In September, we covered the new out-of-stock option on eBay At the time it was only available to a small cohort of sellers, the good news is this tool is now available to all sellers.
eBay have announced the change here.
The tool is free to use on multi-quantity Good ‘Til Cancelled listings and will help safeguard feedback and help to protect sellers from associated defects. eBay have also updated the tool so any Good ‘Til Cancelled listing with a quantity of zero for an entire 30-day billing period may qualify for an insertion fee credit at the end of that period.
Here’s how eBay sellers can apply the out-of-stock option to Good ‘Til Cancelled listings:
1. Go to My eBay > Account > Site Preferences
2. Under Selling Preferences, click Show next to Sell Your Item form and listings
3. Click Edit next to Use the out-of-stock option
4. Select the checkbox, then click Apply
Once available, sellers can apply the new out-of-stock option directly from Selling Preferences in My eBay and can also opt-out at any time.
7 Responses
This is great news. Ebay seem to be taking a few notes out of Amazons book and making life a little easier for professional sellers.
Finally its started working correctly, as previously the listings just ended, now they state “This item is out of stock”
I clicked on this option and have called eBay twice in the last two weeks as listings are ending instead of showing out of stock. The seller support checked and confirmed that settings are correct but there are issues with some accounts. Apparently it was reported to tech and even today when i checked and tried, listings ended.
Apparently not all accounts have a bug but i will suggest trying it first. If your listing moves to out of stock and then ends after 10 minutes then you have to report to eBay.
This is a very interesting change. However, do you still get an email to say the item is out of stock as you do when an item ends and the same for it coming back to stock… I would presume not ?
We use the emails as a very useful tool to know what has sold out or come back in to stock on a daily basis without having to run reports, and is useful due to multiple platforms and helps when speaking to customers.
Seems to be on by default!
Wow, eBay is beginning to learn the ecommerce trade. About time you start learning that your traditional way of doing things is ancient.
Ebays next steps may well be:
Cancel insertion fees
Cancel the 7, 10 and 30 day listing and make everything GTC
Increase title lengths beyond 80 characters
Remove the stupid idea of selling limits
Unify the product page and cancel the template and coding headache for sellers
Reform the pathetic cross border duplicate policy
Cancel the idea of 2 accounts (eBay and PayPal) and unify them for simplicity and ease
Differentiate between what is a seller feedback and what is a product review
Perhaps if you (ebay) go out to the market, buy products, stock them, list them, ship them and then have eBay dictate how you should do things you’ll probably reconsider trading on this platform