New eBay Links Policy Upcoming

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“Better buyer experience!”—it’s a favorite expression in eBay’s offices these days. Providing good buyer experiences makes good business sense if you think about it.

If buyers have a better experience, they’ll likely buy more, and that means eBay sellers make more money (and so does eBay).

eBay’s most recent initiative to ensure customers have a good shopping experience is the company’s new links policy. eBay has evaluated buyer and seller behavior on its site and has decided that placing e-mail addresses  and shortened URLs (sometimes called tiny URLs ) in listings is not helpful to buyers, and is therefore a bad buyer experience. So eBay has outlawed these.

eBay has had a links policy for a long time, and had been enforcing limits on what links sellers and third party tool developers could place in eBay listings. However, beginning Oct. 1, new listings and relistings will be blocked if they include either of these. eBay is already warning sellers by returning error messages for listings that will violate the new policy.

If you post such a listing using Auctiva, eBay will return an error message that we will display in the Account Notifications area of your Auctiva account. The e-mail restriction affects both clickable and nonclickable addresses and shortened URLs.

“But wait!” you exclaim. “I’ve got e-mail addresses in a bunch of my saved listings! What can I do?”

You can update your saved listings using the Find and Replace button on your Saved Listings page. With this feature you can update most fields in a listing like Buy It Now price, description, quantity, sale type, start price, etc.

Now if you think you might have e-mail addresses or links in some of your profiles like your Seller Details, you should review these as well and update them if needed. Once you update these profiles and save your changes, the information will be adjusted in all the listings that contain these profiles.

You can also use Find & Replace by Auctiva to update hundreds of live eBay listings at once. You can find this app in eBay’s Apps Center, and it won’t cost you a dime. You can even use this app if you’re not an Auctiva customer.