eBay have announced New July eBay item specifics mandates affecting the following product categories:
- Business & industrial
- Collectibles
- Gift cards
- Home & garden
- Media
- Musical instruments
- Non-fungible tokens
- Parts & accessories
- Sporting goods
The deadline to make the changes is the 12th of July 2021.
Item specifics comprise a detailed description of a product (make, brand, colour, size, etc) and are an essential part of the filtering process for buyers. According to eBay, 55% of customers use filters to find what they want. In certain categories (such as fashion) this can rise to 80%.
“What may seem like a chore for sellers is actually a benefit. eBay’s aim in extending item specifics is to enhance the customer experience on the marketplace. Buyers can search for products in a more structured way to find exactly what they want. For sellers it is a valuable SEO tool, so their products can be found more easily. The more detail provided, the higher up the eBay search results the listings will appear.”
– Richard Falconer, CEO, Optiseller
Updating all listings manually to ensure they are compliant with the New July eBay item specifics mandates could prove to be very time consuming, especially for those sellers with hundreds of thousands of items in their inventory.
Fortunately, Optiseller can help with its Aspect Finder+ tool, which is free of charge (courtesy of eBay) to all eBay sellers until the 30th of June 2021. The tool quickly identifies those listings that are missing item specifics which are currently required, soon to be required and recommended across all listings, in all categories. In addition, the tool optimises item specifics to boost search visibility helping seller maximise sales opportunities.
“We would urge all eBay sellers to take advantage of the free tool. Just as most companies want to get on page one of Google, eBay sellers should be striving to rank highly in eBay searches if they want to sell more. Customers want to find what they are looking for quickly and use filters to drill down to exactly what they are looking for. Unless your item specifics are up to date, you risk losing valuable sales.”
– Richard Falconer, CEO, Optiseller
For details of how to access the Aspect Finder+ tool please visit go.optiseller.com/aspect-finder-landing
For further information about Aspect Finder+ and Optiseller please visit go.optiseller.com
Chris Cook from Optiseller is a speaker at Tamebay Live in May, sign up to learn how to optimise your listings and stand out from the competition.
8 Responses
Optiseller didn’t work for the last update. Is there any reason to believe it will work for this one?
Perhaps eBay could pause the item specifics mandates while we try to digest the massive changes they are introducing on VAT – specified late with no tools to help. Again.
We sell in “Parts & Accessories” category. I went though few documentation pages to find out what exact attributes are needed.
Click on the link on eBay’s page.
Got “Page Not Found”.
LOL
Looks like someone forgot to upload that xlsx file.
Very not helpful.
So if all this palaver js effective and necessary for search rank, whats the
Point of the promoted listing option .
time spent on listing administration eats into effectiveness of their market
Whats next?
High tide at the nearest estuary
Wind direction?
Atomic structure?
Optiseller are always advertising jobs around here, it has to be hard sell however to get people to pay yet anther subscription on eBay.
I give up with eBay items specifics in my video games cat….90% of it is pointless. People just search ps4 resident Evil village and look for the cheapest price it is that simple….as long as you have added the platform and game name EAN not a lot else is really needed.
I look at the eBay item specifics and every game seems to be missing 4 and 5 and 6 and none of it is actually needed.
every book that is ever listed has its TITLE in the TITLE
so why the need to list the TITLE in the specifics
but to use optiseller dont you have to give them “developer” access to your ebay account?
just thinking of the nightmare that was webinterpret!
In my experience, often the ‘best sellers’ i.e. those which appear at top of 1st page of search with a high volume of sales do not have all item specifics filled out. I notice this way more often than note when doing market research.
We do try to fill out item specifics and it helps when selling similar items as we can copy/clone an existing an item thus the item specifics are already completed.
When an item starts selling well for us, then we manually revise it on ebay and complete an extra item specifics or add an extra line of description – basically to try and improve it. But, like I said, we only do this once items have picked up some traction. We do not fill in every item specific when listing a new item and it works for us and it clearly works for the ‘best sellers’ like I mentioned at the start of this post.