My issues with ebay run far and deep with the amount of hoops sellers have been forced to jump through the past few years. It costs my company a ton of money, much more than any other marketplace. The most recent issue is we cannot edit listing starting in November. Apparently the problem is ebay' s move to catalogue based listings. We are the manufacture and our products aren't updated in time to list them to ebay. We have a bespoke listing tool that we stopped using because it was not compatible with our templates. Previously, we could edit any listing, anywhere and be fine. Now when I attempt to edit a listing I'm getting this error: Inventory-based listing management is not currently supported by this tool. Please refer to the tool used to create this listing.
Error from my listing tool: Error from submission : Inventory-based listing management is not currently supported by this tool. Please refer to the tool used to create this listing.
When I go to the tool I originally used to create the listing I get a similar error. I went to Frooition, who applied our templates, another error. I call ebay and they say it's whoever listed our templates, but it was our software and we haven't locked ourselves out of editing. Frooition says its an ebay problem and they should be releasing a work around shortly.
To add insult to injury, ebay suggests I end the listing and restart, which loses all my watchers and view history, some of which is years old. Ebay is now suppressing listings that do not have white backgrounds but I can't edit the listing because ebay won't let me. So now I have to decide whether to lose my listing history or apply the updates that ebay wants. My ebay sales are way down on all our other platforms because of this.
Historically the amount of updates we've had to do to remain in compliance with ebay is unlike any other online platform.
- Ebay used to allow phone numbers so customers could pay with a credit card, this was changed and I had to revise all my listings to remove our phone number.
- Ebay required sellers images to come from a secure site, so I moved over 50k worth of images and updated thousands of listings. Ebay could have secured their site themselves but they put it on the sellers.
- Ebay starts requiring sellers to pay for return shipping charges for any reason, but doesn't back up sellers when a customer returns items outside of the return policy guidelines.
- Ebay starts suppressing images that have any watermark and are not on a white background.
Every one of their policy changes cost us money and now they are holding our listings hostage since we can't edit them but then suppressing them because we can't make the edits ebay wants. If anyone has a solution to editing listings without ending them please reply.
