01-22-2025 06:09 PM - edited 01-22-2025 06:13 PM
I’ve been buying and selling in the coins category for a while now. Recently, I decided to improve my store’s look and feel, and I was horrified to realize that my pet peeve—being unable to drill down using eBay’s nested categories—applies to my own listings as well!
Why can’t we have nested eBay categories the way they appear in search? Is that too much to ask? The coin category is already well-organized, and I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to browse through familiar categories without having to deal with the custom nonsense sellers come up with.
This isn’t just about convenience—it’s about sales. The inability to browse mindlessly reduces impulsive buying, which I know is a huge factor in this business.
I realize I’m late to this conversation, but in case any product managers at eBay happen to see this - can we get the default search without "store" even when you have store subscription?
Fixing this could improve the experience for both buyers and sellers. /end of rant/
p.s. UX wise - detailed drilling allows for mouse-only navigation when someone is interested in several categories, say "Ireland" , Russia", etc vs having to resolve to text search
01-22-2025 06:13 PM
You can "change" a layout but how would you "turn it off"?
People would see a blank screen?
01-22-2025 06:28 PM
I don't have a store at the moment so can't check but when I did I always used eBay Standard Categories. I think if you go to Manage Store and edit the custom categories they will revert to eBay Categories if you delete all the custom ones.
01-26-2025 08:21 AM
I tried to disable the "customization" of categories and switch back to eBay categories. While that is possible, the issue remains the same for both eBay and Custom categories—they only support three levels of nesting, likely starting from the very top. When I reverted to eBay categories, nearly all of my 600 store listings ended up lumped under a single category, "Coins: World," which doesn’t help at all with product discovery.
As a workaround, I’m planning to create a simplified version of custom categories that directly match the names of eBay subcategories. Hopefully, this approach will work better for me.
01-26-2025 08:26 AM
I meant turning off "customization".
I didn't realize that it still not as good as the generic search b/c it only keeps 3 levels of nesting and starts from the very top , so everything went to "World:Coins".
After sleeping on it, I am creating a version of categories with shallower nesting that has exact names as Ebay has , so that my leaf level categories match ebay leaf level categories.
01-26-2025 08:29 AM
thanks,
I tried to disable the "customization" of categories and switch back to eBay categories. While that is possible, the issue remains the same for both eBay and Custom categories—they only support three levels of nesting, likely starting from the very top. When I reverted to eBay categories, nearly all of my 600 store listings ended up lumped under a single category, "Coins: World," which doesn’t help at all with product discovery.
As a workaround, I’m planning to create a simplified version of custom categories that directly match the names of eBay subcategories. Hopefully, this approach will work better for me.