We are tinkering around with a new “Attributes Preflight” panel to combat the plethora of attributes eBay is unleashing on sellers in some categories.
Instead of sticking with the current preference of inserting all, required, or no attributes, setting the insertion preference to “Ask” gives you chance to select what attributes to insert into new listings. You can also save your preferred attributes set for a category.
Check this animation for how it is supposed to work. You might need to choose “Open Image in new Tab” to see the complete frame.
Do you think this something useful?
Do you think this is useful enough to make “Ask” the new default setting for what attributes to insert into new listings?
For many years (?!) of using GS, I’ve had to manage a pile of “templates” (yes, still) for kinds/categories of item, which have some of the Attributes turned on or off.
But the problem I’m seeing is that Category the resolution may be incorrect. I don’t keep one “Books” template for listings, but one for science fiction paperbacks, another for old fiction (not Antiquarian), another for science popularizations, another for… &c
Rather than “save for this category”, might it be possible to build a little Attributes template, and save it with a name? For instance, if I want to save “Cross-stitch Pattern” as an Attributes Slug (or whatever you like to name it), I prep one (as you show here), and then am prompted to save it in a drop-down that shows in the Attributes assignment menu. Then when I make 10 listings for new Cross-stitch Patterns, I can quickly assign close-enough subset and values.
That way, if I open a box of (making this up) Star Wars novelizations, I can save a “Star Wars novelization” Attributes slug, and avoid that (sorry) super annoying copy-and-paste-Attributes thing I do now.
And if you don’t want to make the Add detail... dropdown more crowded, maybe to the right in a new “Pre-filled attributes” dropdown?
I figured that GarageSale power users probably won’t need this feature. But maybe it helps people who haven’t figured out how to create several templates as starting points for new auctions.
I have the gut feeling, that such a save “attribute profile/set” would be specific to the category it was created in. So it would only be accessible for listing that are within the same category.
Or should it be available in all categories on the same eBay site?
Not true for me. I use/sell in several categories that have the EXACT same 3 or 4 attributes.
category: Toys & Hobbies > Model Railroads & Trains > Railroads & Trains > xyz
Yes, I think so. Maybe the “default” name, when saving the set, could be the whole “category pathname”???
Thinking through edge cases (for you, ahem ), one would want to know how this would work for items listed in two categories.
In general, when working manually, there’s a set of Attributes for each category an item is listed in. Sometimes (but only rarely) there is a non-empty intersection of those Attributes.
What I don’t know is whether eBay avoids or tolerates conflicts. If I try to list an abstract object in Paintings and CDs at the same time, will there only be one Artist Attribute? And is it represented in the API call with the same ID?
I don’t know, but it might be salient.
The more general question, I suppose, is what happens when somebody “saves” an Attribute which is not explicitly part of that Category. I have some old Books still that have deprecated Attributes floating around, and they seem to be tolerated as long as they don’t clash with the current API key-value pairs?
), one would want to know how this would work for items listed in two categories.