If you have not yet seen the announcement, eBay has a new
Duplicate Listing Policy for fixed price listings which starts enforcement in just over a month. The main purpose of this policy is to improve the search experience to surface the best items and to increase buyer satisfaction. The posting:
| A quick, inspiring view of the great selection available is key for holiday shopping on eBay. Effective October 26, a new Duplicate Listing policy on eBay and eBay Motors will help ensure this view for buyers and, at the same time, improve visibility for great listings for many more sellers. Starting October 26: -
The item offered in a seller’s Fixed Price listing must be significantly different in buyer benefit and value from items offered in their other Fixed Price listings. In short, sellers may have one Fixed Price listing per identical item. Multiples of an item must be sold in a single multi-quantity Fixed Price listing. -
Starting October 26, eBay will automatically end duplicate Fixed Price listings, keep the best performer, and credit Insertion Fees and listing upgrade fees for the ended listings. Sellers who continue to create duplicate listings for identical items may be subject to a range of additional actions including listing cancellation, loss of fees, limits on account privileges, loss of seller status, and account suspension. -
You may want to take action now to cancel your duplicates and add the quantity to your best performer before October 26 to ensure continuous selling. To help you quickly and easily identify your duplicate listings, a duplicate listing look-up tool will be available in the next couple of weeks. Be sure to check back for an announcement. Here’s where you’ll find a link to the tool when it’s available. -
For sellers with more than one user ID, the one-listing rule per seller applies across all selling accounts—i.e., the seller can have one listing per item, not one listing per user ID. Learn more about the new policy—what’s considered a duplicate listing, exceptions, examples, consequences for non-compliance after October 26, instructions for updating your listings, and more. Talk with members of my staff today until 5 pm Pacific time on a special discussion board we’ve set up for this purpose. As always, thank you for buying and selling on eBay—we look forward to a great holiday season for all. Dinesh Lathi
Vice President,
Seller and Buyer Experience |
Key things to consider if you are listing the same item as multiple fixed price listings:
- if not using variation style listings and it is appropriate for your items, start using them for your products (you may find things like automatic matching for item specifics and automatic variation item specifics creation to be valuable)
- if you are listing automotive parts and accessories, use Parts Compatibility (Fitment) for your listings instead of many different titles
- if your products are in a category that supports catalogs, use catalog mapping to include additional product details instead of multiple listings with different titles
- if you have multiple accounts that sell the same products, consolidate to a single account for processing or partition invetory so duplicates are not listed across the accounts
- modify your schedules for fixed price listings to be a "maintain 1 copy" and increase the amount of quantity in each listing to improve Best Match positioning
This is a new policy that's got relatively short time to implement, but if you've been doing many of these things over the past few years then the adjustments should be minimal. If you have been using the same listing model for many years without any changes, it may be a good time to re-evaluate and make adjustments accordingly to optimize your products for these new requirements.
11 replies
Marshall,
Thanks for the heads up. This is good news, I suppose. But as a practical matter, I have several concerns:
1. How does eBay identify 'duplicate' listings? Is it based only on title? or title and price? Item specifics? Description?
2. During the upload/update process, CA is supposed to prevent creation of new ads when posting template and ad template are identical to existing ones for the SKU that's already in the system. But due to unknown glitches, this doesn't always work as planned. As a result, we had thousands of duplicate ads created, most of which have been identified and deleted, but some still linger.
3. ChannelAdvisor variation listings is supposed to prevent duplicate ads from listing, but it's not 100% perfect. Duplicates still do get listed occasionally (some are result of a SKU actually having two ads, other duplicates have unknown causes).
4. If SKU 12345 has variations of small, medium, and large, but only medium is in stock, CA will list the medium as a single, non-variation listing. Then when small and large come back in stock, CA will list a variation listing that includes all sizes, thus causing a duplicate listing of the medium size.
5. How does eBay determine which two accounts are associated with the same seller in order to identify duplicate listing across accounts?
Ocean
For your listed issues:
1. eBay has all of that information detailed in the examples and help information related to the new requirements on their site, linked above. I would strongly suggest reading through all of that to see what they mean as substantially similar items. I assume they will be using title for automated processing and reports from users for manual review.
2. This should have been fixed already and if it is not then we would need to get an example upload from you that causes duplicate ads so we can identify and fix any other root causes.
3. There have been a lot of improvements here over the past 12 months to prevent even the remaining cases we've identified and I believe that we have these resolved. They should not be creating multiple variation listings for any reason.
4. That's not a duplicate listing according to the information that's available at eBay in the information. Less than optimal, but not a duplicate situation. The scheduler will self-correct that information when the listings next come up to cycle. It's the only option available when an item is supposed to go live and siblings are not available since eBay requires two or more child items to list as a variation listing. When only one is available it is listed on its own.
5. eBay Trust and Safety has a lot of things they know about accounts to associate them together. I don't know exactly, but we've seen plenty of cases where a problem happens in one account for a seller and multiple of their accounts are all suspended together.
This is all very interesting. eBay's top 4 sellers are actually all one business entity. they all sell the same stuff, with each account listing tons of identical listings. This will help reduce a lot of the clutter, which will be great for buyer experience. But like everything else with eBay that's great in theory, this one policy is going to be a huge headache for everyone. I just got off the phone with our TSAM. She has no idea if this policy will be enfoced solely by a computer algorithm or if there's going to be any human involvement. Based on the examples of what consists of 'significant differences' and what differences are insignificant, I don't see how a computer program can be smart enough to distinguish. 'HDMI cables for Blu Ray' is considered identical to 'HDMI cables for Dell Computer'. and '10 envelopes' is also considered to be identical to '11 envelopes'. WTF? How can a computer program correctly identify the subtle differences between significantly different products from insignificantly different products? So based on the preliminary guidance from eBay, it would seem that human eyes would have to intervene to make sure listings are not improperly ended. 120 million listings exist at any given time on eBay US. Even if a computer can filter out 200,000 listings are identical each day, that's an impractical demand on human resources. So basically we're going to end up with a computer ending all the listings, a lot of which will be legitimate duplicates while many will not.
Ocean
There will be some automation for things that are obviously duplicate and some manual human review for the cases like you've described. I'm sure the human review will be based on reported situations and evaluated based on the rules in place to analyze if a listing is a duplicate or not. It probably won't be perfect, but that'll be part of the adaptation. If users aren't trying to game the system and are legitimately listing different items for different buyer situations, it should be fine.
Think about it this way -- if you were going to buy an item and either of two different listings would be effectively equivalent for your purchase situation, then that's a duplicate listing. If they're identifying different purchase situations then they're different items from the eBay perspective. There are a lot of good examples in the eBay information that's been posted and they're continuing to update that based on feedback and questions that they get. Just today I've already had two conversations with people at eBay about these changes.
There will be a new tool available shortly at eBay that will analyze your information and tell you the duplicates that are detected in your items. That will likely start a whole additional set of questions as debates begin over whether items are really "duplicate" or not. We're working with the eBay teams to make sure we can identify things and help you with any cases where your items may need adjustment to fit within the new policies and to make sure your items are in the strongest position possible for future sales.
yes, I really believe this is a move in the right direction, and I think it will ultimately improve sales. I'm just apprehensive of the transition stage. I wish they would have thoroughly tested this in a smaller market befor going live on .com.
We do have two accounts linked on eBay, all sharing the same SKUs in CA, so we're going to have to shut down one account. That's fine with me because I really believe cleaning up eBay search is necessary.
I exported all our products and did a quick duplicate finder by auction title. There are HUNDREDS! The SKUs/styles are unique, but when we carry 100 different cop costumes, 400 different 70s costumes, etc., there aren't too many different varieties we can use for the title. So my fear is that many of these listings will be automatically removed even though they are actually different products. But that's not really CA's problem. These are eBay issues, which I've already raised with them. Supposedly image file locations will be a factor in the differentiating process. Hopefully it's true. I'll see what happens after eBay rolls out the testing feature.
Ocean
As eBay rolls out their duplicate listing policy to additional locales, I wanted to provide links to content within ChannelAdvisor's SSC with information that may be helpful:
To add to Jennifer's post, eBay has announced the Duplicate Listing Policy will be applied to many additional countries with the spring release. For more information on the eBay spring release, see:
Supporting eBay Changes for the May 2011 Update (SR11.1) in ChannelAdvisor
Has CA considered adding a mechanism to prevent duplicate listings from being sent out? with large catalogs sometimes we accidentally upload an ad twice, etc and it seems like it would be easy for CA to set a limit of 1 active ad per sku at a time..
Bob
We're looking at an assortment of ideas, but one of the challenges is that there are cases where multiples are allowed. That makes it a bit more complicated for anything we might put together since it has to account for those situations as well.
Perhaps you can make it an optional account setting, since most sellers probably do not list multiples, but those that do still can.. Most of us just want to stop getting the annoying emails from Ebay everytime a duplicate slips through.. by that its already relisted so we have to remove a schedule from one, then delist that one.
Ultimately that's the direction that we're looking.