit requests to have these details updated.
One of the issues with any product catalogue using details amalgamated from multiple sources is data quality. We see far too many listings on both eBay and Amazon with ‘UK Seller’, ‘Fast Shipping’, ‘Free Shipping’ or quantity listed in the title. This is fine when it’s ‘your listing’, but as soon as details are combined to make a single product page it just doesn’t work. We need to see listing titles on eBay automatically purged to remove all such information when the title is selected for the eBay PBSE Product Page title.
We’re not sure what advice to offer in these circumstances, eBay have already put the brakes on their roll out of the PBSE mandate to new categories until after Christmas, but it may be worth checking your existing listings that aren’t included in the current mandatory PBSE categories to see what’s being promised on the new style eBay PBSE Product Page and whether it matches what you’re offering in your listing.
8 Responses
Anyone else notice that when you revise a listing on the Ebay app they automatically click best offer prices, even when you have not ticked that option.
An Ebay rep told a seller on another forum that yes they aware of this and Ebay encourage it. Q3 figures must be bad for Ebay
WE are slowly moving away from eBay as all their changes are having such a damaging effect on our sales.
We are 28% down on last year my friend is 37% down another is 16% down and others are over 12% down. None of us have raised prices in over 2 tears and some items have not been increased in over 4 years. So it is obviously something eBay are doing. We have seen a 9% increase on Amazon moving from 25% of our inventory on there to 40% now on there. (still loads to transfer) We have seen a 41% increase in sales on the new On BUY.com and now using other platforms as well so it looks like eBay will be shortly shut down by us as they have now changed so far from what worked into a system that mimics amazon and does not work as good so why do we need to subscribe to both..
Will, yes we have seen that. Also if you change something via the phone app, you often find that ebay have replaced your details etc with the ebay catalogue! I have had that happena few times and only noticed when i viewed the listing on the pc. I then went into it and my description and details had all been removed!!!
To make matters worse, some of the details from the catalogue were incorrect… so the specifics were incorrect. If a buyer buys it and then claims SNAD I don’t have a leg to stand on!
Another issue is when i have searched for things and they are in the ebay catalogue, i come across many sellers who use the same barcode for everything… so i geta list of totally irrelevent things, or worse still… something i may think is something it is not.
And issue to deal with…. and yep… more refunds!
eBay will responsible for any “Item not as described issue” where you have a clear product and can take a photo and prove your information is correct as per the suppliers spec and catalogue. Which will mean a lot of payments being returned to sellers by wrongful representation of the products.
They will end up just like amazon where we recently had a dog harness in blue and when we tried to list on Amazon some fool had already listed it under that barcode but put in the title red it took so long to try and get it altered we gave up.
But the best yet we regularly find are where the items are supplied to us in outers of 3 or 6 from suppliers and then we go to list them on Amazon and they have them on there priced at the individual price but the title says (box of 3).
I keep meaning to order 1 and then demand the others be sent.
Welcome to eBay’s “Why Make Something Easy When You Can Make It Difficult Program”