Not ranting, raving, or complaining. Just trying to work around the latest changes in a way that minimizes the effect on my listings practices. For many years I have maintained a store and used the 1,000 listings it allots every month to set varying durations for my listings.
The change to forced GTC listings doesn't allow me to do this without additional time or money spent listing and relisting slow moving items. In order to lessen the amount of time I spend listing, I started yesterday listing all of my new listings on either Saturday or Sunday in large blocks. Today, being Sunday, I ended almost 70 listings that had potential to end on a weekday and be automatically relisted by eBay. I was able to do this with bulk ending and bulk "sell similar" functions. Because it is the last day of the month and I had used most of my "free" store listings, it cost me about $7 total to do this.
By the end of April I should easily be able to have all my listings starting on a Saturday or Sunday with no concern as to what day they end on. By using 7 day multiples, I will only have to do my listings and relistings for a couple of hours each Saturday and Sunday with just about zero chance of ever running into an unwanted automatic relist.
Not a perfect solution to GTC in any way, but does give me some control over my listing durations as long as I stick to 7, 14, 21, and 28 day cycles that are looked at on Saturday and Sunday only. There are, of course, some disadvantages to this, and I realize it cuts the number of my actual store listings in half, but as a short term fix, it should work for me.
I will have a one time expense doing this until I get all my listings to start on Saturday or Sunday and am able to manually end and relist in bulk, but worst case is that that costs me 10 cents a listing instead of having 35 cent unwanted automatic relistings crammed down my throat by eBay.
In three or four months I will see how this is working for me and evaluate rather or not to keep my eBay store or lower my expectations of what eBay can do for me.
