eBay

Anonymous · ‎07-12-2017

Good day Community!

Please join the Community team this afternoon at 1 PM Pacific Time for our weekly chat. No specific topic is set for this week, so feel free to bring your general questions for discussion.

See you then!

alan@ebay · ‎07-12-2017

@vrykalak wrote:

@mr_lincoln wrote:

“UN-Enhancing the Buying Experience”

...I suggested that these Buyers voice their concern on the Weekly Chat (1st thread on the list below) … but sadly the Weekly Chat time slot is not convenient for them and since eBay does not allow Pre-Register questions they cannot participate, though some would like to

Has anyone investigated the idea of letting us send questions in advance?
That would make this immensely useful chat opportunity even more valuable.

As I mentioned last week, I was on the road, and only managed to find a truckstop with wifi in the last 15 minutes of the chat. I got my question in, but most of the replies happened via email afterward, so the community at large couldn't see them.

If I could have posted the question in advance, it could have been discussed by the group before I showed up, and my answer might have already been provided.

If you have not already done so, please talk to the PTB, and see if there's a way to make this possible.

Hi @vrykalak

I replied to this on our discussion boards yesterday, here's the post:

http://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Weekly-Chat-Pre-registered-questions/m-p/27207749#M1000964

"Hi

The format of our weekly chat is remaining the same for the time being. We received a lot of feedback and suggestions through the survey we ran recently, we're working through all of that feedback, and we will think about how best we can make improvements.

When/if we have updates to share we will post about it.

Thanks."

@As I mentioned in an earlier post on this thread, if you have questions during the week you can tag our team by @mentioning us in posts. You do not need to hold questions for Wednesday.

Thanks.

Alan - eBay Community Manager

If a member's response helped, please give it a Helpful. If you are the author of a thread and a member's response resolved your question, please click "Accept as Solution." More on Accepted Solutions.

Check out the eBay for Business podcast! For your chance to be featured on the show, call in with a question at 888 723-4630!

tyler@ebay · ‎07-12-2017

@b86fiero wrote:
~~
Search Engine Keywords - we were told a couple of years ago that they do nothing to get visibility on Google Shopping. (After the eBay / Google tiff). When did this change for the good again? Just wondering.

I lol'd at 'Tiff', that was definitely an... exciting...time.

Once it was resolved and our data began feeding back to Google search engine keywords came back in vogue. I don't know how much of a positive impact it will make with Google's algorithm, but it should definitely be a benefit rather than a detriment.

Tyler,

golfingaddict · ‎07-12-2017

@Anonymous wrote:
@golfingaddict wrote:
Hi Alan, Trinton, Heidi, Doug, Brian, Tyler and all.

I have a question about the new push that is trying to spot "off ebay transactions" in email.

I frequently get "offers" from potential buyers that ask for a price/combination of something similar to what I am selling. Some of the offers are quite pushy and many of them end with 'send me an invoice'

Of course, I am not about to endanger my selling account on ebay by accepting these things or sending an invoice but I am curious about one thing. In the past, it was not allowed to send ebay sellers "best offers" unless best offer is listed in the listing. Now it seems that I get them all the time. Frankly, if I wanted to accept offers, I would add that to my listing. (please no speeches about increasing sales or velocity by accepting offers) I do not want to entertain offers and I do not want to fend off these requests and in particular I do not want to be accused of doing something untoward. Asking me to send an invoice certainly fits the bill of wrongdoing by the buyer, in my opinion and could actually be used as a set up by ebay or a competitor.

I do not want accusatory emails by big brother ebay that picks up these attempts, particulary since they are coming from the buyers and not by me. I also do not want these attempts at "best offers" when I do not have it listed in my ads.

I hate to ignore these emails but I also do not want to get in hot water from the "bots" or get warnings that I am doing something wrong.

what do you think?

What is the process that ebay is using to deter buyers from these types of offers
Hey @golfingaddict happy to give you some direction on how to address these requests. I think that the best option is to work up a template response to reply to these requests. Thank them for their interest and explain that while you are unable to accept their offer, you do hope they find something in your listings that meets their needs. It can be short and polite and ensure that you are not spending an excessive amount of time on offers you are not interested in.

Additionally, you can set up your listings to automatically decline any best offer under a certain price. This will help minimize any offers you would not take into consideration.

Any time that either party say something that could potentially be a request to take a transaction off of eBay, both parties will be educated about our stance on this. We take this matter very seriously, so I understand the message can come across stern. Rest assured, as long as you are not selling or buying items off of the site, you will have nothing to worry about and these messages can be passed over. As a best practice, I do recommend that you reply to any requests that a buyer makes, and particularly respond to the requests that could be considered solicitations of off site sales. This will ensure we can see you refused the request if a review is needed.

Trinton, I'm sorry, but did you really read my post?

I do not have best offer enabled, therefore there is nothing to set up to auto decline.

And quite frankly, it is insulting to think that I need a warning from ebay because some (non) buyer makes an offer to "take it off ebay"

I do not need to be educated about emailing buyers, I need this practice to stop.

Accusing me of wrongdoing because a buyer makes an offer to take it off ebay is ludicrous. Typical..... always blaming the seller for anyting that goes wrong.

Sorry I asked.

Anonymous · ‎07-12-2017

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:

The following is from the FAQs in the Spring 2016 Update. Is this still correct?

If you have HTML authoring capabilities, you can indicate which content eBay should use for the View Item summary by encapsulating desired content (up to 800 characters) in special HTML markup. A simple way to tag your content is to include the following HTML around the text you wish to include in the mobile item description:

<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Product"><span property="description">This paragraph contains almost 800 characters of text to be displayed in the mobile item description. And the text in this paragraph through this sentence contains 250 characters, which is the amount we will display without any actions on your part. When you tag this paragraph with these simple HTML breaks, the content will be displayed to shoppers looking at your item. This will allow the shopper to see the key information you want to display, without them having to click through to the complete description. If your complete description is 800 characters or less and uses basic HTML we will display the entire description without any action by you—so the best practice is to keep it within 800 characters. If you have a long description, make it easy for your buyers by using this option. </span></div>

Can confirm this is still correct and a best practice to customize what your buyers see at a glance. See: http://pages.ebay.com/sell/itemdescription/customizeyoursummary.html for more details on this process 🙂

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎07-12-2017

A couple years ago ebay was telling us the stores design team was working on more changes...."stay tuned."

I've stayed tuned, but haven't seen any changes.

Is there anything in the works?

lionb8 · ‎07-12-2017

cleared cookies and used 3 different browsers. I tried the exluding part just now:

click on shop by category, go to jewelry, vintage, costume, retro 30's-80's, collections, lots.

then click on US only, then more refinements, click on exclude then add the names. Click apply

and the number of items is the same as before I excluded those sellers.

This has been happening for several days now.

doug@ebay · ‎07-12-2017

@golfingaddict, thanks for bringing this back up. I think it slipped off my radar. I'll look back into this.

@golfingaddict wrote:

I see that the elusive 15 year badge continues to be awarded to a small number of users ....... it is increasing slightly every month. 6 months or so ago, you said that it was something that you were looking into as it appeared to be a bug. Any progress on this at all?

tyler@ebay · ‎07-12-2017

@djmovers99 wrote:

Hi friends,

As a follow-up to my question last week concerning the relatively new item specific called "bundle = yes, no, -", I was wondering if anyone can think of a reason that this field shouldn't always be set to "yes"??? It's kind of like is there anytime you would not want your listings to look good on mobile...

I was think about doing a bulk edit to change all of my listings to "bundle = yes"

Thanks,

David(DJ)

Howdy @djmovers99! We haven't heard back yet on exactly what this specific entails, and what its intended use is. I'll send another email and see if we can't get a bit more information. Thanks!

Tyler,

Anonymous · ‎07-12-2017

@dhbookds wrote:

@Anonymous wrote:

@dhbookds wrote:

Relative to scam messages, I'm a bit confused as to what should be done........

We get a message....."I'll pay you x amt over your asking price, just send me your pp address, etc"........

That may or may not garner the ebay bot message warning not to take a transaction off ebay.

As I understand it, we are supposed to answer, in the bot event, that we will not take the transaction off ebay........but what do we do if not caught by a bot?

To be clear, there is no transaction/no purchase/no payment..........

Thanks

I wanted to start out by saying that responding to these kinds of offers to confirm that you will keep your sales on eBay is the best course of action should we have concerns of an off eBay sale. If you do not receive any kind of warning message from our automated filters and are looking to make sure it is reported, you can reach out to customer service to have it reviewed. Our goal is to have our filters catch any instances of off eBay sales requests, and by touching base with a customer service agent we can ensure this is not only actioned appropriately, but looked into in detail to see why it was missed by our automated process.

Trinton, most of us would rather take a beating than call CS.....from just a time point of view. I really suggest that if you could put the report button back on the messages with the reason of "offering an off ebay transaction", it would simplify our lives alot.

Though I hate hearing that you've had a poor experience with customer service in the past, I know that time is valuable when running a business and can suggest that you check out our eBay For Business Facebook page. This page goes hand in hand with our eBay For Business blogs and is a great resource for sellers. Visit: www.Facebook.com/eBayForBusiness to get in touch with our dedicated support team on this page when you have concerns and are limited on time. You can send a private message directly to the page and then focus on other tasks while waiting for a response.

Edit: Corrected URL

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎07-12-2017

Thanks Trinton. Here's the last line from the page you linked. Can you tell me where I can find that useful tool?:

As part of the View Item description summary feature, eBay will also release a tool that will allow sellers to preview the customized item description and to tweak/edit the text/HTML between the <span> tags before actually publishing the listing.

mr_lincoln · ‎07-12-2017

@Anonymous wrote: Thank you for compiling this info for us! I'll take a look for appropriate next steps. You are always welcome to @mention one of the Community team members if you feel our attention is needed directly on the thread

________________________________________________

Trinton, thank you and yes I know we can @ mention but this seemed better to pull some things together for the Team plus one of the Buyers on that first thread asked if I would post for them since they could not attend the Chat ...

Regards,
Mr. Lincoln - Community Mentor

tyler@ebay · ‎07-12-2017

@vrykalak wrote:

@llllady wrote:

Thanks, Tyler, but that doesn't really answer the question asked. I'm talking about does EBAY lower your items in search, like if you don't offer 60 days returns, free shipping, use product identifiers, etc.

Wow! I didn't know my items were being lowered for those reasons.
I never use free shipping, because it isn't fair to buyers who live different distances away, and I like to combine shipping when someone is smart enough to buy two of my offerings.
I had no idea I was being downgraded for that.
What other criteria does eBay use to determine SEO?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Hi @vrykalak - Best Match takes many factors into consideration, returns, listing completeness, and seller performance being some of them (the FAQs at the end have some good info).

Tyler,

b86fiero · ‎07-12-2017

Yesterday while searching for a craft kit I clicked on a listing and saw a whole bunch of other sellers items all over the page in boxes for the same or other craft kits. It was a visual kaleidoscope of confusion. I backed out of the listing right away. There were so many items displayed it was difficult to tell which was the item I actually clicked to read the description.

Is this a test? And if it is will this type of multi-seller catalog pages be the norm for the holiday selling season?

tyler@ebay · ‎07-12-2017

@lionb8 wrote:

cleared cookies and used 3 different browsers. I tried the exluding part just now:

click on shop by category, go to jewelry, vintage, costume, retro 30's-80's, collections, lots.

then click on US only, then more refinements, click on exclude then add the names. Click apply

and the number of items is the same as before I excluded those sellers.

This has been happening for several days now.

Thanks so much for catching me up on what you've tried - I'll reach out for more info and examples. Thanks!

Tyler,

vrykalak · ‎07-12-2017

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:
The following is from the FAQs in the Spring 2016 Update. Is this still correct?

If you have HTML authoring capabilities, you can indicate which content eBay should use for the View Item summary by encapsulating desired content (up to 800 characters) in special HTML markup. A simple way to tag your content is to include the following HTML around the text you wish to include in the mobile item description:
<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Product"><span property="description">This paragraph contains almost 800 characters of text to be displayed in the mobile item description. And the text in this paragraph through this sentence contains 250 characters, which is the amount we will display without any actions on your part. When you tag this paragraph with these simple HTML breaks, the content will be displayed to shoppers looking at your item. This will allow the shopper to see the key information you want to display, without them having to click through to the complete description. If your complete description is 800 characters or less and uses basic HTML we will display the entire description without any action by you—so the best practice is to keep it within 800 characters. If you have a long description, make it easy for your buyers by using this option. </span></div>

How many characters do you "lose" in this 800 character total by inserting line feeds <br> or using paragraphs? When the mobile app first appeared, I heard you lost 50 characters for every blank line in the description.

So, if you had a title <br> and a subtitle <br><br> manufacturer or source <br>size, shape, color, material, etc.<br>...that may be all you have room for in 800 characters.

But to write a description without line feeds is extremely off-putting to me as a buyer, so I won't do it as a seller.

Is that still true? that you "lose" 50 characters off the total for every linefeed?