The business policies for eBay is an item that may require you to opt in through eBay. Everyone has access to opt in to use these business policies. Here is a link to opt in to the business policies: http://www.bizpolicy.ebay.com/businesspolicy/policyoptin
*Note from eBay representative: This link to opt in to business policies works about 80% of the time.
When I click on the link, it brings me to my Manage Business Policies page since I already use Business Policies. So the link is still active and working enough to bring me to my Manage Business Policies page.
I opted in accidentally in Turbo Lister and it was an ordeal as you know. I stuck it out and got through the initial confusion of so many extra policies being generated for every possible variation or combination I listed with for 8+ years in Turbo Lister. I only had 50-100 active listings but thousands of old ones in TL going back 8+ years.
Opting in online will only look at the past 90 days online so not as bad as years saved in Turbo Lister if you saved a lots of listings in Turbo Lister from years back.
Opting in to Business Policies will make a cryptically computer generated named policies for every different combination of how you listed. Which should not be too bad if only online active and past 90 days completed used. Payment Polices generated would not be too bad since not too many ways to do this and should be only a handful even for 5000 listings. Same with Return Policies. But Shipping Policies may generate hundreds of policies if not more.
Consolidating the Payment Policies into meaningful names and removing duplicates should be easy since there should be few. Same with Return Policies. Shipping Policies will generate many policies and will take time to sort them out with meaningful names and remove duplicates.
The good news is that your listings will all be converted to Business Policies and should run okay giving you time to sort out the policies and organize all. The Business Policy manage page will show each policy and how many listings are using it and you can click on that number and it will show you them as a subset of a Seller Hub active listings page. This way you can see what listings are using that policy.
Start with sorting out Payment and Return policies. Remember when renaming a policy, it has to propagate through all listings and with so many listings it will take time. It will show a message saying it has completed eventually. Be patient as it does not take minutes but hours possible to change or update large quantities of listings that you have. Do not update an update in progress.
Because business policies are using the listing revision service for active listings, the restrictions on updating active listings apply. By this I mean no changes to a listing in the last 12 hours, no changing auction listings with bids and whatever active listing revision restrictions exist. When a listing cannot be revised, the Business Policies will update the revised policies but also keep an old version of the policy. This can be very annoying because your policies are not "clean" and you have to remember to go and clean up the orphan policies. But because the policy must be kept for 90 more days while the listing is in completed listings, it can take 90+ days to delete the orphan policy because it is in use with the old completed listing! I usually used the Description of the policy to put this at the start of the description "Delete on xx date" as a reminder.
Business Policies are great and make sense to use but has annoying issues because of Revision rules for listings. Other quirks I cannot remember right now.
The big question is where is eBay going with Business Policies. So hard to tell. Business Policies weer going to be forced on sellers years ago in a Seller Update by a certain date like other changes forced on Sellers. But it was delayed and then not forced on sellers for years now. I think Business Polices may be dead with no future but you will not get a straight answer from eBay.
What should you do? Ask why you want Business Policies? What benefits do they offer? What issues? Can you get by with Bulk Edit and File Exchange editing listings to accomplish the same? Remember if you opt in a lot of work will be created? Do you have time to spend organizing and cleaning up the mess?
Conceptually Business policies makes sense and is very neat and organized when set up. Works well most of the time when I used them but has eBay quirks and glitches sometimes.
PS When you are opted in to Business Policies, menu options show in the Seller Hub. You have to click on Listings in the overview page and Business Policies will show in the left hand column.
