New Ebay Categories Update Issues

Hello. Same problem with my listings. I don’t expect very many sales per week since I have only 400+ listings, but eBay’s category changes deleted almost half of my item specifics, and I’ve had only one sale since the 12th. I had been working hard to list more items for the holiday season, and now those items don’t appear in searches.

Im just re-listing (with the item specifics that had already been there) when I have a chance. Obviously this takes time away from creating new, additional listings. Why 4th quarter? Are they trying to discourage and eliminate small sellers?

First things first: don’t panic! Every other seller (small and large) in your categories is going through this issue at the same time. You will get through it, and once it’s done, you can just get back to the normal routine of buying, taking photos, listing and shipping.

I went through all of these problems six months ago in my main niche, trading cards, which affected about 3000 of the 3400 items in my store. All 25+ subcategories in sports trading cards were consolidated into just two — sports trading cards and sports trading card lots.

Here are my tips to get through the editing process as quickly as possible:

1. Use bulk editor to make changes in batch. It is easier to stay organized if you do every listing (or 200 at once) in an individual category at once. If you have well organized store categories, that will make your process even easier. You can change the main category of 200 listings at once using bulk editor. You can also add a particular item specific.

2. Only add the required item specifics and then move on. Don’t worry about recommended, or getting every little detail moved over perfectly. I can’t stress this enough. Perfect is the enemy of good with eBay.

Once you’ve finished the first two steps, here are a few more that might be helpful.

3. Polish your titles. Use every relevant keyword that a buyer might use and include basic descriptors of the item. For example, every one of my trading cards has the word ‘card’ in the title even though that should be self-evident by the category it’s in. But I want to catch those casual buyers along with the expert collectors.

4. Use this period to start scavenging on eBay if you don’t already and you will find listings that fall through the cracks and sell for less (sometimes much less) than you might expect. Whether it’s listings from small time sellers who grow frustrated by the “new” changes or large-scale wholesalers who don’t have the time to bulk edit 20,000 listings, you will find bargains during this period of change. Because of the category changes, old saved searches are less useful as well, so buyers are affected by the changes, too.

But as a scavenger, you can take advantage. I added a huge amount of inventory — probably 2-3 times what I usually buy — in the month leading up to these category changes (after they were announced but before they were required after) and the month after the changes. I am certain that sellers who were slow to make the changes to item specifics, or went through the motions by putting in keywords like SEE TITLE or NA, were lower in search rankings.

This isn’t the first time eBay has made seemingly weird changes, and it won’t be the last. Six months after these changes, I can say with confidence that my store is better off for them. My listing flow is a few seconds faster because I don’t have to switch between 20 different subcategories, and the listing process is easier for casual sellers to find the most relevant categories for their items. That’s why eBay made the changes now.