What sellers need to survive the Ground Advantage migration...

[sin-n-dex]

Not that anyone at eBay is listening...

I have over 11K in listings, and although I tried my best to batch update stuff so it would be "standard shipping" (and use Ground Advantage), there are listings being missed.

What I need, and I'm sure I'm not alone, is a filter on my active listings to show me everything that still says FC for shipping so I know which ones still need to be updated. I've been trying to catch things as they sell (to determine if I missed any categories), but the filter will work great at identifying those missed strays during this migration.

C.

[sapphire_studio]

Since you don't have free shipping and charge it separately then you should be able to sort all your items by shipping price (you can add that as a column if it is not already there). That should give you a good way to have all the first class put together for you to check mark and then bulk edit.

[the-hook-and-the-loop]

I have seen hundreds of posts about this Ground Advantage switch and not much mention about using business policies to make the changes. It took me about 15 minutes to change my listings. And if a seller isn't set up with business policies, then create a policy with Ground Advantage and assign all listings that need to be changed.......to it.

[mybigsale]

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@the-hook-and-the-loop wrote:

I have seen hundreds of posts about this Ground Advantage switch and not much mention about using business policies to make the changes. It took me about 15 minutes to change my listings. And if a seller isn't set up with business policies, then create a policy with Ground Advantage and assign all listings that need to be changed.......to it.

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I use shipping policies and It took about 10 minutes to adjust them the way I want. Don't know why someone would choose not to use shipping policies.

I offer Ground Advantage and Priority Mail. I noticed that eBay displays "USPS Ground Advantage Estimated" for both services. I've come to expect bugs with most eBay changes.

[44012]

@the-hook-and-the-loop 

That is what I did.....I sorted the items by dollar which helped separate FC from Parcel.  I also at the same time added new policies for EIS to make sure listings that could break or too heavy only ship US. I was confused months ago the first time I entered one and there were mistakes made but they were easily fixed.  Business Policies are excellent!!!  Very easy and repetitive once you do a few (if your business demands.)

[duncanvr]

Frankly I don't know how you manage 11,000 listings. Do you do anything with older listings that don't sell I mean how long do you keep an item unsold 6 months? Two years? Before you get rid of it. It just seems to me 11k of listings is an awful lot to manage. And hopefully your getting at least 10 sales a day with that many on sale? I keep just over 200 listed and find that just manageable. But at least I am getting daily sales. I think with 11k items listed I would get depressed as to why 1000s of them are not selling fast enough. But hopefully your getting a good turnover.

[siamjane8]

Because some of us have thousands of unique listings with calculated shipping and vastly different weights and dimensions. Business policies do not work for that. 

   What would work is a simple programming code to change calculated 1st class to calculated advantage for is sellers eBay....

   Remember, eBay makes s ton of money off those shipping labels too. They do not of on 100% of the negotiated rates to us. They profit from every label printed through eBay. As they should- they provide a service and it's easier for us and we get better rates to boot so eBay should monitize that.   But it's a service, why can't the self proclaimed greatest tech company make a simple code redirection /update for it's customer base? 

[mybigsale]

@siamjane8 

Because some of us have thousands of unique listings with calculated shipping and vastly different weights and dimensions. Business policies do not work for that. 

I don't understand. With shipping policies, you choose what shipping services, handling fees, and countries to offer buyers. You could have a shipping policy for Calculated Ground Advantage, a shipping policy for Calculated Ground Advantage and Priority Mail, a shipping policy for Flat Rate Padded Envelope, Etc. 

Dimensions and weights are always defined in the listing. They are not part of the shipping policy. I don't understand why a few shipping policies would work on 250+ unique listings but not on 1000's of unique listings.

It would have taken 10 minutes of editing policies to use Ground Advantage as appropriate whether I had 100 or 1000 listings. All my listings have unique weights and dimensions and use calculated shipping.

[lloydsteventaylor]

i use business policies and definitely recommend it. i have about 2800 listings and only 3 business policies for shipping. ebay standard envelope, ground advantage and media mail. ground advantage and media are calculated and ebay standard envelope is flat. for this change i went into fcp first class package(my old one ) and changed it to  ground advantage. as i do each listing i enter the package dimensions and weight. for ese package dimensions and weight are the same because they are small and light.

[wastingtime101]

With the number of listings you have, you should be using business policies. If you're interested in setting them up, check the link in my signature below.

I can't imagine any seller with more than a few hundred listings not using business policies to make their life easier, regardless of the Ground Advantage update.

[pennysdream]

Business Policies is a blessing. You should try it.  

It also took me less than 10 min to change most everything.  

And this morning I realized Advantage covers everything.  So, I created a new Everything Policy.  

That one I will have to go and adjust stuff; however, I can do it in my own time.  

[nobody*s_perfect]

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@siamjane8 wrote:

Because some of us have thousands of unique listings with calculated shipping and vastly different weights and dimensions. Business policies do not work for that. ... 

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You should look into how business policies work.  The setup of a business policy does not include package dimensions and weight.

Here's a link to  the page where you'd set up a shipping policy.  You can see that it includes selection(s) for shipping services and handling time, with optional details for international shipping, shipping rate tables, and excluded locations.  No place to set up specific weight or dimensions.

https://www.bizpolicy.ebay.com/businesspolicy/shipping?pageNumber=1&source=manage

[sin-n-dex]

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@sapphire_studio wrote:

Since you don't have free shipping and charge it separately then you should be able to sort all your items by shipping price (you can add that as a column if it is not already there). That should give you a good way to have all the first class put together for you to check mark and then bulk edit.

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I hadn't known I could do that... I'm kind of old-school tech able, but not keeping up to date with new things we can do.. by old school I mean I learnt on computers 25 years ago and did not really update my skills. (If anyone wonders how I work on a computer every day... the software we're using at work was written in 1980 and never updated since).

C.

[sin-n-dex]

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@duncanvr wrote:

Frankly I don't know how you manage 11,000 listings. Do you do anything with older listings that don't sell I mean how long do you keep an item unsold 6 months? Two years? Before you get rid of it. It just seems to me 11k of listings is an awful lot to manage. And hopefully your getting at least 10 sales a day with that many on sale? I keep just over 200 listed and find that just manageable. But at least I am getting daily sales. I think with 11k items listed I would get depressed as to why 1000s of them are not selling fast enough. But hopefully your getting a good turnover.

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Everything except the stamp collections and 75% of the postcards belongs to the B&m store. I go by looking at my shelf at the store and moving things that take up space or getting rid of a type of product I'm not selling very much of. (Some things have been rather duds, even when you cut the price).

I couldn't tell you how many sales I get a day, that kind of varies...  but I find when I don't pack orders for two days, there are 20+ in the queue and I'm barely keeping up with packing. Some orders have many items, like Mr token buying 82x 99 cent tokens at auction on Sunday. I spent an hour packing his order. However he gets boxes of other token junk from the store that get added to his package.

The purpose of the auction is to keep him engaged so I can keep offering him stuff. Auctions run specifically to deal with him, and engage a few other token collectors that come by frequently. He might spend $90 on cheap tokens that takes me an hour to pack, but in the past month he's spent $1300 on 60 lbs of tokens that were too junky to ever list... but it adds up when you have thousands at 45 cents each. I don't even have to do anything with them but count them and put them in rolls for easy shipping.

I work full time, so from 7am until 5pm I'm busy all weekdays... if I had more than 10 sales a day I think I'd go on a listing hiatus because that seems to slow stuff down. People talk about throttling... I kind of throttle my own store by listing lots when I don't have stuff to pack and ship, and not listing when I'm doing nothing but packing and shipping.

In any event I think I took care of the Ground Advantage situation. People are talking about policies, but I'm not techy enough to try and figure that out now. I generally learn stuff on a need to know basis. I adapt to change when there's no other choice.

C.

[sin-n-dex]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

With the number of listings you have, you should be using business policies. If you're interested in setting them up, check the link in my signature below.

I can't imagine any seller with more than a few hundred listings not using business policies to make their life easier, regardless of the Ground Advantage update.

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Thanks for the link. I will at some point look into it, but since the situation is currently under control (with most items changed over... I'm looking for this filter to catch the strays that didn't update because an offer was active, or some kind of error), I'll just leave things as they are for right now.

I'm watching sales as I pack and ship to see if an item is not showing "standard shipping" for buyer selected, and the FC appears instead. That will tell me there's a category or type of item I missed when making changes.

C.