Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

Subscribe to our 2 FREE Newsletters!

Web AuctionBytes

Home

Subscribe

Blog

Letters to Editor

Podcasts

Forums

AuctionBytes TV

ABU Back Issues

Sponsor

COOL TOOLS

Calendar

eBay Fee Calculator

Collectors' Links

eBay Promo History

Bookshelf

Fraud Resources

Auction Site Fees

Auction Management

Payment Services

Storefronts Chart

Sniping Chart

Consignment Services

Drop-Off Store Laws

Ecommerce Resources

Photo Tips

Marketing Inserts

Yellow Pages

Classifieds

AUCTIONBYTES

Our Writers

Write For Us

Partners

Press

Advertising

About Us

Link To Us

AuctionBytes Blog
News and insight focusing on
ecommerce and the online auction industry
by Ina Steiner, Editor of AuctionBytes.com

June 30, 2008

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

By: Ina Steiner

Mon June 30 2008 21:39:34

eBay sellers must make changes to their listings in order to comply with policy changes. In a June 20th Announcement Board post, eBay VP of Seller Experience Dinesh Lathi provided a quick "listing update" checklist for sellers:

We realize that any time sellers need to change their listings or templates, it costs you time and energy. To minimize the effort it takes for our sellers to accommodate our changes, I'd like to give you a quick checklist of changes you may need to make in the coming weeks, based on the changes we’ve announced:

Remove any links to 3rd-party sites to stay in compliance with recent updates to eBay’s Links Policy (Read our previous announcement).

Specify shipping, return policy, item condition & handing time in the specified fields. This information will be required soon so now’s the perfect time to get started.

Remove any email addresses from your listing descriptions by September.

However, I'm getting reports that sellers are unable to bulk-edit their listings; some are being told by eBay Live Help reps to revise each listing individually (this after being on hold for an hour, in one case). In researching the issue, I've also come across threads that say eBay is charging listing fees to some users for simply revising listings, though again, it's not clear what's happening - see this thread, for example.

I'll see if I can figure out whether there is a glitch, but in the meantime, any suggestions for frustrated sellers?

Here are just a few threads on the boards when I did a search for bulk edit:

Anyone Else Having Trouble Getting the Bulk Edit To Work?

How to edit return policy????

Immediate Payment Required - is there a way to remove it in bulk?

Comments (19) | Permalink

Readers Comments

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Former ebayer

Mon Jun 30 22:08:59 2008

Did he say ''GLITCH''.
Ok, now this is getting laughable!

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: unaware

Tue Jul 1 00:52:49 2008

For several days this past week (Saturday and Sunday I think) eBay was giving me a Promotion fee reduction of some sort.... not sure what it was as it was on both my 3 cent store renewals and my auctions. I was never informed of any promotions that would give me 100% free store renewals or 10 cent insertions for auctions that should have had a listing fee of $2.00.... very odd and unusual. When I went into the 10 cent auction (that should have cost me $2.00) after it was live to correct a spelling error it went back and refunded my 10 cent insertion fee and charged me the $2.00 that it should have charged in the first place!.... all because I made a spelling change in the HTML of my listing. This is all documented in my seller account (my running invoice). This Promotion came unannounced and ended last night unannounced. Why was I getting this odd (but welcome) promotion and why did it get reversed just by making a spelling change in my listing? It appears eBay is doing some live experiments of some sort (or maybe I am giving them credit they don't deserve and it was just a out and out screw-up!)

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: AngrySellers

Tue Jul 1 00:57:31 2008

You have got to be kidding me ! Someone with a brain really needs to take the reigns over there.

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Clapton*is*God

Tue Jul 1 01:02:55 2008

UN FREAKIN BELIEVABLE

Why can't there every be a GLITCH, where I don't get my bill?

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: tj

Tue Jul 1 01:18:35 2008

Well at the very least eBay are advising sellers of the changes required in good time..just a pity their system is not up to the job..the massive amount of bugs/glitch’s whatever this year is just plain crazy…..more like a web site just starting out, not one that’s almost 13 years old ????

I really feel for any seller with hundreds/thousand of listings to edit...a massive amount of work

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: unaware

Tue Jul 1 01:46:28 2008

Actually I did get a glitch on eBay once where I did not get a bill. Several years ago after one of their ''changes'' they ''forgot'' to bill me in the last month of a quarter but then billed me the full amount at the end of the first month of the next quarter for the missing month as well as for my then current month. I thought I had really gotten away with something when there was no invoice for the one month but it all came due at the end of the next month when two months of fees were billed. I don't think this was a accident on eBay's part... I think they delayed my income to the next quarter in order to have some new changes that were then taking affect in the new quarter look good.... I mean when does eBay ''forget'' to invoice you? It had to be part of some effort to move income from one quarter into the next quarter to make it look good to the Wall Street types. Of course this would only be work if they had done it to a bunch of other Powersellers... I always wondered if this had happened to others.

On the bulk edit tool... I gave up on it several months ago. I wanted to bulk change my shipping costs on 600 or so store listings before the last USPS postage change and I had no luck with the bulk editing tool at all. I would go through the whole process and on the very last page I would submit it and then... NOTHING! I tried it a second time and it did not work again. I gave up on it. Did I tell eBay? No!... I am tired of getting canned answers and then bugged via e-mail about taking a 10 minute survey about my customer service ''experience'' for days afterward!

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Bill

Tue Jul 1 02:25:27 2008

Yes, I remember that bill thing that happened. Got double billed the next month. I figured at that time they were cooking the books but I did not look further into it since junk like that has been happening for years.

Bill

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: mindelec

Tue Jul 1 03:08:14 2008

the chief problem with editing your return policy to be compliant is that one of the required fields "who pays return shipping" does not exist yet. so even if you add a return policy now it won't be compliant later.

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: David

Tue Jul 1 11:14:58 2008

eBay should have the common decency to "grandfather" existing listings - especially when THEY cannot support or halp facilitate the REQUIRED changes. Sorry - eBay is in the toilet. Myself and many others have gone elsewhere now. I have been taken for so much money now that I am on a mission to let everyone know exactly how eBay operates. Too bad Meg left - it was a GREAT company under her direction!!!

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Ming the Merciless

Tue Jul 1 14:58:04 2008

Ebay was NOT a "great company" when Meg Whitman ran it. It wasn't even a marginally well run company then.

It's just that Rip Van Winkle sellers finally awakened from their slumber and saw the handwriting on the wall when ebay made so many changes simultaneously.

Under Whitman, the changes were often hidden in legalese policy changes and were done incrementally so the frogs in the boiling water didn't notice. Other changes were instituted in a low key manner.

But most people liked her -- why I don't understand or care to understand -- while her intentionally buggy platforms stole money right and left from sellers, while their incredibly bad business decisions relieved sellers of still more money, and their insatiable greed and stock option driven business plans halved the value of ebay stock.

A "great company?" Not by any yardstick worth measuring with unless you were one of Meg's crew who ran off with millions (in Meg's case 1.2 BILLION) from stock sales.

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Rachael

Tue Jul 1 23:07:06 2008

When eBayAU brought in that you must offer PayPal, I tried to bulk edit and for some unknown reason, I wasn't able to. It should have been a simple process which turned into a laborious nightmare of editing hundreds of single listings.

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Julie

Wed Jul 2 01:50:03 2008

There is only one cure for bulk editing and all other glitches...

DUMP EBAY and go elsewhere!

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Matt Price

Wed Jul 2 09:46:17 2008

This is why as a professional seller, I have taken all of the stuff that I would normally put up on ebay and put it on Proxibid.

The reason is this. I can have my auction listings timed and not have to worry about excessive fees. That is just plain senseless.

eBay has been nickle and diming sellers since they closed their free listings down and every ramp up in price meant me going someplace else for the same thing.

Now that some alternative venues are up, I can say that I am back on track this year to where I was on eBay 5 years ago.

eBay has just priced and policied me out of the venue. Now I just put surplus junk perfumes up.

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Gail

Wed Jul 2 09:58:25 2008

Bulk edit is a joke! If you have multiple identical items in one listing, and have to edit the listing after one sells, you have to end the listing and restart it with the revisions, thus incurring an additional cost. I heard they were going to stop doing that, but no evidence of it yet. After the huge postage increase and changes last year, I have been spending hours trying to get all my S&H charges updated and putting in place all my international charges that were dropped. After almost a year and a half, I am almost finished and that is with the 'bulk edit' program. I currently have over 6000 listings. Now they want us to go through that all over again to add stuff that they want us to have in there such as refund policies. My refund policy is stated in my TOS--NO refunds. Why should I now be taking hundreds of hours to go through all my listings yet again to add that in their little blanks (which another poster mentioned weren't even all there yet)? Do these dofuses ever use the system they keep messing up with.

It is getting so frustrating. After hundres of $ in sales a week ago my sales have slide right off the cliff and I've sold ONE thing in the last 4 days will my search visibilty bounces all over the place. We are working hard to get an accurate database of our items to be so out of there. This from a powerseller who has never had a negative, who has sold thousands of items over the last 5 years, and paid thousands in ebay fees.

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Peter Leeflang/CEO of Leeflang Archives Corporatio

Wed Jul 2 11:52:30 2008

Ina, 'bulk edit' is no adequate tool to remove links and email addresses which will become violations.

Bulk edit does not allow bulk changes to parts of a text or html code in multiple listing decsription fields.

If Ebay says that we can do it that way, they m isrepresent their capabilities and falsely give teh impression that sellers can deal with this without cost.

Also, bulk edit' never works properly. At bets one can modify 10-20 listings (only for limited type of fields, not most of the ones we need). Try any larger number of listings and the 'bulk edit' will fail, and we have thousands to modify.

The reality is that most major sellers will have to take down all their lstings, modify them in their own listing software and relist each, thus giving Ebay needlessly more money than they already get in fees.

This operation also takes away from our otherwise 'productive4 time' and adds to the real hidden cost of doing business on Ebay, which is not really the officially listed fees, but muc higher, probably double that.

It is no surprise to me that we have seen our less efficient competitors disappear off late. They have no margins left to pay for this.

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: roo

Mon Jul 7 16:17:12 2008

There have been problems with the Bulk Editor for more than one year.

The last two times I submitted the problem through our TSAM, the ultimate response was "we can't reproduce the problem".

Although this is not the language used, it is tantamount to saying the problem doesn't exist until an eBay engineer has the same problem appear on his screen. Your word isn't good enough, and they wouldn't dare let you know if one, two, or a million other users had the same experience.

One of my major points to Execs at eBay in January at the eCommerce Forum, and again at eBay Live (besides dozens of emails on this subject to anyone who will give me their email address) is that the site is CONSTANTLY broken. It should not matter whether my experience is the same as two other people or 98% of the users - all reported problems should be identified and fixed.

That being said, in regards to changing in time for the upcoming enforcement of new rules, we asked in May for T&S to review our listing template (singular - one file) and our About Me page to tell us what violates the new rules. They absolutely refused, and told us they didn't have the "bandwidth" to do this for us and all other users.

Well, first, I didn't ask for all other users. And, second, I am effectively turning myself in so I don't have to guess at what does and does not constitute a violation under the "new rules". Apparently, only by using one of my anonymous IDs and turning myself in will I EVER get a response from T&S - and it will come simultaneous with SANCTIONS against our account, which will take days/weeks to deal with.

As noted by others on this thread, eBay is making this transition as vague and inefficient as possible, likely causing many sellers to invest 2-5 times in revising listings until they guess what T&S wants.

This is the worst I have ever seen eBay, and we are SO glad we moved 65% of our GMV to other sites like Amazon, where this type of idiocy is not something we are forced to endure.

_roo

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Goretti

Mon Nov 10 10:32:29 2008

For sellers who need to revise their ebay item description automatically, use the tool from baywares.com. This works great.

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Perry

Fri Mar 13 09:12:32 2009

Everybody is complaining about eBay. The answer is simple, just get off. It is only a matter of time before they throw you off anyway. Ebay is clearly a company that does not like people. They want to constantly threaten you, ignore your questions and concerns and let you pay them to abuse you. If you ran your company the way they do, you would have been long gone. And if you feel you need them, do keep an eye on that seller dashboard so you can constantly be reminded that you are failing and a worthless human being, even if you maintain a 100% rating. It is part of their new CEO's bitterness towards people. Talk about a loser.

Bulk Edit Problem vs. eBay Policy Compliance

by: Jason D

Thu Jul 23 21:42:26 2009

Unfortunately baywares does not work if you are trying to edit store listings that have had purchases made. In other words, say you have 8 identical items (in my case comic books) in a single listing. If you sell one or more, you are no longer able to edit the listing. This makes no sense to me. I can certainly understand not being able to edit an auction that has bids or is almost ending. I can't understand not being able to edit a store listing though. Unfortunately bayware does not solve this problem.

I was told today that the only way to do it is to end and re-list the thousands of items in my store!!

Bye eBay!!

Click to view more comments
1

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives


Site Index Copyright 1999-2009. Steiner Associates LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy.