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The podcast (and voicemails) were so great about dissecting the little details of the seller updates, so I wanted to post a link and spread awareness of this quarter’s update which came out this morning.
There are the usual category changes and required item specifics changes. If anyone has categories which require bulk item specific changes, remember that there are a lot of ways to do so quickly: the bulk editor and download/upload are the two fastest that I know of.
The change that I’m most interested in involves sending coupon codes unique to your store to repeat buyers or interested buyers.
Send discount offers to targeted buyer groups with coded coupons
Sending coded coupons to buyer groups is an easy way for you to encourage existing and potential customers to purchase your items. For example, use coded coupons to target specific buyer groups when your seasonal inventory has the greatest potential to sell.
The following coded coupons options will be available starting in October.
Launching in October
- Send a coded coupon to your previous buyers to encourage repeat business
Launching in the next few months
- Send a coded coupon to your followers on eBay
- Send a coded coupon to eligible buyers who have expressed an interest in the type of inventory you sell
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Also mentioned: Promoted Listings are now called “Promoted Listings Standard” in order to make way for “Promoted Listings Advanced” sometime this fall.
Advanced promoted listings work on a pay-per-click model. I won’t pretend I understand anything else mentioned in the update. Apparently you’re promoting via groups of items? Or groups of keywords? It’s the kind of thing I need to see in person before I’ll fully grasp it, I feel.
And was this mentioned in the update? Promoted listings can be automated now, so any new items you add immediately go into a campaign. I had to make a new campaign to get this working.
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I’m cautiously pessimistic about ebay getting rid of 100 +/- subcategories under postcards and condensing to only two: Topographical and Non-Topographical. Hopefully there is an automatic transfer of subcategory information into item specifics, which I’m sure we’ll now have to add. If not, it’s going to take me more than a month to fix/update 30,000 listings.  I guess postcards couldn’t dodge the bullet forever.
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I went through the deletion of subcategories in Sports Cards a few months ago. It was an illogical change solving a problem that didn’t exist. The previous system had subcategories for each individual sports and worked great. The new system which has two main subcategories (Sports Card Singles and Sports Card Lots) is much less intuitive. But eBay loves their item specifics.
I do have some good news, about half of my listings auto-populated with those new required item specifics. In sports cards, only two item specifics were required, so filling in the other 1500 listings with those two item specifics only took a few hours total. The bulk editor was very helpful in speeding up that process and there is also a separate widget in seller hub where you can quickly view and edit the listings which have item specifics that to be updated.
I don’t know how much sourcing you do on eBay through purchases of individual postcards and lots, but the few months before and after the subcategory change were a great buying opportunity. A lot of listings slipped through the cracks as sellers were slow to update to the new required item specifics on old and new listings, and my theory is that eBay’s search algorithm was not kind to those slow adopters. I didn’t see a reduction in sales at all, but I was also listing heavily at that time.
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I haven’t had time to analyze many of the category changes. One that jumped out at me in Automotive was changing the category Spark Plugs and Glow Plugs to just Glow Plugs. Glow Plugs are used in Diesel engines to preheat the cylinder before a cold start of the engine, Spark Plugs donate gasoline vapors in each cylinder in the proper synquence. A really stupid uneducated change. No doubt there are other changes as bad or worse.
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