I just want to reinforce this message to eBay in regard to the changes made to the Stamp category.
eBay, please just admit that you made a colossal mistake with the latest mandatory requirements for item specifics!!!.
Sellers don't want these changes and there is no benefit to buyers so why are we being asked to invest hundreds of hours to make these changes.
The solution is quite simple - just delete a few lines of code - remove the code that makes these fields mandatory.
No one searches for Place of Origin. 99.9+% of stamp listings either have the country in the Item description or are listed in the appropriate country category, so why are sellers being required to fill in "Place of Origin" for these items? It is completely redundant. Also, place of origin does not equate to Place of Manufacture because some countries such as Canada have used printers in at least 6 different countries to produce, while about 50% of countries don't even print their own stamps.
A check of Canadian stamps indicated that here are only 582 (out of 175,156) listings found by the certification filter, of which only 155 have certificates or Certificate numbers. Others claim to have a certificate but provide no evidence of the certificate. More than 50% of the listings are clearly make false claims of certification (i.e. are low value stamps selling for 10% or less of the cost of certification).
What do Stamp seller have to do to get the message to eBay that they are being asked to add information to listings that is only applicable to about 0.1-0.3% of the listings. If this is not reversed, then any value of having this information on a listing will be quickly lost. In a few months this search criteria will return 10,000's of items with fake certifications and eBay will not be able to eliminate the deceptive listings.
