Selling food items.

[inhawaii]

I'm not sure how many of you sell food items.

Probably not that many.

I came across a frustrating issue that has happened to me before.

Ebay just ended a listing of mine with a expiration date issue.

The product itself did not expire.

I just failed to update the expiration date on the listing.

All I need to do is update the expiration date on the listing.

But when ebay ended the listing, it's gone.  No where to be found.

So I can't just "fix" the listing. I have to make a new one (including photos).

I also lost the stats (number sold). So it starts at zero.

Frustrating!

[714ricki]

We all feel your frustration when a listing is removed by ebay. The only thing to do is to create a new listing & hopefully you can simply use the photos from the original listing. 

Happy New Year!

[wastingtime101]

If only I had seen this when you posted it on 12/21 @inhawaii I would have advised you to pull up the Google cache for the listing so you could grab description, etc. You can try now and might get lucky, but at this point it's probably gone.

I used to sell food products many years ago. I had a system setup whereby I would create a listing, then I would create an alert that would appear two months before the expiration date in the listing. It would not only alert me to check for aging product, but notify me to update the expiration date on the listing if it was a product I kept restocking. Maybe something like that could work for you.

The way I worked it was to have one alert come through each month with the name & listing number of any product(s) that had an expiration 2 months out. I could update the alerts at any time by adding or removing products on a specific month's alerts.

[earthdreamer]

I assume the listing may still be found in your sold items, so you can simply sell similar. 

One idea to keep track of expiration dates is to type them in the note field in seller hub for those particular food items. 

[evry1nositswindy]

We also have more access to previous orders, so you should be able to use sell similar.  You lose the sales history though.

[lacemaker3]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

If only I had seen this when you posted it on 12/21 @inhawaii I would have advised you to pull up the Google cache for the listing so you could grab description, etc. You can try now and might get lucky, but at this point it's probably gone.

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@wastingtime101, in my experience, google cached pages don't include the description anymore. They haven't for months, when I have searched for them. Just pictures, and price.

I tried different browsers, with the same results. Have you found a browser or a search engine that caches the descriptions?

[simply-the-best-for-you]

I actually heard of a YT famous seller who had her account shut down for something VERY similar.   She was able to get it reinstated but not without much headache & an inside track to eBay.   

She had a food or health/beauty, I don't remember, item & she uses stock options.  The item was OOS b/c she was out of them, but the listing still exists for when you get more in.   So, there were NONE for sale at the time b/c the item was OOS & the expiration date in the listing was expired.   

If/when she got more stock, she would update the listing, but there was no need to update an OOS listing that no one could buy from.   I don't remember all the particulars, perhaps there was more than 1 of these, but they shut down her account & suspended her from selling.  Just thought you should know.  

[wastingtime101]

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@lacemaker3 wrote:

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

If only I had seen this when you posted it on 12/21 @inhawaii I would have advised you to pull up the Google cache for the listing so you could grab description, etc. You can try now and might get lucky, but at this point it's probably gone.

...

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@wastingtime101, in my experience, google cached pages don't include the description anymore. They haven't for months, when I have searched for them. Just pictures, and price.

I tried different browsers, with the same results. Have you found a browser or a search engine that caches the descriptions?

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I forgot all about that @lacemaker3. Google has done a bunch of changes to their search the past few months and that was one of the side effects. However try this - when you pull up the cache, at the top of the page it says: full version, text-only version, view source

Click on view source then use the find feature (Ctrl + F) for the word description - you can pull up the description text there. It's just not displaying on the full version. It's kind of a cumbersome method, but it will do in a pinch when you are really stuck and need to pull the info.

I'm interested to know if inhawaii has any success with sell similar from the orders page as others suggested. I know that works when the seller accidentally deletes a listing, but I don't have confidence it will work when eBay is the one that removed the listing.

[a_c_green]

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@lacemaker3 wrote:

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

If only I had seen this when you posted it on 12/21 @inhawaii I would have advised you to pull up the Google cache for the listing so you could grab description, etc. You can try now and might get lucky, but at this point it's probably gone.

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@wastingtime101, in my experience, google cached pages don't include the description anymore. They haven't for months, when I have searched for them. Just pictures, and price.

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I would suggest searching Worthpoint.com using the exact wording of the listing, if possible. (I know the listing itself has disappeared, but its title should still be found in any prior eBay transaction notifications that would have gone to the email account associated with your eBay ID.) I usually have pretty good luck finding my old listings there, and I can then retrieve the description, which saves me a lot of time. 

Going forward, whenever I'm listing something that I might be listing again sometime in the future (but  which will probably be beyond eBay's 3-month retention window for sold listings), I copy-and-paste the listing title and description into a text file (Description.txt or similar) stored with the listing photos.

[a_c_green]

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@a_c_green wrote:

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@lacemaker3 wrote:

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

If only I had seen this when you posted it on 12/21 @inhawaii I would have advised you to pull up the Google cache for the listing so you could grab description, etc. You can try now and might get lucky, but at this point it's probably gone.

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@wastingtime101, in my experience, google cached pages don't include the description anymore. They haven't for months, when I have searched for them. Just pictures, and price.

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I would suggest searching Worthpoint.com using the exact wording of the listing, if possible.

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Whoops -- I meant to say "the exact wording of the title." If you plug in at least a substantial portion of your listing title in the Search window of Worthpoint.com, there is some chance that you will turn up old listings of yours. Put your search pattern within "Double quotes" to limit the results to exact matches of wording, and in that order only. Pick whichever excerpt of words (in sequence) from your title is least likely to produce false-positive matches to other sellers' listings. Good luck.