SELLERS - Heads Up Categories Stuffed Up Temporary

[katistrophik]

Hi Guys,

Spending time over in US and boards are alight with problems in various categories, info listings missing - this is hopefully a temporary hassle while eBay are attempting to streamline:

This advice from eburtonlab (US)

Do not erase or modify your saved listings just yet. I suspect it will take a few days to determine which problems are caused by the new categories, and which problems are just temporary glitches while the new categories are being implemented.

At some point all the old listings should be available again, and if you modify all your listings right now, your modifications may wind up being unnecessary or obsolete when the dust finally settles in a few days.

[katistrophik]

Also:

You can bulk edit item specifics which saves a lot of time.

1. Go to Seller Hub
2. Under Listings click on Active
3. Check box all of the items you want to edit
4. Under Edit click on Edit Selected
5. Select all items by checking the box
6. Under Edit Fields select Item Specifics
7. Change Edit Items Individually to Edit Items in Bulk
8. Make your changes 
9. Click on Save and Close
10. Click on submit changes.

The changes will take several hours to update depending how many you are doing at once. You can do up to 200 items at a time.

[twyngwyn]

you can only ignore the recommended for so long...then they too, will become mandatory

[katistrophik]

I know, but it may buy some time for those with a LOT of listings, I am not sure of the deadline here though

[davewil1964]

I've had recommended warnings for several years...

[twicetoldau11]

I so glad others are having issues with this. I mainly sell books and a lot of the time I sell bulk books by the same author (6-8 books at a time)  and for the life of me don't understand why there isn't a check box that prevents the need for (publisher, ISBN, book title, date, etc) as these will  be different  with only the author being a constant.  Their system doesn't allow multiple titles,  plus  I usually list the titles in the main body anyway. Just makes listing even harder and more time consuming...   

[davewil1964]

No such thing as ISBN any more. It's UPC, and optional.

If I'm selling 6 books by a single author, I use "x 6" as the book title.

[gec2002]

Another option to save time is to use this free tool

https://isdntek.com/ebaytools/ItemSpecificScanner.htm

It allows you to build a spreadsheet of all your data that can be pasted into a spreadsheet or saved and opened in a spreadsheet.  From there the data can be easily changed in bulk as required to suit your new item specifics.  Once saved it can then be loaded into eBay via File Exchange.  It is particularly useful if just using one category, I change over 2000 titles in less than an hour.

The tool was developed by eBay user shipscript who is well known on the US boards.  All data is retrieved from data found publicly on eBay without accessing your account.

[minimum_56]

I've just updated over  850 book listings (bulk listings) using the bulk edit in Sellers Hub.
The majority are same author with multiple books.
As I had the author's name in the listing title - copy & paste into the Author name specifics field.
With Book title specifics...well I fudged a bit with that one...'Various' was what I finally decided for all the 'multi' book listings. Apparently some US book sellers with multi-author listings are doing the something similar...

I hope it's acceptable to the 'powers-that-be' - at least until they throw the next change at us 😎