Rebecca Michals addressed some of the item specifics questions and concerns in the recent May Seller Check-In and I thought her answer gave some interesting insight into eBay's point of view on this topic.
https://youtu.be/rBQjuN3yTg0?t=2853
@glasser - I thought you might be particularly interested after your thoughtful questions in the chat on May 19th.
Item specifics, why do they continue to change?
There are a number of drivers for category and item specifics changes. One of the main ones is to support new products and new trends that we see happening in the marketplace.
Then there are programs that are related to supply and demand that we need to be able to support that require some changes to happen. And then also we want you to know that we are aligning all the sites and categories and item specifics to a global data model so that buyers and sellers have the best opportunities to transact globally and everything is, you know, an even playing field I guess.
And then in addition to the above, there are times that we have to make changes to meet a business requirement from legal or from policy from SEO, selling, search, shipping. So I think the takeaway here is that we are doing it on purpose because we truly believe that updating those items specifics will drive your business and will help result in more sales for you and a better experience for buyers.
Then the other part of this question is do we really have to do all of this? And I think that's a perennial question - do you have to do all of these item specifics?
So there's a whole team here at eBay that is working hard every day to make sure that the required item specifics are the most meaningful to buyers so that the specifics you put in are the ones that buyers are looking for.
Any other item specifics are either recommended or optional and are not going to stop you from listing or potentially having a successful sale if they're not completed.
And then the last thing I want to mention just to be really clear, please do fill in the required item specifics. That's really important. But there's lots of recommended ones and we do not suggest that you put in NA or not applicable if you find a recommended item specific that isn't relevant to the item that you're listing.
