"Item condition required" errors vs "Condition is not applicable" warnings

[Vaguery]

The last few times this has cropped up, it has been an eBay ontology/API problem, but there also seems to be an oddity in the way GS is handling the UI.

I’m using the US site category tree here.

In some categories (for example, #29223, Books & Magazines > Antiquarian & Collectible), the eBay category descriptor says it “supports” the Condition attribute, but in fact that is not the case. That is, when editing an item in this category, GS flags a missing value of Condition, but when launching it warns that the Condition is not applicable and (correctly) disables that field on eBay.

However, in some other categories, (for example, #34032, Crafts > Needlecrafts & Yarn > Embroidery & Cross Stitch > Hand Embr Patterns & Magazines > Cross Stitch Patterns), the category (as reported in GS) does not support Condition, and the field is grayed out. But it turns out that field is required, and when launching a listing the app reports the error Item condition required.

This is partially due to eBay ontology problems, since I only ever see these errors when listing books in “non-book” subcategories, like craft books in the (correct) “crafts” branch rather than “books” branch, and I personally can work around it by the less-desired tactic of moving the items back to Books.

But it feels like an edge-case bug that I can enter a Condition for the first example I gave, and GS will hide it when asked, but I cannot cause GS to accept a Condition value in the second case.

Shouldn’t the more appropriate behavior be “enable the GS UI field despite the support profile of the category”? The broader use case could be phrased as “I am drafting new listings but have not decided which category to put them into yet”, and I would like to postpone that decision until the last moment.

The way GS and/or the API ignores the extra information in the first example seems desirable in general. I’d like to enter the info, even if it’s not used (or accepted) in a given listing in a given category.

later it’s interesting to note that all the sibling categories of #34032, which are also “embroidery patterns and magazines” but for different techniques, do accept Condition. It’s just the lonely one I happened to land in that is not working, so that is definitely evidence for an eBay ontology bug.

[ilja]

Could you please export the GarageSale listing from the Cross “Stitch Patterns” and send it to me, so we can do some testing?

[Vaguery]

In the last 24 hours the category tree and/or requirements seem to have updated here. I see the two listings I changed categories on so I could list them, but I have checked and the problem category now has “Uses Condition” listed, and when I modified the running listings there was no complaint.

I imagine it was a brief error on the server side.

I was pretty suspicious when I noticed that only one of about nine leaf categories had the problem I described.