What jeanius thought this up?
by Sue Bailey
Waist 32 or size 32?
It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon; what better to do than a little eBay shopping? I need a couple of new pairs of jeans… Well, good luck to anyone else who wants to buy female jeans on eBay today, because eBay has just made it a whole bunch more difficult. The “waist size” item specific has just vanished from search options. You can search by dress size – but as we all know, dress sizes and waist sizes don’t always coincide, either on the jeans or on the ladies inside them.
I mentioned this to Chris as he’s been listing jeans recently. And it gets worse. For sellers who are listing jeans, there’s no indication that the only place their ISs will show is on the individual listings – but the item specifics themselves have been limited. eBay jeans now only exist in even numbers: if you want to list a pair of 31″ leg jeans, you can now choose between saying they’re 30″ or saying they’re 32″. Same with waist sizes.
Yet again, eBay seems to be suffering from the disconnect between the people who code the site and the people who use it. Women’s jeans come in 29 inch waist, 31 inch leg sizes – trying to stuff us all into even numbered sizes just won’t work. Moreover, distinguishing dress size and waist size on female jeans is crucial – there’s a whole world of difference between a waist 32 and size 32, which eBay – by only showing one set of measurements – now obscures.
It’s a shame, because jeans was one of the areas where item specifics made searching so much easier. I don’t want to have to go back to complex search strings and trying to second-guess how sellers will write their titles. I hope this is just one of those oversights that can be fixed in a day or two. In the meantime, I’ll be over at La Redoute. Sorry, eBay sellers.
Update: As per Mr Munden’s comment below, this was apparently a glitch: it’s now been “fixed” in so far as the search options are back; sellers who’ve listed with incorrect item specifics because they were forced to do so will, unfortunately still have to edit their listings by hand.
12 Responses on "What jeanius thought this up?"
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Mens’ clothing item specifics are seriously poor at the moment. It all happened when variant listings arrived…it seriously needs sorting out. I have passed some comments onto ebay already about this.
I actually contemplated buying a Tomtom off eBay this weekend. Spent five minutes “browsing” and got totally p’ed off because the results were flooded with accessories and miscellaneous other crap, so gave up.
I still need a Tomtom, suppose it will have to be Halfords tomorrow.
Personally I think eBay is just messed up completely, be it jeans, Tomtom’s or whatever else.
Buy a dress
Real ladies dont wear Jeans.
best comment ever …
This is the third poorly thought out ‘Item Specific’ change that we have seen in as many months! We first noticed an ‘Item Specific’ problem at the beginning of August when the values for ‘Condition’ where changed without any notice. They changed the acceptable values, for example ‘New: Without Tags’ was changed in some, but not all, categories to ‘New Without Tags’ the only difference being the colon. When items were relisted eBay did not automatically change the old value to the new value, instead the item was relisted with no ‘Condition’ value which we know adversely affected our sales. The next problem we noticed was a change to the ‘Main Colour’ values in October where eBay changed the list of acceptable values. For example they dropped ‘Baby pink’ but did not substitute ‘Pink’ so items were left without a ‘Main Colour’ value. The new list of values did not appear to have been well thought out, we sell a lot of lingerie and cannot now list items as ‘Cream’ or ‘Natural’ but we could list them as ‘Bronze’ or ‘Gold’! This last problem with ‘Size’ was implemented early last Friday morning and was immediately brought to the attention of our eBay Account Manager and escalated but as of 14:30 on Monday there is no news from eBay! Over the three month period of these poorly thought out eBay ‘Item Specific’ changes we have seen our Amazon sales grow dramatically and our eBay sales stay about the same so it could be that customers are not able to easily find what they want on eBay and are going elsewhere.
Just to let you know that this is not an item specific change. It was a technical error and will be rectified hopefully today. No plans either to introduce this.
Regards
Patrick
eBay.co.uk
Phew! Good news! Thanks Patrick
Mind you… it’s just occurred to me that I’ve been merrily listing away using the wrong items specifics as I was barred from entering the correct ones.
Now I haven’t a clue which listings were relists with old but hidden specifics and which are new ones with say 30″ leg because it wouldn’t let me enter 31″
The descriptions are correct but I’ve far too many listings to root through to check which have the correct item specifics and whichdon’t
Thanks for clarifying that, Patrick.
It does worry me, though, how eBay staff say “it’s a glitch”, and seem quite dismissive of any consequences a fixed glitch may have. Not only has this cost sales in this category over the last few days, it’s caused sellers to have to list with no or incorrect item specifics, which will mean those listings have to be edited. Sellers’ time is valuable, and time we spend editing our listings is time – frankly – wasted.
Patrick,
I assume you are saying that the ‘Size’ problem is a technical error and will hopefully be fixed today. That’s good as it will only give us a couple of hundred items to manually edit! What’s the story for the ‘Condition’ and ‘Main Colour’ changes/technical errors? The ‘Condition’ problem took eBay over six weeks to fix and meant we had to edit over 1200 listings. The ‘Main colour’ problem is still occurring today. We are not editing the colours on our thousands of items until we know what the resolution to the problem will be. Despite chasing our eBay account manager since the beginning of October we still have no information. Please could you contact me as you appear to be closer to the problem than our eBay account manager – our eBay id is 1066sales or telephone 01424 868007. Thank you.
Following on from Stuart’s comments – are these really “technical errors” or just poorly thought out changes from when eBay implemented the multi variant listings. Since the multi variant listings have been enabled the item specifics are all over the place.
For example – previously when you advertised a bra there was 1 item specific for size with a drop down list for you to choose the size e.g. 36B. Now there are 4 different item specific boxes for size, you enter the size that now has a space e.g. 36 B, you enter the underband e.g. 36, you enter the cup size e.g. B & you also enter the bra cup size e.g. B. Why do we need to enter the size in 4 places & why does the underband size need to be separated from the cup size, neither of the options is relevant without the other!
I also advertised a range of tights a few weeks ago & had been surprised as we’ve not sold many so I went to find my ads on eBay. I went to the women’s underwear & opened the box to refine my search by “type” & choose the hosiery & socks option. The tights I advertised were ex-M&S so I refined my search so it just brought up that brand with 59 listings but I couldn’t see my tights! Keen to find my adverts I then started my search again & from the women’s underwear I then opened the search box & refined my search for M&S, I then typed “tights” in find box at the top, this brought up 162 adverts & yes my tights were among them. As my tights are advertised in the category women’s underwear>tights why were they not among the items in my initial search &/or why were “tights” not an option on the search box? I can only think that this is the reason why my tights are not selling, as it’s very clear that customers cannot find them!
The worrying thing here is that the issues we have described have only been realised by chance, the “technical people” at eBay should be thoroughly checking these item specific options before they implement them & not waiting for their customers to notify them of problems.
Further to the update saying the problem is fixed it would appear that the problem is only partially fixed! If items are relisted then the size is not lost so that is fixed. However if you go and create a new listing for a pair of ladies jeans you will find that all the Size choices still have Size in them e.g. ‘Size 8′. So over a week after the problem was reported to eBay users still not able to correctly list new items or correct the items from which eBay have removed the Size.