diving into Business policies question

[Ryanne]

hey y’all
i’m going for, trying business policies for my shipping and to help ease the difficulty of changing handling time.
if i set up a couple shipping policies, will it change all my current listings, or just affect my future listings?
i’ve added them to my second store as an experiement, and when i view the listings it looks like it has the old shipping info (parcel select rather than FedEx Smartpost as per one of my policies). thanks for any insight!

[So Cal Joe]

If you go to account settings then Business policies, you’ll get the page with all your business policies (most of which will be shipping.) On the right side of the page, each policy will have a number, which is the number of listings with that policy.

This page should give you an overview of all the policies for all your listings.

Once you create policies, I believe all your listings are assigned one.

If I remember right, it’s a bit of a mess in the beginning, as you’ll need to consolidate your listings into the right number of policies. As long as the service (first class), the places you ship too, the handling time and the handling charges are the same, they can all be in the same policy.

You can use edit button on the left to merge policies. I remember having a bunch of duplicate policies, when I first set it up.

Once set up, you can just edit each policy as needed, for handling time.

I hope I’m not stating the obvious, but since no one else has replied, I thought I would.

[Anonymous]

when I tried it months ago, it changed all my current listings
I bitched to eBay about that – maybe they ‘fixed” that

let us know!!!!!!!!!!!!

[IndySales]

I just switched my small, 150+ listing store over to business policies. eBay automatically generated policies based on each of those listings and their unique shipping policies, so while no damage was done, the end result is the business policy page being flooded with entries for each of the unique listings. E.g., if I arbitrarily decided to have a First Class package with $1 shipping when I was making a listing, I now have a business policy specifically for $1 First Class items.

Other notes:

* Dimensions are intact, as is weight.

* When you first land on the policy page you’re greeted with a number of popups instructing you to click buttons like “Consolidate shipping policies” and “Clean up policies”. However, clicking them only shows a message that you should “check back later”, implying the process is being performed in the background. How will I ever know when they’re done? Can I safely make changes without having them undone?

* The policy page claims you can view the listings that apply to each business policy, but instead it redirects to a page showing all of my listings, even if the page says that only 1 listing applies to it.

* I don’t understand how you could possibly convert a large store over to this system without being completely overwhelmed. The way eBay automatically generates policies based on your existing listings is unreliable and has resulted in multiple policies for the exact same conditions, and since I don’t know how long I have to wait for eBay to consolidate the duplicates for me, I’m afraid to make any changes myself.

* The design of the page itself is suspect. It’s “old school” eBay, so the page isn’t responsive to changes you make – you have to refresh each time. For example, I changed all of the listings under one policy to use another policy, but the dialog box disappear and nothing changed. I ended up refreshing the page and “Update in progress” appeared next to that policy.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s well-intentioned functionality in here somewhere, but eBay has a long way to go towards making it more accessible.

Edit: After an hour or so I’ve come up with a system for combining duplicate policies:

I have several policies with incremental names (Calculated:USPS Parcel Se,1 business day#13, Calculated:USPS Parcel Se,1 business day#14, etc). These were automatically generated by eBay and each have a single listing attached to them and appear to be the same. In a few cases, each one had a different price set for handling, or just a different list of places I won’t ship to, allowing local pickup, etc, so eBay made a policy just for that listing.

To fix this, I opened up each of the duplicate policies in a new tab, then compared them against the others to find which policy was the most appropriate. I then combined the unnecessary policies into the correct one.

I can see what eBay is trying to do with this system and it’s growing on me very quickly. However, if you’re the type of person to customize shipping for specific items, converting over will be a chore depending on the number of fringe cases.

So, for people with large stores that need to set handling time often, what you’ll be doing is going into each shipping policy and setting the handling there. As far as I know, there is no way to edit multiple policies at once. Still easier than editing 500 at a time, though.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by IndySales.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by IndySales.

[So Cal Joe]

Did you end up making any progress Ryanne.. or did it just end up creating a big mess that you have to sort through?

I haven’t heard it mentioned on the podcast or here, so I was curious..

Thanks

[Ryanne]

yeah ebay created like 3 pages worth of different shipping policies based on every variation and handling price of my 1000 listings (it’s the 2nd store). but in the future i’ll just use a couple shipping profiles when listing of course. it’s a bit messy, but that’s fine. a bit nervous to turn them on for the main store, but i’m sure i’ll be happy to do so eventually.

[Author]

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