Large Sellers and the eBay Listing Scanner


10K LISTINGS OR MORE

If you have more than 10,000 active listings, you will need to break your item list into smaller chunks of less than 10K listings due to the 10K limit in the Scan Tool. The best way to do this is to specify eBay site categories (not store categories) in the advanced settings section of the Scan Tool.

The tool will allow including up to 3 categories and excluding up to 24 categories in one run. Make your selections prior to using the "Get Items" button on the tool.

You can locate category numbers by looking to the left column of eBay search results under your username and then hovering or selecting the category of interest. The category number is included in each URL. Note that eBay site categories vary by country, so be sure you are viewing your items on the primary site where you list them.

In the example shown below, the seller has nearly 28,000 active listings. We must first expose all categories in order to choose the best plan, so be sure to click the option to "See all categories". Because categories vary by country, will will not mention category numbers in our example below.

  1. The largest main category contains 25,128 items (too many for the listing scanner), so, for our first scan, we will exclude that category (shown in red). Because the main categories are all on the same peer level, we do not need to include any category numbers. The unspecified categories (dashed green) and their subcategories are automatically included.
     
  2. We next open and focus on the contents of the excluded main category, and, because that category contains more than 10K items, we must break it into smaller scans. So, for the second search, we include the main category (green) with 25,128 items, but exclude its largest subcategory (red) that has 18,870 items. So the second scan will pick up the remaining 6258 items.
     

     
  3. For the third search, we will look at further dividing the large subcategory with 18,870 items that was excluded in the previous scan. We find that we can divide it into two groups because it has one large subcategory containing 8902 items. So we will include the parent category with its 18870 items, but exclude its largest subcategory that has 8902 items. The remaining 9968 items will just make it under the 10K limit as our third scan.
     
  4. For our fourth and final scan, we will pick up the 8902 items from the last excluded category. So the final search will include only the last unscanned category.

We will then have collected 28,000 items in four scans.

Save the CSV file for each of the scans and process within Excel to prepare a FileExchange file, as described below:

PREPARE FOR FILE EXCHANGE

The Scan Tool creates a CSV file that includes columns for Item, Size, GTC, Photo, and EnlargedURL. After importing into Excel, the Item column should be converted to number-format with no decimal places to get rid of exponential notation (right-click-format-cells). You can then sort the file by colums to locate duplicate item numbers (listings with more than one photo to repair) or to choose by image size or GTC status.

After optionally sorting and culling, the data can then be used to create the 3 columns required by File Exchange.

The three File Exchange columns must be named: Action, ItemID, and PicURL. The value for the Action column is Revise. The ItemID and PicURL are available in the original CSV file under the headings "Item" and "EnlargedURL". The PicURL must contain the online address of the replacement photo. You can not use desktop photos in this field.

File Exchange allows up to 5000 item actions per day, so you may need to split your Scan file for File Exchange. Larger users can request an upgrade from eBay to 50K actions per day. See this community forum thread for increasing limits

Since you can sort your CSV file by column (including size and GTC), you will have some flexibility in deciding which photos to replace first.

This procedure works well for listings with a single photo.

MULTIPLE PHOTOS PER LISTING

If you have more than one undersized photo per item, the tool will have created a line item for each. However, the duplicate item numbers are not allowed in File Exchange, nor is more than one externally hosted photo allowed per item, so more work is required.

When a listing has multiple photos, ALL photos in one listing (not just the repaired ones), must be uploaded when replacing any photo. File Exchange allows only one externally-hosted image or multiple eBay-hosted images per listing. Thus, if you have multiple photos per listing, you may need to go to the eBay API to upload multiple images to eBay hosting (UploadSiteHostedPictures) prior to moving them into your listings through File Exchange.

When using multiple photos, each photo must have an eBay URL and be pipe-delimited ( | ) in the File Exchange PicURL column. One must upload and replace the whole set for one item in a file exchange revision. The format for a cell in the PicURL column would be pipe-delimited eBay-hosted URLs, like this:

http://i.ebayimg.com/...image1.jpg|http://i.ebayimg.com/...image2.jpg|http://i.ebayimg.com/...image3.jpg

PLAN YOUR SCANS

Due to the looming deadline, there will be more users on the tool and more delays. For large scans and for the transfer of images to eBay over FileExchange, we recommend choosing a better time of day. Open times are the wee morning hours, lunch, dinner hour, and after 10pm. The dead of night is the most open period (2am-5am).

For your planning, tool traffic will affect only the initial download that populates the page with 100 buttons and the fetching of enlarged photos from our server. The auto scan feature is run entirely in your browser.

MAKE YOUR PHOTOS PERMANENT

You can use the enlarged photos at any time in the next several weeks, although we indicate they are good for only 48 hours to reinforce the sense that they are not permanent. Once an enlarged photo is saved to your computer or uploaded to eBay hosting, it will be permanent in that location, since those copies are not on our server.