eBay Business Seller Update April 2022

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eBay have today published a Business Seller Update. There’s nothing that will directly change the way that you sell and manage your business, but rather enhancements to assist you to fulfil orders, measure traffic and the inevitable category and item specifics updates.

eBay Fulfilment by Orange Connex gets a slew of updates with the most interesting being the introduction of Sunday deliveries and a later last shipping cut off time of 6pm (two hours later than the previous 4pm).

eBay are changing how listing page views are counted to exclude bots such as search engines and also switching to a 30 day count rather than a lifetime listing page view count.

New mandatory Item Specifics are coming to four categories in July this year, and will be available for sellers to voluntarily update from mid-May. eBay have also given notice that as they work with experts to tailor each category, there will be some category changes and the way some attributes are named to better meet shoppers requirements.

In some ways, this is a Seller update that you could largely ignore as it’s pretty much business as usual for most sellers. However, it’s well worth digging into the detail, considering trialling eBay fulfilment and of course if you sell in the categories where Item Specifics are changing then you’ll be obliged to spend time updating your listings by early summer.

5 Responses

  1. Fed up with filling in and ticking boxes for ebay item specifics. Often repeating the information to say the same thing. eg, wine glasses, I can tick 3 different boxes to tell the buyer they are getting a wine glass. New listing tool makes the process even more slow and painful.
    If listing is already created on Amazon I can create the listing in seconds.
    Shopify simple process that take about 3 minutes to create a listing and about 30 seconds to fill in Google fields.
    You spend a lot of time making professional listings, stock images all relevant info. Then search for the listing to see a private seller who has copied and pasted a store website, screen grabbed a picture off the store website as well at the top of the search.

  2. It also looks like they’re planning to retire the classic listing form. I got a chance to try it on eBay.com, but can’t find a way to opt back. I noticed these problems that I hope they will address before they force everybody onto it.

    For those who are using desktop computers or larger screens, the current listing form, albeit long, is practical – you can do everything from one screen. The new form is concise, it is easier to glance over everything, but the moment you require a new listing you have to click ‘edit’ on every section, bringing up a new prompt, before returning to the listing form. In effect it is making it much longer to complete and more cumbersome.

    The HTML window appears much smaller on my desktop screen. I have to scroll both left and right and up and down much more to see both the code or preview. If like myself, you use stylesheets and slightly more enhanced formatting it makes it very difficult to work with. Also the code that I have used for many years, falls apart under the new form. Certain < tags have been reduced to text and when trying to revert it back to a normal tag, the HTML editor keeps reverting back to text. Also the layout of my design is ruined in the preview, which means I would now need to recode everything in order to get it to adapt with the new listing form, whereas under the old one it displays perfectly.

    The paid for international visibility option has currently not been included. I understand if you set your shipping preferences for other countries you can often get listed there, but by paying you guarantee getting indexed and with the possibility of getting into the top results, not appearing arbitrary and potentially completely buried at the bottom. It's a paid for service that has existed for years on eBay and always been a successful part of my selling stragey. When I discussed it with eBay they could not tell me why it had been removed and could only offer to pass on the feedback to the relevant team.

    Although I haven't experienced any lagging, others have spoken of long lag times, anything up to a minute or longer where the form turns a solid white and blinks.

    Item specifics from existing listings or drafts are going missing.

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