Revising eBay Mobile Summary Descriptions
A large percentage of my listings have had incorrect data populated into the mobile summary description by an incompetent 3rd party listing management eBay partner. This has resulted in incorrect mobile descriptions being shown to buyers using mobile devices. It also results in this bad data being copied by eBay if I use a "sell similar" based upon a listing with this bad data. I am not a coder but I have found some postings on this topic although they seem to be dated as they still mention active content and apparently older versions of eBay's lister. Does anyone know of a way that I can eliminate this data from this field for all of my listings or better yet from the ones I specify? Thanks in advance for your time. Cheers.
8 comments
shipscript
·2 years agoDo you have a few sample listings with the wrong data? It's hard to know specifically whether it is coming from the description or eBay's code.
shipscript
·2 years agoI think I have found one.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Canada-1937-4-Cents-Carmine-Rose-Coronation/394504642019
The body of the description carries this hidden code:
Whereas the text of the description is:
NEWFOUNDLAND
1937 - 4 Cents Carmine Rose Coronation Issue
Scott # 231
Mint Very Lightly Hinged (VLH)
Fine - Very Fine
Because the mobile summary is hidden, every time you created a new listing, without first wiping out the hidden text, it was carried forward. There may be a way to bulk remove the mobile summary using a third party tool if the summary structure is consistent throughout. If each summary was created by the same tool, then it would be fairly straightforward to remove.
There may be some problems with listings you may have already modified, as the structure may have been corrupted, making it difficult to remove the hidden code without corrupting your description. I guess that will depend on how you repaired those listings.
I also found a listing where eBay pulled a summary from your description. That listing had no hidden mobile summary within the description, so that is encouraging.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Canada-1935-3-Cents-Carmine-King-George/256411948096
danthecollector
OP2 years agoThanks so much for responding!
The issue was caused by my 3rd party listing tool. At some point they inserted a "mobile description" field into their listing software and began inserting data into it. Unfortunately they did not place it the lister where it could be seen. So we were uploading that data to eBay unknowingly. Then we would copy those listings in the 3rd party tool to create other listings and the data was unknowingly copied. We identified the issue about 6 months ago. We don't know how long it went unnoticed prior to that. We never were able to get the 3rd party to acknowledge, much less fix the issue despite opening many support tickets.
So newer listings and revised listings are clean. Or should be. Thus I have a variety of states of data in that field.
I revised some old listings manually when editing them by removing everything in that field in the 3rd party tool then uploading the revision to eBay. That seemed to work. I would do it when I had to touch the listing anyway. But likely I've only fixed a small percentage of the listings with issues. The 3rd party at some point implemented a "remove all data in SEO (their category for mobile description)" function in their software which I ran but which did not work. They also said that they went in and removed all the data about 5 days ago but obviously that didn't work either. Hopefully those tools did not make it worse. I'm sharing the history so that perhaps you can surmise if the code can be easily fixed without impacting descriptions. Their tool is the only one which was used, but they are SAAS and some of their tools changed many times daily.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. If I am looking for a 3rd party tool, what kind of tool am I looking for?
Thanks again!
shipscript
·2 years ago@danthecollector
Bulk editing your descriptions:
The ActiveContentEditor is designed to modify eBay descriptions to add or remove known elements, or to make custom bulk changes to descriptions. While originally focused on Active Content, it has a very powerful find/replace feature, so I ran your listings through it to apply a custom filter.
That filter was set to remove the part of your description that started with:
and ended with:
If your listings are generally simple, like the one I found and pasted into my earlier post, then the scan will probably capture and remove the blocks of code with no ill effect. It sounds like the code is probably still intact and cleanly removable. Had I suspected more complex descriptions, I would have created a more complex RegEx filter to avoid capturing unwanted text, but it looks like we can go with this simple one.
The tool scanned 3053 listings and found that block of code in 1912 listings. Based on your comment, that sounds like a reasonable number of listings that still carry the mobile summary code.
Using the "VIEW" option on the tool, I took random samples of the the tool's revised descriptions, and they look clean. These samples will disappear from the tool server in a few days:
US_255386549445_rev.htm
US_394822787712_rev.htm
US_255900901162_rev.htm
US_394004692984_rev.htm
US_392765377222_rev.htm
US_253369531614_rev.htm
This is a link to the tool that prepopulates the fields and filters I used for the scan, in case you want to run the scan again.
Your revision files:
In the event you don't want to run the scan again on your own, I went ahead and asked the tool to process CSV zip files of the results. Those zip files contain File Exchange CSV files that are formatted to allow upload to eBay's Seller Hub as a revision spreadsheet.
This is your zip file with your File Exchange Revision (fer) spreadsheet that contains 1912 listing descriptions:
https://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/ActiveContent_support/data/danthecollector_1707958836682/zip/fer_17079619686628.zip
Next is your zip file that contains your 1912 Original (feo) descriptions. If something has gone awry, the descriptions can be restored from this zip file, so save it until you don't need it:
https://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/ActiveContent_support/data/danthecollector_1707958836682/zip/feo_17079619712604.zip
How to use your files:
The files are zipped, so after you download, you will need to upzip and extract the fer CSV revision file. You can open the files in Excel if you want to look at them, but be careful not to edit or save after opening. The files contain 12-digit item numbers that Excel will display in scientific notation, and eBay numbers should not be saved in that scientific format. If they are, the item numbers will be truncated with extra zeros and will become invalid.
That extracted CSV revision file can be uploaded on Seller Hub > Reports > Uploads.
https://www.ebay.com/sh/reports/uploads
"#3 Proceed to upload"
You may find that some of your listings won't update. If so, there are listing mandates that must be met first. To find out if your revision was successful, the upload history on the same page will have a "results" file if you scroll to the very far right of the uploaded URL. Download and open the results file in Excel to see if there are any warnings or failures on some of the listing revisions.
eBay's Revisions:
Whenever a description is edited, it passes back through eBay's indexing and filters. I have found that I can change the mobile summary in a description and see it updated on the site within about 5 minutes. Because you will be revising two thousand at once, it may take slightly longer to re-index and see the summaries revise.
danthecollector
OP2 years agoThank you! This is incredibly helpful! I will review and digest and I will post an update at some point. Appreciate your efforts!
shipscript
·2 years ago@danthecollector
The zip files are held on the server for only a few days, so download them at your earliest convenience if you think you will use them soon. Otherwise, you can simply run a new scan using the extremely long URL I provided and generate new zip files.
Keep in mind that the tool can only revise active listings, so, as listings end with undesirable code, they should not be used to sell-similar.
danthecollector
OP2 years agoI have the files.
Thanks for the reminder that everything live with quantity of zero and everything ended won't have been fixed by this. Makes sense. As long as I know that I can work with it and keep the undesirable code out. This has been a great help.
danthecollector
OP2 years agoI ran the file successfully with only two items throwing unexpected errors that I will look at. I will now spend some time checking results. I will give it a bit of time as I know there is a delay in processing updated mobile descriptions or removing them at times. Again, thanks so much!