As announced in their Autumn Seller Update, there are some new soon-to-be-required eBay item specifics in the categories below. The new item specifics will be required in early 2022, and are now available for you to add as you edit or create new listings.
- Collectibles & Art
- Jewellery
- Musical Instruments
- Parts & Accessories
- Sporting Goods
You’ll see these item specifics tagged as Required Soon, to let you know that you’ll soon be required to add them to affected listings. You’ll also see more updates as these item specifics become available, including the date they’ll be required. eBay strongly recommend adding new Required Soon item specifics to your listings from now, as then when they become required you’ll be ready to go.
As eBay introduces the new soon-to-be-required eBay item specifics, you’ll also see updates to the structures and item specifics names in those categories. These updates are based on input eBay sought from industry experts to make listings in these categories easier for buyers to find.
Next week, you may see changes to the structure and item specifics names in the categories listed above. eBay will automatically adjust your affected listings to reflect these changes.
Tools to help you find and update missing item specifics
There are a number of tools and features to help you find and update missing item specifics:
- Download/Upload file
Available in the Seller Hub Active Listings page, this tool allows you to download an Excel file of your listings, identify and update missing item specifics in bulk, and re-upload the file to apply the changes.
- Task reminders in Seller Hub and My eBay
If you have listings missing Required, Required Soon, or Recommended item specifics, you’ll see corresponding tasks in Seller Hub, or corresponding modules in My eBay Selling Overview.
- Quick filters
If you have listings missing Required, Required Soon, or Recommended item specifics, you’ll see quick filters on your Seller Hub Active Listings page. These quick filters show you all listings missing those particular item specifics.
- Required Soon feature
When you create a new listing or revise an existing one, you’ll see indicators above item specifics that will be required soon. These will include the date the item specifics will become required.
- Edit item specifics in bulk
When you add item specifics on the Seller Hub Active Listings page, you can select multiple listings and click the “Add item specifics” button. This will load all of your selected listings into a pop-up window where you can add any missing item specifics.
9 Responses
Never mind the tinkering with item specifics, how aout covering the absolute disaster that this update has been regarding the complete annihilation of certain categories!!
Pottery/glass, postcards, etc.
The way in which these have been moved into meaningless/grossly incorrect new catrgories is appalling.
Salt into the wounds is the charging of erroneous listing fees within shop accounts too!!
Some seriously fuming sellers accross the globe right now; the forums / youtube / etc paying testament to just how bad this one is.
we hate item specifics with utter intensity,,
though the restructuring of category’s that are decades out of date,
is a good thing
Brilliant eBay- turn what was a 10 second form into a minefield. We sell unique items- each item specific is different to the next. It’s now taking so long to produce listings that it’s almost pointless. We find buyers never read them anyway and after carefully completing and checking each form they are uploading via auctiva to eBay with errors. Each one appearing on my eBay requiring action and showing “add item specifics required soon”.
All of the specifics are as detailed as they can be- it’s impossible to add more for the items we have.
A complete mess – but just what we expected as it’s eBay.
R .. you serious?!
The category changes are devastating; lucky you, – you clearly don’t list in Postcards, Pottery/Glass or many other vintage/art areas.
For those of that do 100/1000’s of listings in these areas, the new cats we’ve been dumped into are hopelessly wrong, have no meaningful options … & currently are being erroneously charged 12p per listing (even within our montly shop allowances) when trying to revise/relist.
lucky you indeed…
I would like to know who these industry experts were.
Having traded in collectables for more than twenty years, the new specifics are a garbled nonsense.
Sales are down dramatically and having just finished completing adding specifics to our items, there are now more than 40,000 listings requiring them again.
Optiseller is a useless tool for collectables, lacking the refinement or insights , so there is no alternative to thousands of wasted hours of unpaid slog going through them one by one.
It just isn’t worth it any more.
To their credit, Ebay CS refunded this month’s anchor shop fee when I complained.
But it doesn’t alter the fact that Ebay has become an unstable and unpredictable platform to sell on.
Who knows what they might do next.
we think many have just become conditioned to the stupidity of the category structures
when listing a postcard of horse shoe pass, or devils leap, we dont want to become a geography expert, to list it,
though nothing much has improved ,if anything its worse, with item specifics
its too granular, listing ceramics
height, width, depth, decade ,colour, brand, manufacturer, decade, era, artist, genre ,
pottery ,porcelain, earthenware stoneware, blah ,blah,blah,
we think ebays logic is focused on 40ft containers of chinese imports
it takes one process to list thousands of skus,
ah ha we stand corrected,
were with andy on this
what clown titled a category
“Pottery & glass” ,rather than Ceramics and glass ?
pottery is a type of ceramic , pottery is not a prime category
It’s as if you rented a shop on the high street and overnight your land lord breaks in rearranges all your stock and re-programmes your till
What have eBay done? we are not in a category that has been changed but our sales have crashed, our listings are all over the place, sometimes on page 1 sometimes on page 100. There seems to be some sort of rotation of listings that is completely illogical and without explanation. We sell in womens clothing and apparently should not be affected by any changes made on Oct 12th but since that date we have seen sales drop 50% with gaps in sales over an hour. before Oct we had sales every 2-4 minutes. If it’s not broken don’t try and fix it………………….crazy.