With this week’s announcement that eBay are mandating more Item Specifics from this coming October, in the Home, Furniture & DIY, Clothing, Shoes & Accessories, Jewellery & Watches and Toys & Games categories, it’s welcome news that new tools are being created, to make completing eBay attributes easier and automate Item Specifics where possible.
Announced at eBay Open and already live to a percentage of sellers in the US, eBay are starting to automatically populate Item Specifics based on the titles that sellers enter. Today we’re able to reveal screen shots of what the tool will look like when it becomes available to you.
Automate Item Specifics on eBay
For example, in the image above the title is “Large Beige Faux Fur Luxury Fleece Blanket Throw” and from this eBay are able to identify four main Item specifics and automatically update them:
- Type: Throw/Blanket
- Colour: Beige
- Theme: Luxury
- Material: Faux Fur
This is before the seller even gets as far as starting to manually enter Item Specifics, when they get to this section of the Sell Your Item form they’ll eBay have done their best to automate Item Specifics and those that can be inferred already entered:
Anything that saves time for sellers, especially in the area of Item Specifics, has to be very welcome.
Suggested Item Specifics values on eBay
The second part of the new listing flow from eBay will be an indication of how good your Item Specifics are. eBay will display both a count (number of recent searches) against each Item Specific to give you an indication of how important that particular attribute is to complete as well as a roundel which fills up with each Item Specific you enter.
At the same time (as in the image immediately above), to make completing recommended Item Specifics quicker, eBay will auto-suggest frequently used vales so you can select them with a single click if they apply to your item. This won’t work if your item needs different values, but for the most popular values it will be a time saver.
What about third party tools?
These new tools from eBay to automate Item Specifics for sellers will be specific to the Sell Your Item form. We would hope in time to see third party tools replicate a similar experience within their own software solutions.
What the tool will do however, is give you the ability to start and launch a listing in your third party software (or perhaps on the eBay Mobile App) and then go in to edit and complete it on eBay taking advantage of the Sell Your Item form automate item specific features.
eBay have also made the Optiseller aspect finder tool free of charge until the 31st December 2019. Optiseller is a third party tool which can identify and correct listings that are missing key item specifics from the relevant categories.
3 Responses
How do we access the free offer until Dec 2019 as the link just takes you to a pricing screen and which package(s) is/are included in the free offer – thanks
How do i get the trial please?
eBay would be better spending time working out why their sales are so poor and making their website actually work properly. Even paying for advertising makes no difference.
It used to be a good site to sell on, now it is a complete waste of time and money. As a business seller I am constantly bringing in new stock and updating to make sure I have what customers are looking for. It works on my own site and on Amazon, but not on eBay.