ShipScript has been an eBay Community volunteer since 2003, specializing in HTML, CSS, Scripts, Photos, Active Content, Technical Solutions, and online Seller Tools.
When we change the site to eBay.co.uk, it is possible to see all 157,000 items.
Here are your listing categories and the number of items in each category.
I scanned each of the smaller categories using the Bulk Active Content Scanner with your email in the "Custom Capture" slot at the top, while populating only one site category in the advanced search settings. The result is that only one of the smaller categories has emails (about 300).
Category #Listings 14281 -113985 35975 - 36433 149332 - 23489 211 - 17054 29489 - 10762 149325 - 9631 53574 - 16947 149324 - 8088 Category #Listings email 64482 - 521 - none 260 - 323 - about 300 267 - 10 - none 11116 - 10 - none 11700 - 1 - none
I did not scan any of your larger categories listed under "collectables", which is where the rest of the problem listings would likely be found.
Here is a sample listing from category 260 that I filtered in the Sandbox tool:
http://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/ActiveContentSandbox.htm?192878482864
You can see the captured text in the "Markup" tab and the results after removal can be seen in the "Filtered" tab. That listing has two copies of your email and it also has a phone number. Do you also want to capture and remove the phone number?
What do you want to do with the text that surrounds the email (and phone number)? Is this phrase consistent in all listings, or are there possible variations of the text, including space variations?
After making decisions about what text to remove and whether to replace it with anything, the next issue is that the Bulk Active Content tools can only process 10K listings at a time. That is why I tried to look for category breakdowns. However, your largest category has 113,985 items so there are no reasonable breakdowns for the tool (unless you know the large categories contain no violating listings.)
To get around the 10K limitation, you could download all of your item numbers from File Exchange. It's free. Signup info here:
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Tools-Apps/File-Exchange-Resources/td-p/29630234
When you download the file that contains your item numbers, break it into spreadsheet files that are no more than 30,000 rows each and make sure each new file has a header row and that the item numbers look like numbers (not exponential notation). You can then run each of those 30K files through the Bulk Active Content Editor that can be populated with the filters that you want to apply (that I may need to prepare for you).
To summarize:
- Subscribe to eBay's UK File Exchange.
- Download your list of items from File Exchange
- Break that list into smaller files of no more than 30,000 items each.
- Decide what to filter.
- I'll prepare a filter.
Then process the changes:
- Paste the smaller File Exchange spreadsheet into the Active Content Editor and add the filter.
- Run the scan (could take an hour).
- Collect the zip file created by the Editor.
- Unzip and upload one revision file to File Exchange.
- Check the File Exchange response for other issues that prevent file revision.
- Repeat for each revision file in the zip.
- Repeat for the next 30K batch.
When using the Bulk Active Content tools, choose FILE EXCH CSV from the country list. A new box will open. The list that you paste there must include headers and a country code, formatted like this (with a comma, tab, or semicolon delimiter):
ItemID,Site 192882897243,GB 192882998313,GB 192883062797,GB 192883088444,GB 192885252474,GB 362612456955,GB 362612540186,GB
The Bulk Active Content Editor has "Advanced" instructions for working with File Exchange data or spreadsheet data. Open the Advanced section near the bottom of the tool for instructions and screenshots.
Data entered this way through the FILE EXCH CSV box may not exceed 30,000 items per batch.
You mentioned you have 3000 items with your email, but eBay is giving you a list of only a few hundred? You could run your eBay list through the tool using the format I provided, but you'll still need to filter out the other thousands, and the most thorough method is to ask File Exchange for your list of items and break that into smaller 30K batches to run through the Active Content Editor.
Actually, if you are not trying to fix anything else in your descriptions, it is probably faster and more efficient to run the FileExchange-created lists through the Active Content Scanner to locate the violating listings (adding your email address to the Custom Capture slot at the top). That tool will create a list just like the one I posted as an example, and that shorter list can be saved and built upon as you run each 30K File Exchange batch through the scanner.
When all batches have been run in the scanner, all the results can be merged into one long list of 3000 item numbers with violations that can be pushed into the FILE EXCH CSV box in the Active Content Editor and then you will only need to process one revision file from that tool.
