Sellers in Business & Industrial verticals, your listings could be affected by the latest mandates. Many sellers will be familiar with these changes, but if you are new to the world of eBay, we will explain things in a bit more detail. You may think that these changes are an unnecessary evil. This is not the case. The changes are essential to your success in the marketplace. eBay monitors how customers are searching and filtering for products. So, if you have changes to make it means that there has been an influx in traffic to listings like yours.
The deadline is the 12th of July, so it is going to be upon us before you notice. Thankfully, there aren't too many required changes for you this time. For UK sellers, it seems that there is only one category affected which may be a test to see how you adapt to these changes before rolling out anything further. However, this doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done.
Here are the changes affected in the UK*:
| Category |
Product |
| Commercial Flooring & Tiles |
Commercial Floor Care |
| Commercial Flooring & Tiles |
Commercial Floor Transitions |
| Commercial Flooring & Tiles |
Commercial Flooring & Carpet |
| Commercial Flooring & Tiles |
Commercial Flooring Underlayment |
*If you trade in other marketplaces across the globe it seems to only affect one category, which seems to be relating to commercial flooring. So, these examples should help you with your own store.
The item specific which has been mandated this time is Type.
So, you are in a better position than some of the other verticals which may have changes in the hundreds. With that being said, you can still make things easier on yourself by using a tool to manage your listings’ item specifics. With our Aspect Finder+ tool, you can easily see what item specifics are required, and which are recommended. Just because something is not mandated does not mean that it won’t benefit your store to populate them. As well as this, the tool automates the process of populating the item specifics for you and even has a drop-down of suggestions to make your life that little bit easier. Another handy feature of Aspect Finder+ is the Buyer Demand Indicator. This gives you a rating of 1-5 stars for your Item Specifics so you can determine how important they are to prioritise.
This is an image of the category lookup tool.
Additionally, our Category Lookup tool gives you an exact number of customers flocking to listings like yours using certain item specifics. This is updated every 30 days, so you know the data we provide is reliable. Again, if you use these tools, you will see why it is beneficial to fill in more item specifics than is required by eBay. The more information you give, the fewer questions or returns you will receive. In the end, it will make all the difference to how smoothly your business runs.
As you can see from the screenshot above, feature is the item specific which has the highest rating on this category at 5 stars, however, is not required, only recommended. Brand is required but has half a star, and type has one star and is currently required soon. If you look at the value, you can see that feature has 2520 but brand has only 326. This is a powerful example that shows if you stick to doing the bare minimum, you may miss out on a high volume of traffic that could be directed to your listings.
We hope you found this helpful and remember, if you sell outside of the UK, many of the mandates are similar globally so this information can be applied to help you work on your store. Our tools are available globally too!
For info on the mandates more generally, read this post.
If you're a seller in any of the following verticals, we have blog posts to help you:
Sporting Goods
Media
Home & Garden
Musical Instruments
Parts & Accessories
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