eBay Item Specifics
What are item specifics?
Item Specifics are the specific attributes for your products, such as the brand, size, colour and GTIN (UPC, EAN, ISBN) that help potential buyers to easily find and make informed decisions about your products. The more data you can provide about your products, the more accurately eBay will be able to display your listing to the right buyer, at the right time.
eBay uses item specifics as part of their “best match” algorithm to match products to a buyer’s search query. eBay also provides numerous filters that allow buyers to further drill down their search query. As a seller, if you do not have your item specifics up-to-date, you risk disappearing from search results.
With eBay’s ongoing focus on improving the buyer and seller experience, the platform’s item specifics requirements are being continually expanded, including mandated item specifics that must be included before a product can be successfully listed.
Why should you include all available item specifics on your listings?
- Improve your search ranking - The more item specifics you provide the higher you’ll appear in eBay’s search results
- Increased visibility in search results - When buyers use search filters, you'll ensure your products can always be found
- Reduce returns - More item specifics means buyers can purchase with greater confidence that they’ve found the right product
- Find the right buyers - eBay will be able to more accurately match your products to associated search queries
- Inclusion in new buyer experiences - As eBay continues to improve the buyer experience, you’ll ensure your products continue to be featured
Updating and managing item specifics in Codisto
We recommend always adding new item specifics to your website directly, rather than in Codisto. Managing item specifics through Codisto then becomes simple. If your existing product attributes directly match any of eBay’s preset item specifics (e.g. “Brand”, “Colour / Color”, “Size”), Codisto will automatically import and map to the corresponding field in the Xpress grid.
If Codisto is unable to automatically match any of your product attributes with eBay’s requirements, you’ll need to create a custom item specific field using attribute mapping and map your custom attribute to this newly created field. Once created, Codisto will map that field for ALL of your products with that attribute.
Map eBay Item Specifics using Attribute Mapping Mode
Enable the Item Specific(s) you wish to use (or create your own custom Item Specific). This is done via Attribute Mapping mode (accessed either from the Home screen or from the mode selector on the Listings screen).
Make sure you are on the eBay site you are wishing to edit by using the drop down at the top right. Navigate to Item Specifics and expand the rows. The attribute mapping screen will show all the available eBay item specifics for ALL the categories of your items on eBay. This list can be long due to how many eBay suggests and will vary depending on how varied your product catalog is. At the bottom of the list, you can create your own custom Item Specific.
- Item Specifics required or recommended by eBay will show with an asterisk next to them.
- The reason you have to first activate some item specifics is that most item specifics provided by eBay won't always be necessary for your products, so we'll avoid saturating the multi-edit grid with unnecessary fields
Set the value for the enabled Item Specific
The default value once enabled is "Codisto Grid". That means you can edit in multi-edit mode as a column on the grid. It's also possible to map an attribute value at this point (or edit via the single edit mode).
Save via the green button, top left
Set eBay Item Specifics Using Multi-edit Mode (The Codisto XpressGrid)
To edit Item Specifics via multi-edit mode you need to add the relevant columns to the grid that you wish to edit. You can add or remove columns to make use easier by clicking on 'Extra fields'
Scroll right on the grid and expand the Item Specifics column group and edit either individually or in bulk (using filters if necessary).
When you have finished, simply publish your changes to set them live on your eBay listings.
More information on item specifics requirements.