I find myself updating the text in many listings (1000+) just to get them all using the same boilerplate. Some are several years old, and the wording of the text in the Description field has gradually mutated a lot.
This is actually the second time I’ve done this, so I’m getting the hang of it, I think.
I’ve managed to build a Smart Folder to capture the incorrect items, then select all listings there and use Bulk Find & Replace… (which is excellent, by the way).
Then I can select the folder contents, and choose Revise…
But this is where I have a problem.
For some of the 1000+ listings, I’ve recently sent out offers to watchers, or I’ve received offers from watchers. In those few cases, I get an error API response from eBay saying Listing cannot be revised (and various other messages).
I don’t want to ask for any changes to the GS search interface or ontology, but I would welcome any simple way of identifying which of the 1000+ listings have generated error messages in the huge Revise... dialog box, so I can manually or automatically set those aside and try to fix their text in a few days, if they are not sold. Obviously the wording and spelling error in a Description is not a huge priority if there are already offers being sent around, but if things don’t sell I would like to improve those listings.
So is there any way for me to, for instance:
scroll to error messages in the Revise dialog
find the listing itself in the database
manually drag that to a special folder for later revision?
I thought the right-click menu “Display items with issues” in the Revise dialog might do the trick, but it turns out that “Listing cannot be revised” (an Error, not even a Warning) doesn’t trigger that filter?
I do the “end item” and “relist” method that way the person with the offer gets a notice that the item is available to purchase at the new item number. REMEMBER, the listings that are several years old eBay is NOT showing in searches anyway so the new number will get your item to show in searches. Old listings of several years old only will sell when a buyer searches in your other items in your store listings and then eBay will show them. Try some and you will see in increase in older listings selling.
Yes, I mean “the listing Description text has not been updated for several years”, not that the listing itself is that old on eBay. I regularly revise the easily-edited portions, and restart frequently. It’s just that finding the text of ~11 incorrect words among 4k listings is a great job for “Bulk search”, but I also seem to have half of those being under offer at a given time.
I’m pretty good with search engine analytics hacks.
I am thinking specifically here of such hacks, since the same approach I’m using to “fix text” could be used to include cohort tracking information in the Description text. One of the inventory control issues I’ve been working on for a few weeks is a better approach than the script-generated “SKU” I’ve developed, which does lots of extra work by being randomized occasionally as a cohort/group key, plus recording hashed “actual SKU” information. No need to go into the details, but if I can programmatically insert more tabular information into the listings already existing, I can use “Bulk search” to manage that data, and won’t need to be poking at the SKU column any more.
In any case, everything would be a lot easier for me if the Revise... dialog popup display filters worked…
