Books - change in item specifics?

[keziak]

I went to create a listing under Nonfiction and the SYI form came up with dozens of item specifics I haven't seen before. Are they actual item specifics or keywords? Confused by the whole system to be honest.

[evry1nositswindy]

I ran into this last night.  What a nightmare.  It was very cluttered and had many check boxes for unrelated specifics.  I read something that they were doing away with the cookbook category and adding them to non-fiction.  This has something to do with that change.

[abfabvintage]

@keziak 

They were supposed to start the IS and some category changes starting June 10 which is tomorrow...guess they started early? Have been waiting for this to happen to see just how bad it will be since they will also convert your active running listings in midstream with eBay deciding where to put your stuff. Therefore, am not listing a lot until this changeover happens so I can do a one time babysit of my items to see what they changed. Last time they did this, it wiped out all my IS.

[abfabvintage]

And I just now checked my Auction Wizard 3rd party listing program and they have not received any updates from the ebay developers as of today. Nothing like doing it last minute as usual.

[keziak]

Some time ago they made a change so that the topics were no longer specific to the category, just a hodgepodge of everything available. No idea how that works for browsing. I had all the topics memorized for every category so have always picked what used to be the right ones. Pointless exercise, do people even browse? I hope against hope that people use keywords and titles to search, not ISBNs or browsing categories.

[ittybitnot]

General reply

You may wish to examine this, and the tools provided by a most gracious eBay member and see if it is helpful.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Gather-your-Item-Specifics-before-the-Category-changes/m-p/298...

[readabouthorses]

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@keziak wrote:

I went to create a listing under Nonfiction and the SYI form came up with dozens of item specifics I haven't seen before. Are they actual item specifics or keywords? Confused by the whole system to be honest.

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I just now checked in Turbo Lister to see if there were updates which would impact the Magazines section of Books and OMG OMG OMG .... there was a data update and guess what I now see in Magazines !!!!???

VARIATIONS. The ability to create Variations. Not sure how to approach it but I would love to be able to list that way. I could list each issue for a magazine and year as a variation?

[coffeebean832]

They are phasing out the Books- Other category and moving most of it to Nonfiction. That definitely impacts the IS. Go to the thread linked above with shipscript's tool. There are a lot of relevant links you should review.

[myjunqueyourtreasure]

I guess they couldn't figure out how to stop the megas from listing everything else in the cookbooks section.

Not sure how variations would work well for magazine back issues. I do mine singly and list (some of) the contents.

[keziak]

thank you, lots to read.

[cornersbumped]

The change brought me back after many decades away from the Community, looking for what the heck was going on.

Today's excitement is that the Author field in Item Specifics (for the Fiction category, but not Nonfiction (yet)) has become a dropdown with only pre-populated names in it. 

Oh, and the fact that almost no 10-digit ISBN number resolves in the catalog any more.

:facepalm:

[myjunqueyourtreasure]

Damnit. Just when I was getting ready to list some books I pulled off the river a while back.

Guess that pile will have to wait until the dust settles (again).

[cornersbumped]

Actually it seems like it's more complicated. I list with GarageSale, and while the same version is running on both of our machines, the item specifics form for the same book is shown differently on the two.

Could be a bad coincidence of GS update plus eBay ontology changes. Either the broken one will fix itself (doubtful, given what I read here), or the "working one" might eventually break as well. I'll let you know.

Meanwhile I don't actually know what the online sales forms look like. It's been ...  11 years? since I listed using the web form....

[ittybitnot]

Oh, and the fact that almost no 10-digit ISBN number resolves in the catalog any more.

I used to despise the catalog intrusion when an ISBN number was inputted.  All of a sudden I would get the stock photo (which looked nothing like my book) and the stock information that was indeed inaccurate as well. 

Books just went someplace else. 

[abfabvintage]

@ittybitnot 

I think in all my time here, which is running out, I never used the ebay ISBN. I have it turned off. I would just list my book and put the ISBN as my own custom (my input) and put it there and in the description. And sold both books over time. And my own pictures. No UPC, no ISBN, nothing but my input.