Listing items for sale on eBay can feel different depending on whether you’re using a mobile device or a desktop computer. eBay set out to change that, and today it announced the new “Unified Listing Experience” and made it available to some sellers.
eBay said the new capability brings greater consistency to how sellers list across devices.
Over the next few weeks, eBay will expand it to all sellers, and it will become the default experience for some sellers starting next month (and for all sellers in the spring).
eBay promised, “Your listing fields, item specifics, and integration with third-party listing tools won’t be affected by these updates.”
So what is new? eBay explained:
“This update combines the best features in our current listings flows, giving you a streamlined listing experience that’s more consistent across all your devices. This means that wherever you list—mobile, tablet, or desktop—you’ll see a clean, unified look, and you’ll have just one listing experience that can scale with your business.
“This experience is built on new technology that will allow us to more quickly deliver new features to help you create great listings. We’ve already rolled out Background Removal on desktop as part of the new experience. Previously only available on mobile devices, this feature helps you create professional-looking photos as you list.”
We found one seller discussing it on a discussion board thread, who wrote in part:
“Gone is one simple scrolling page with fields to type in like the rest of the world- now everything is in popup boxes on the right side. they added at least 2-3 clicks of a mouse to every single field that you need to type in. It is befuddling- they are dumbing down the whole site to work on a phone.”
You can find eBay’s post on the Announcement board – if you have access to the new unified listing experience, let us know what’s different and if it makes your life easier.
Updated 1/20/2021 to add link to video (via Facebook).
This user said it best, couldn’t describe ebay any better. dumbing down is the best analogy of ebay I’ve heard in years. everything they do is dumbing down…. or robbing. one or the other.
eBay = Morons! Don’t fix what isn’t broken, you San Jose doofuses!
emperors new clothes
I use the opposite approach. Most listings are created in Excel and imported into the SixBit workflow. Some custom listings are entered into SixBit in a fraction of the time it would take to create a new listing on the eBay web site. When similar, but unique, listings are laid out in a spreadsheet with filtering, is is possible to view relevant listings together and copy fields from one listing into another and verify that necessary columns are filled in. It is also possible to spell check.
From the eBay description and user comments, the new listing flow is slow, error prone, and hard to manage. More mouse clicks to expose required input fields is bad.
The background removal tool is useless for stamps. Most stamps are scanned with a black backgrounds to optimize viewing of perforations around the margin of the stamp. Is eBay management aware that editing jpeg files reduces image quality?