Comics-scifi_collectibles Volunteer Community Mentor
ShipScript has been an eBay Community volunteer since 2003, specializing in HTML, CSS, Scripts, Photos, Active Content, Technical Solutions, and online Seller Tools.
This is a quote from a fellow mentor @shipscript
The message means that the phrase "Card Attributes" is now a reserved word for the Item Specifics fields and can no longer be used as the name of a variation group. The same thing happened two years ago in some of the categories where sellers had the word "Color" as the name of a dropdown list, and then eBay claimed "Color" as the name of an Item Specific and sellers had to modify their variation listings.
Unfortunately, there is no way to "rename" a variation group. The only solution is to delete the variation name (with the hundred cards listed under that name) and create another variation with the new name. It's quite awful and I've been struggling with this on behalf of sellers for three weeks and even wrote a tool to help.
There are two ways to go about this:
The first is mostly manual:
1. Use Seller Hub to download a report of the price, qty, and sku for all the listings. It will include the variations, but not the variation photos.
2. Then use the business lister to add a new variation name and copy the card names across to the new group name (Card Number, Card#, Card/Player, etc), then delete the old group name. This will preserve the photos, but will lose price, quantity, and sku in the variation combinations, which must all be re-entered.
3. The Condition must also be changed in order to move forward. Typically there is a dash in the listing where the old condition number (probably 2750) existed and it must be changed to "Used" (3000).
4. This is where the Seller Hub spreadsheet will be needed. After posting the above revisions, return to the Seller Hub spreadsheet and remove all the items except the listings with the "Card Attribute" names. Rename every "Card Attribute" to the new name. If the Item Number is displayed as a exponential number, change that column in the spreadsheet tool to display a number with zero decimal places. Upload the CSV file to Seller Hub to restore the price, qty, and sku.
I explain a variation of the process here (useful for the screenshots), but that was before we fell into the snake pit of Seller Hub issues and cross depencies, so I'm thinking the process I've described above may be the better approach.
The second approach is programmatic, which is my tool:
It will download the seller's variation listings. The tool has a find/replace to do all of the above and then produces a CSV spreadsheet for upload to Seller Hub. Sellers are having spotty results uploading to Seller Hub and we don't know if there is a Hub issue, a file issue, or a listing/seller constraint.
You can send the seller to this thread if you wish, and I can help directly.
You have 15 listings that use "Card Attributes" as a variation name. Fortunately, you don't have hundreds of cards in each listing, so you could do this by hand if that seems easiest.
Alternatively, you could use the VariationScanner to generate a spreadsheet as a bulk revision for Seller Hub, but it will take more than just that.
Unfortunately, because you have other issues with those "Card Attributes" listings, you can't change the Variation name without updating the mandated new Item Specifics (your listings are missing the "Graded" item specific). And some listings have an unsupported item condition ("Used" is now the only valid condition) that must be changed at the same time as the other revisions.
So, when you rename your Variations, you must also add the "Graded" item specific and change the condition to "Used".
Other issues are likely to pop up with some of your multi-variations, where Item Specifics labels are used in the variation groupings. For example, two multivariation listings have 4 droplists called:
• Original/Reprint (fortunately, eBay changed their item specific to "Original/Licensed Reprint")
• Season
• League
• Team
Since only the "Team" appears to be different in each of those two listings, they don't need to be complex multivariations at all. They can be simple variations with a name like "Team Set".
In reviewing your other variation listings, many use variation names that have been assigned as labels for Item Specifics, and they are likely to cause future problems. It might be a good time to update them all.
eBay is tending to create and reserve item specific labels that are fully spelled out. That means abbreviations will probably be safe; thus, many sellers have switched to "Card#" for the variation name. Words and phrases that are unlikely to describe the product are also safe. For instance, "Color" would be unsafe to use in a tee shirt category, yet meaningless (and safe) in a card category. Similarly, "Team Player" or "Member" might also be safe.
If you need specific help, I can currently be found on this thread:
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Seller-Tools/Sports-Trading-cards-revision-deadline/td-p/32057979
