eBay UK have published a final status update and details on the 15 October Item Specifics and classification changes. This follows a similar announcement from eBay.com and comes with the promise that eBay will never again roll out category changes and item specifics requirements simultaneously in the future.
One interesting snippet in the announcement is that eBay will “be in touch again in late January with information on planned changes for 2020”. This indicates that the first eBay Seller Release of 2020 will be late January.
eBay UK Final status update and details on 15 October item specifics and classification changes
“We’d like to thank you for your patience and understanding as we’ve been working to resolve the final few issues from the 15 October category & classification and item specifics changes. We’ve already sent an email with a final status update to the sellers most affected by these issues. You can read our previous update from 31.10.2019: here.
Seller Hub – All missing sales data (from 12 Oct. to the current date) in the Seller Hub Performance tab are restored and validated.
Missing values – We have now completed copying the hidden item specifics you previously provided into the Required item specifics fields. You don’t need to take any action on listings created before 15 October.
Irrelevant item specifics values – The cleaning of irrelevant values is complete, sellers should now be seeing the appropriate values in the drop-down menus.
Left hand navigation filters – The left-hand navigation filters are fully functional in almost all categories now. A number of item specifics in six Clothing, Shoes & Accessories categories are not displaying in the left-hand navigation as they should. We expect this to be resolved in the coming weeks.
We’d like to remind you that you can use the Optiseller Aspect Finder Tool to help you quickly identify and correct any listings missing key item specifics.
Our efforts to optimise our platform and improve the experience for sellers and buyers will continue. Going forward, we won’t make category changes and item specifics requirements simultaneously. New changes will be gradually rolled out to minimise the chances of disruption to sellers. We’ll be in touch again in late January with information on planned changes for 2020.Thank you for your patience and thank you for selling on eBay.”
– Regards, The eBay Team
6 Responses
Have they actually tried searching for men’s and women’s jeans sizing? How can they say everything is fixed.
“and comes with the promise that eBay will never again roll out category changes and item specifics requirements simultaneously in the future.”
We’ll never make this one very specific combination of monumental f**k ups again, we’ll endeavour to do new and unexpected f**k ups in future, or f**k these two things up individually rather than together.
wow that’s reassuring. can tell they learned from this.
Optiseller isnt working……
My Good Til Cancelled listings are not relisting. They are just dropping out and all end up in unsold ended listings. it is a total shambles because when I try to relist them they use the original quantities and are not properly linked to my inventory management. Every day for the items that have not relisted automatically as they are supposed to do, I have to remove the links to eBay listings on my inventory, relist them on eBay and import them again.
If I try to add them again from my inventory management system so that it only adds the current correctly quantities, eBay will not allow the listings because according to them they are already there. Except they are not they have ended.
The whole mess is a nightmare, it has not been sorted out at all. The item specifics are nonsense, and products just cannot be found in search. I use Storefeeder to list my products in eBay and although all the new specifics are there they don’t transfer over to eBay correctly. I can only assume the API link is as badly programmed as the rest of these so called improvements.
By the way does anyone in the UK ever call leather Bullhide?? What planet are these people on for goodness sake.
So they make Heel Height mandatory on women’s shoes – Heels category on the 15th of October. All recommended values are in imperial units – 15th of October comes and all recommended values change to metric. There’s 4.4 million listings in the women’s heels category and only 187,000 with the recommended values for heel height (which is mandatory apparently). This is not a one-off example – there are numerous item specifics and categories like this. I have no idea how to move forward from this – do I make changes to all my listings after running through all categories? Will eBay continue to map the values? Will they continue to make changes to item-specific values without announcement?