eBay - Item Specifics UGH
LarkinCollector
Posts: 8,975 ✭✭✭✭✭
From what I hear, this started yesterday where eBay is now forcing you to fill out the Item Specifics. I went to do a mass upload with TurboLister yesterday and 75 of 77 had ERRORs related to this. It seems to be slightly different on what is required for each category of sports cards. What a huge pain to go back and update all of my listings when I already have the info in the listing Title and some is idiotically redundant (guess what, if I have it listed in Soccer Cards, the Sport is Soccer). eBay is just getting worse as a sales platform for the small guys.
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Yep. Just two re-lists for me but yep same.
Yes, Very Annoying.
The "must" ones seem to be Sport, Team, Original, Year.
Hmm, I haven't been forced to do Year on any and got part of my batch fixed and uploaded yesterday. Card Manufacturer and Grade seem to have been required on most/all. 'Various' and 'n/a' seem to be acceptable values when appropriate.
Probably depends on what was already filled in on previous listings.
The “sport” one seems the most mundane to me, considering the category of tradings cards>sports>baseball was already elected.
Mundane, idiotically redundant, whatever ... the only time it's made sense to fill out is for cards listed in the Olympics category, but then its 'Olympic Sport', not just 'Sport'.
Oh my goodness. This sounds like fun. I'll find out tonight. Ebay tinkering with something to punish sellers all the time. "Unreal".
Yes, it’s brutal
Think it took 8-10 hours to update all my auction relists and templates (I use a lot of templates). I can't wait to see what happens with all my GTC BINs when they're due.
Has anybody tried Optiseller to see if it makes it any easier? https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/Optiseller-New-third-party-tool-to-help-you-identify-listings/ba-p/30324812 I hate free trials and still use TurboLister, but it looked like it might be useful for Seller Hub.
I found this out last night. It sucks.
Appreciate today-
Bill
I completely understand the “spamming” thats occurring now on player searches at least. So much easier to just hit “sell similar” vs creating a new listing for each new card/player considering you HAVE to have these specifics filled out.
Good news, I guess, is that you don’t really have to waste title space on things like “topps, card #, year, original” and things of that nature if you take the time and set up each card listing correctly. If you have time to burn, that is.
It's just awful and takes forever to revise the listings. I'm still in shock.
People in general just don't know how to leave "well enough" alone.
Shane
I have always filled in as many as I could when listing. I figure if it helps that one person narrow down their search enough to be able to find my item and buy it over the person who didn't enter an item specific in, then I'll do it. My issue now is, when I list a "lot" with multiple manufacturers/years/players/teams/whatever, and it wants me to pick one each of the team/player/year/brand/etc, that doesn't make any sense and is frustrating to me. If you're going to force me into picking one (a lot of times, the player isn't even listed in the pre-determined player menu), then at least let me pick multiple, especially if I already selected "lot" as one of the options!
Fair enough, but I would guess you are one of the few who did fill them out voluntarily. I'm usually in a rush whenever I get extra free listing offers and included it all in the title or category already (except Team since I either ran out of characters or it's not applicable for sports like golf, tennis or boxing). Can't you type in whatever you want for player/team? Even basic MLB teams like 'Cincinnati Reds' weren't coming up as options when I did mine and had to type it in each time.
For my soccer/cricket listings, my templates now have 'No idea, I'm American' as the default 'Team' and for Hockey 'I'm not Canadian, no clue'.
The spamming has been going on forever already with Gary Nicklaus cards tagged with Jack Nicklaus as the Athlete or every golf SIFK card w/Jordan Spieth. I am having fun with nicknames and common misspellings in that field though.
For sure, but I can tell you the amount of ozzie albies listings that now have to be sorted thru because acuna jr. is listed in “the player” field has gone up exponentially. I did some myself just without realizing it simply because i got fed up and just kept hitting the “sell similar” tab. It was an A-HA moment after wondering why
all these acuna listings popped up while searching the prior week.
Wish turbolister worked via smartphone.
Yes, this made the relist promo less special and ensures I’ll be doing “list similar” with hopes those boxes will be filled in already
They will but best of luck remembering to change the player name, team name, etc for each listing prior to hitting list item.
Dont fret, I certainly didnt. It wasnt until I was searching for an Acuna card and eventually ran across my own Albies listings. The A-HA moment was strong that day my friend. After the 10 minutes of confusion that is.
I ran into this earlier this week. I listed two lots of 1970 Topps and had to fill in player (I went with 'various') and team (I went with 'various') . I imagine this will be painful for those who list much more than I do.
Is "various" an option in those drop down menus or do you have to type it in and it accepts it as a valid entry?
It's not an option in the drop down AFAIK, but works fine when typed in.
It looks like so far the current required fields for the 4 major sports are the same and currently they allow very general info for most fields. If you're familiar with file exchange your current listings can be updated quite easily with general info as long as there are no open offers. So if all your items are in one or any of the following categories and you want them to comply to current requirements, then all you need is a list of all your item numbers and then create a revise format upload file for file exchange with entries in the following field names.
Ebay Category and *Required Specifics Fields
213 Baseball *C:Card Manufacturer *C:Sport *C:Grade *C:Original/Reprint *C:Player *C:Team
214 Basketball *C:Card Manufacturer *C:Sport *C:Grade *C:Original/Reprint *C:Player *C:Team
215 Football *C:Card Manufacturer *C:Sport *C:Grade *C:Original/Reprint *C:Player *C:Team
216 Hockey *C:Card Manufacturer *C:Sport *C:Grade *C:Original/Reprint *C:Player *C:Team
The new item specific requirements are used by ebay for results filtering purposes if a person uses ebay's filter options. Most users and collectors know what the search box is and will search what they're looking for in that manner. So if they're looking for 1966 Topps PSA they'll see all the items with those in the title. If however they start using the built in ebay filters, it filters items based on uses data from the item specifics and will only show items that match your filter. So if they hit the filter for New York Yankees and you just put "various" etc. in then your items won't be displayed. It makes very little sense to "search" ebay using their filtering options but ebay prominently displays it and if less experienced users start relying on ebay's filters then you're kind of going to need the right stuff in those fields to be seen.
Stay away from Inkfrog, they made matters much worse then this SPORT DATA FIELD debacle, by changing their photo uploader on a whim, I have so many listings created less then a month ago and probably more, all need to have their respective photos re-uploaded again due to the uploader change.
As a side whine: the customer support @ Inkfrog isn't one of their specialties, they don't have any.
FWIW, these relisted without any changes, but there were notifications on them that Item Specifics needed to be added. I think I've got all of my existing stuff fixed now.
I generally use my computer to list initially. I started using my phone for these new item specific changes and discovered it's a thousand times quicker updating and all it is is tap tap tap. One good thing that has come out of it is an increase in sales so I am not complaining one bit
BUMP
So in 2019 Ebay forced us to add certain Item Specifics... then earlier this year they blew all of those Item Specifics away and threw all of our cards into the same pot... and today they're making us add them back.
I have always added as many specifics to my listings as I can, so I was ticked when they blew most of them away, and now they're making us add back the Sport and Graded specifics. Going through 3000+ listings trying to bulk edit cards to specify the sports, my eyes are burning from looking at these tiny images. Not only that, the system is slow because EVERYONE is making updates. Ebay continues to shoot themselves in the foot.
I feel bad for sellers having to go through that, and at the same time, I feel bad for buyers who no longer have categories to search in, yet the majority of items have not been updated with specifics that make them searchable. The result is the majority of items still being “unspecified”, making efficient searches impossible.