ShipScript has been an eBay Community volunteer since 2003, specializing in HTML, CSS, Scripts, Photos, Active Content, Technical Solutions, and online Seller Tools.
Come on eBay! Roll up your sleeves! We got this! We're better than this! Solve this age old problem and provide a better buying and seller experience! Especially in a post Covid world! The supply chain is wonky! It's an easy fix! Think in terms of "business policies"... add it to them if you must. Shipping policies, payment policies, return policies, ADD "variation" policies". POOF... problems go away! Everyone is happy!
1. Identifying the problem:
A t-shirt seller offers 12 colors of shirts and 10 sizes. A temporary GLOBAL shortage hits 1 variation with one specific color. Let's say, 2xl Gray. It's out of stock at all warehouses, by all suppliers, in all brands, by all major companies. Current fix: Kiss your hinny goodbye. It affects 12,000 of your listings and you can't bulk edit them. At best you can edit around 20 an hour, so 600 hours of labor. But the shortage is only a couple weeks long. Instead you explain to any buyers the issue and hope they'll work with you. A business policy of "variation", since all 12,000 listings share the same variation, this becomes a 2 minute fix. You edit the variation to remove 2xl gray. and reedit it when they become available.
An entire color you offer is discontinued. It affects 4,000 hoodies. Color was Kiwi. Current fix. Kiss your hinny goodbye. It's going to take you 200 hours to create 4,000 new listings excluding Kiwi as a buying option. Since all 4,000 shared the EXACT same Variations... a simple variation policy that is applied to all listings could make the change in 2 minutes.
Really eBay, there is no excuse for not having solved this decades ago. It's a simple fix and much, much needed! Especially in a post-covid world that has fallen apart at the seams. You're offering us a model T in a Tesla world. You're better than this. Allow us to create several "master" variation lists and apply them to applicable listings that all share the same variations. Make them editable by allowing us to edit the variation list and have it instantly effect the listings we linked to that list.
Right now, you make it IMPOSSIBLE for us to serve your customers when outside forces effect our supply chains. Then, you bloody pigs mask us if we have to cancel due to OOS, when it's a multi-variation listing and the OOS situation is due to a temporary disruption of the supply chain. You don't give as an easy tool to bulk edit shared variations... we ask. We beg. We plead. For years. For decades. The answer is right in front of our faces.... "variation policy". It's the RIGHT thing to do for eBay's buyers! It's the right thing to do for eBay's sellers! Let's Get 'er done!
I have an infinite number of quantity. Quantity is irrelevant to me. Besides, all shirts are printed on demand, and share the same quantity, so to make quantity relevant, we'd need to be able to create a master quantity variation list and then make all applicable listings share that list. So, when someone buys a 2xl white shirt, the quantity in ALL listings that share that master quantity variation list is reduced by one. THEN, what your suggesting would work.
Current problem I'm working on is I want to add 15 oz ceramic coffee cup as a variation in 4,100 listings. To revise one at a time will take about 273 hours of labor. To create a new "Sell similar" and then relist them all will take about 98 hours. That's the route I'm going. BUT... If variations were able to be bulk edited, the change would take about 2 minutes.
The easiest way to make them bulk editable would be to move the variation into business policies. Because all 4,100 listings share the exact same variations, I could simply edit that "master" variation and have it applied to all 4,100 listings... in minutes instead of hundreds of hours.
I have a similar problem. I buy one item from a supplier and modify that into multiple products. When I have supply chain shortages and deliveries a year out, I have to decide which products to make with my limited supply on hand.
Originally, I was thinking you should use the global Out-of-Stock (OOS) control, but that won't solve your problem because you will need to manually put items out of stock as you decide which to make. However, if you have OOS turned on, then you can zero-out the size or color that is experiencing a supply disruption, and easily restore those when material becomes available.
As suggested by tools_apps_team@ebay a spreadsheet method would work quite well. In Seller Hub Reports Uploads, download a template for "Listings > Edit Price and Quantity". It is a hierarchical report that shows the quantity available to all of your variations. Use a spreadsheet search (or a macro) to locate the variation term that will be out of stock, set its quantity to zero, and upload the spreadsheet to Seller Hub.
Your listings will then show those item variations as out of stock, while the remaining variations remain live. When supplies become available, again download a Price and Quantity spreadsheet and search out listings with zero quantity variations (or search out the variation phrase). Restore that value and upload the report to Seller Hub.
Not a drop shipper. I'm a print on demand t-shirt shop.
I have 3,911 Listings in this store category: HoneVille™ Coffee Cups. I want to add: "15 oz Ceramic mug" as a variation in all 3,911. Quantity can be set at 5. Price can be set at $23.16.
That tool does not look like it's capable of doing that. My plan is to relist these using "sell similiar" at 30 a day for about 130 days. Then I'll end all these listings and the new listings will be in the new category with all 4 variations instead of 3. I'm asking for a quicker way to be invented.
I know you are advocating for an eBay tool, but it seems you also have an immediate need that I thought could be addressed.
A spreadsheet tool can help considerably with that, particularly if one is facile with Excel (which I am not).
So I started with the variation extraction tool:
https://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/VariationScanner.htm
I chose eBay's "Mug" category "20695" in the advanced settings and added a search phrase "coffee cup mug", as gleaned from an eBay search of your items (not a store search).
The tool extracted 3941 listings (the tool limit is probably around 6K items) and generated a spreadsheet of those items, similar to my prior upload screenshot. The extraction took the tool about 8 minutes.
Within Excel, I searched that spreadsheet for "15 oz Ceramic Mug" and deleted the 30 items that had that variation. Next, I used the spreadsheet tool to find:
;15 oz Travel Mug W/Lid
and replaced it with:
;15 oz Travel Mug W/Lid;15 oz Ceramic Mug
in each master record, as the master record must include a list of all variation possibilities.
With that as my basis, I didn't have the macro or scripting capability in my Excel tool that online research suggested I use, so I created a script to add one new Variation (Type=15 oz Ceramic Mug,3,23.16) to each listing record. I think it probably took about an hour, maybe two, because I had wasted some time on researching "how to" Excel instructions along the way.
I now have a spreadsheet of about 3911 items that have the Ceramic mug added with qty 3 at $23.16 each. (Sorry, I didn't notice you wanted qty 5 until after I created the spreadsheet, but I can quickly change that by script if necessary).
Send me a private message with your email address and I will send you the spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet can be broken into a small sample for upload to eBay Seller Hub if you just want to test a single listing revision. If your listings have any unmet mandates, the Seller Hub revision will fail with error messages or may succeed with warnings.
Oh, and if you need to move these listings to a new category, you can do so on the revision upload.
