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Am I going crazy or is ebay messed up for shoes and clothing? The sizing glitch for item specifics is nuts but I’m having more issues then that. When I revise a listing to fix the size issue its changing my shipping selection and i didnt notice until i revised a ton of listings. Also my view counts on my items havint changed in 24 hours, I havint had a sale for 36 hours. I only have 115 listings. What are you guys doing with thousands?
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Yes there is a BIG issue with Ebay right now. It involves changes they are making to categories, item specifics and glitches connected to searches and missing item specifics. Not going to even try to explain what I have read, but Google it and zero in on several of the better and more popular YouTube video posters and all of them seem to be saying about the thing in describing what has happened. several of the ones I follow have direct connection into Ebay and they also are confirming.
Some of the issues is Ebay has deactivated some listings from being seen but not deleted them for not having ceratin Item Specifics in certain categories. They will be making what seems to be a lot of changes. It was spelled out to a small degree in the Spring Seller update and again in the Fall Seller updates.
The better Gurus are offering about 3 ways of dealing with it. I am choosing the wait and see how long before Ebay gets it all fixed. Sales are dropping like rocks for some people. The hardest hit over the last two days are in the clothing categories, next is jewelry. Home Goods and Home decor is also on Ebay’s target list.
Some of the new item specifics have a * beside the new field indicating mandatory and some other fields do not.
Also some of the Ebay IS are also populating into the Etsy platform for those of us who cross list.
Some of the gurus I follow are posting every couple of hours and have several monitors up and running and watching what is happening and watching certains stats showing the Ebay hits and then fixes. They report that some things will change then change a second or third time within hours of each other. Then stabilize.
We have had about 35 listings pulled and put on hold by Ebay in the last 30 hours or so. There is a place on your seller hub where you can see which items you have that are being affected and which Items that need attention. I saw one of ours a few minutes ago that only needs two “mandatory fields in IS” filled in. Right below that is an item we are told we have 17 fields we need to fill in. We have many custom fields that has the info. they want but now they have added a bunch more that never existed before and if their white background fields don’t have data but you do have the data in custom fields they are stumbling all over that also.
Example: We have a custom fields that says “COLORS” [plural with an “s”. They have now added the field “color” to some categories that didn’t have it before. Well our custom data in the field with an “s” doesn’t seem to be being seen and since the new “white background” color field is empty they have “parked” that listing until we can either batch edit all of our 30 or so listings or do them one at a time.
I am just sitting tight for a few days and will see how they get it worked out.
Sorry I can’t be more specific but it seems like a fairly wide, varied and complex set of changes with down stream repocussions from those changes. And the insiders are mentioning there are a lot of categories and subcategories that will be effected over the coming weeks.
Yes sales are being lost by both the sellers and by Ebay, but Ebay is reporting that it was something that was planned and fortold in both those updates.
Jay’s response was back then he would wait and see. Well now we are seeing things stumble over themselves but have to still take the wait and see position if a seller has thousands of listings. We don’t want to get caught mid stride making batch / bulk edits and right in the middle even more categories get added to or changed.
Just what I am seeing and reading over the last few days.
Maybe others here know more of the details of what’s happening and some time frame for Ebay to pull out of the tail spin or repairs to happen and when.
So for now I would suggest a Google search for some of the YouTubers with titles what is happening to Ebay, what’s up with Ebay’s new category changes, etc.
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Thanks so much for taking the time to post that info. Super helpful. In the ebay app on my phone most of my listings have written in red “add more details”. I did go through every listing I have and filled in all the new required specifics but they still say “add more details”. So I’m not sure if these listings are temporarily pulled or if they just want me to add more additional specifics that aren’t required. I guess I’m atleast somewhat lucky because I only have 115 listings currently and in my second month of selling.
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I’m not sure if these issues are affecting my sales, but I haven’t had a sale in an entire week. My store is 300 items, a portion are modern and vintage clothes. I average over 400 sales a year, slightly over one per day. This is the first time I had an entire week with no sales. I tried searching for some of my listings and they do appear in the results, and I’m getting views on new listings. This is shaping up to be my worst year ever on eBay since I set up my store.
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You are not alone. I have approx 1500 items in my store (very few clothing items) and my sales this week have been abysmal
I just got new batch of required item specifics “recommendations” that are ridiculous. Do I really need to fill the names of the actors for 1985 VHS copy of Empire Strikes Back?
There is nothing to do buy wait an see, but I don’t feel like these changes bode well for the scavenger “sell anything” approach.
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“I just got new batch of required item specifics “recommendations””
Where are you seeing these recommendations? Is it in the “Growth” section that someone mentioned earlier? I am seeing absolutely no recommendations there wrt item specifics, which is strange, b/c when I go to edit a sweater listing from a month ago, the new required (starred) “Size” item specific is blank. That’s true for many of my 400+ listings. This particular sweater is coming up in search.
Why would they add a *new* Size item specific? What was wrong with the old one? If they wanted it to be mandatory, why not just make the existing one mandatory?
As far as the bajillion other new item specifics (luckily non-mandatory) – gradual rollout (usually best practice in most situations) of a few at a time might have been more sensible than a big dump.
I’m still following the “wait and see” approach. Hope the waiting is going to end soon and that we’ll then see something good 🙂
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Here is a YouTube video by a frequent poster but he has something interesting that starts at the 16:17 mark. He lives in NY so he drove 4.5 hrs up to an Ebay Open in New Hampshire and turns out Harry Tempkin from Ebay was there as a speaker. After it was over Crazy Joe had a sit down at a table talk with him and video tapes Harry and for the next 4 or 5 minutes Harry sheds some light on what has been going on, what they are doing, and what is to come and why they are doing it. Interesting at least to me.
Also right before Harry comes on at the 16:17 mark… Joe talks about offers to watchers and gets answers from Harry at the Ebay open about the offers. There are a couple of good questions I never thought about on those offers to watchers that Joe brings up.
I think those few minutes are worth a listen. The first part and other stuff is just Joe the crazynydriver talking about his usual weird stuff. But Harry Tempkin talking is worth hearing I think.
mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries
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