2017 Summer Seller Update – More ?s

You create your own business policies then name them what ever you want to call them. After they are saved, those then are the ones that will appear in the drop down list for you to select over and over. If you have policies in your drop down box it is because at one time you may have opted in or tried the Business Policies and had Ebay create them for you. But those are all editable by you.

I create about four or five of my own, like one is named under sixteen ozs. Cal. ship. Then I clciked what shipping choices I wanted in that title for the buyer to see when I listed items under 16 ozs. i also have an easy one, called Free shipping light weight and one called heavy weight. I also have one called Oversized and heavy and show USPS and FedEx and UPS choices under those.

You can also create several payment options policies, shipping and return policies. I even created a link and put in my dashboard short cuts area so I can click on it and it takes me directly to my policy page where I can tweak or edit my policies.

Great time saver, creates standard operating practices for your business and they become your selections from the shipping drop down. Especially handy when using software like WonderLister. Click, select, and boom shipping for that item is done.

The advantages are obvious. If you’re selling clothes, you can create a return policy that is very specific for that category and when you do your listing, you just select that policy. Need to make a change your return policy for the category, just edit the business policy. No need to redo each and every listing.

Hmm….We dont use Business Policies but we do use the drop down choices on the listing page so our policies are clear through eBay. There is no free style policies in our Description. I can understand how that is confusing to a buyer.

I cant imagine how they could force all sellers to only use Business Policies.
For us, we don’t sell homogenous items (like just dress shirts and iPhone cases).
Our items are all so different that we’d need 300 different policies based on size, fragility, etc.

Not sure what you mean by free style policies.

If you have Business Policy enabled, EB creates a business policy (payment, shipping, return) for each and every listing you create and attempts to consolidate them by removing duplicates. If you look at your business polices, you will find you may have hundreds of them already. Every time you make a change to a listing for these policies, it creates another.

The idea is to create a custom one that can be reused over and over without having to edit each listing.

Lets take for example changing handling time. I think your process today is that you bulk edit your listings. And you’re limited in the number of listing you can do at one time. With business shipping policy, all you have to do is edit the policy. If you only use one policy, one edit to the policy covers all of your listings.

Also note, I believe bulk edits are only for active listings. Business policy covers all listings. Active, ended and archived.

Lastly, all EB has to do is deny the listing if business policies are not set. For over a year, EB has been going back and forth with its requirements for business policies. First it would allow 1 of 3, then 2 of 3 then eventually now you need all 3 to be set.

Anyway, they have made it clear that this will eventually have to be done in their “Structured Data” sometime this year.

Actually the business policies are super easy to use once setup and you don’t need that many. You can still set the dimensions and weight in the listing, so you can have a calculated shipping option that can cover many different scenarios. 1 Business policy can be used for a small item or a large item, if you’re using calculated. If you need multiple flat rates then that’s different.

So for example, if it were an item to go in a box, you could setup a policy called “Cardboard Boxes” and set your postage policy up with handling to accomodate your cost for boxes. Then for each item whack in the dimensions and weight, pick the Cardboard Box policy and off you go, rest is done for you, including your global shipping options.

We have very few policies setup and they manage to cover our entire inventory so far, with lots of unique porcelain items, clothing, jewellery and games. Nothing large enough for freight though.

500g ebay satchel
3kg ebay satchel
Padded Mailers
Mail Boxes
Free Shipping

Those 5 policies cover all our shipping policy needs. Well 10 technically coz we also copied them with a No International shipping option, for items we can’t send internationally (ie. currency etc.)

We use 5 different size mail boxes at the moment and the policy covers all of them.

I would say the biggest advantage with using business policies is when it comes to making a change. When you guys go on holiday and adjust your handling times page by page at the moment, if you setup policies all you’d have to do is edit the policy handling time and it would automatically apply to all the listings that use it.

I too, originally thought that business policies were more catered towards high volume, commodity item sellers, but I sell unique preowned items and once I took the time to set it all up, I’m so glad I did.

It also made listing time a lot quicker, just pick your payment, postage and return policy from a list and you’re done.

So if I am understanding this correctly, we are already using “structured policies” in the listing, so I would think we are meeting what eBay is looking for…structured data for shipping, payment, and returns. We just are not using grouped customized “business policies”.

Also, am I reading all the info on the eBay site to mean that we set policies separately for each section? So we could have one business policy for returns, one for payment, and 10 for shipping?

Correct.

I agree with T-Satt that we’re already using eBay’s Structured Policies. I go to list an item. I choose in their drop down whether it be no returns, 5 day, 10 day, 30 day, etc. I choose how I want to ship the item: flat rate, calculated shipping, etc. All this data now lets eBay put me in their search algorithm appropriately.

“Free style policies” were the old days where you just wrote in your description what the terms were. There was no way for eBay to know what the policies were. Buyers would get confused because they could be hidden in lines and lines of confusing text.

I think what Larry at eCommerce411 is suggesting is that you can set common Business Policies that you can choose once on an item and it automatically knows all the details. This makes sense if you sell similar items that always have the same policies. Convenient for some, but not necessary. The Structured Data is what they are looking for unless you can point to a new rule where every item will have to be within a predetermined Business Policy.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 11 months ago by Jay.

http://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/seller-updates/2017summer/listing-policy-updates.html

Paragraph 2 under Adopt listing best practices.

…Details about payment, shipping, or returns should be included in the structured data fields available for Business Policies…

Click on Listings, and they are at the bottom of the left hand menu.

If you are still doing bulk edits to change your handling times, you may have business policies disabled. To enable them, go into account settings, upper left corner, select business policies. It should tell you that they are disabled and if you wish to enable them.