Need to archive, review, or revise your eBay shipping services and costs? This tool can speed that process by creating a spreadsheet of data across all of your items or across specific categories.
Shipping Services and Costs in eBay Listings
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Need to archive, review, or revise your eBay shipping services and costs? This tool can speed that process by creating a spreadsheet of data across all of your items or across specific categories.
This tool will scan items found publicly on eBay without accessing your account,
and can not search out-of-stock items or adult items, since those items are not publicly viewable.
The tool will retrieve and scan up to about 8,000 items (approx 400 items per minute).
If you have more than 8,000 items, use the tool's advanced search and category criteria to reduce the search range,
thus creating subgroupings based on category, price, or date order.
If items fail to load within 5 minutes, a timeout has caused the browser to disconnect from the server
and you will need to cancel the scan and try a smaller batch.
Ideas -
If you have many thousands of listings across a large range of different categories,
consider limiting your item retrieval by category, using the category filter in the Advanced Settings on this tool.
Grouping similar items may help organize your shipping.
For your calculated shipping, the tool will also return a shipping cost to the zip code that you provide.
The destination zip is currently set to the middle of the continental states.
If you don't use calculated shipping, then the zip is of no concern.
You may want to set the tool to your own zip to display the shipping you would see if looking at your own listings.
Or, you can choose a distant zip to help determine if your costs are being covered.
The zip and other filter options are transmitted to eBay when requesting data, so can not be changed after the data has loaded.
Avoid running multiple scans to collect the same eBay data, as bandwidth is limited.
The tool can not collect package weight or dimensions, as this is currently not public data.
The tool can not collect the shipping discounts or shipping rate tables that are linked to listings.
The tool is currently returning "-unspecified-" for items that eBay will send via FedEx to an eBay Authenticator,
as well as for items that truly have no shipping assignment. Since eBay sends the same message for both,
this tool can not currently distinguish between the two situations.
Both types of shipping are flagged in orange and can be selected in the report.
When using Seller Hub's bulk editing tool to revise your domestic shipping options on eBay,
all domesting shipping services, shipping type, and discount options must be included in the Seller Hub revision.
The same will hold true for an international group of services.
This tool will return all domestic and international shipping services and shipping rate type for each listing.
However, the shipping discounts and rate tables will have to be reassigned in the bulk editor from your own records.
Converting to Ground Advantage -
eBay will automatically convert "USPS Parcel Select" to "USPS Ground Advantage".
"USPS Retail Ground" must be converted to "USPS Ground Advantage" by the seller.
There are price changes between "Ground Advantage" and the former "Retail Ground/Parcel Select" services
(some lower, some higher), so if you use flat rate shipping, be sure to review what you're charging
against the new Ground Advantage rates.
"USPS First Class" had covered both letters and packages under one pound.
If shipping small packages that were previously sent first class,
then convert to "USPS Ground Advantage" and review your shipping costs if providing flat rate shipping.
If shipping untracked letters (which will be under 3.5 ounces) or untracked flats
(large, flat, non-rigid envelopes under 13 ounces and less than 3/4" thick),
then keep the "USPS First Class" designation or switch to a generic "Standard Shipping" for those letters.
First Class Letters are currently flat rate, which means the seller will determine the amount of shipping to charge the buyer.
Report -
The report section will produce spreadsheet reports that can be downloaded or that can be copied and pasted into an open spreadsheet or into a text file.
Select the "tab" delimiter if pasting directly into an open spreadsheet;
or use the "comma" or "semicolon" delimiter if saving directly to a text file that will be given a .csv suffix, which can be opened later in a spreadsheet tool.
The "HTML" delimiter is available for sellers who just want a viewable record of what they have, and don't want to use a spreadsheet.
The report offers two spreadsheet formats: The CSV format is a general spreadsheet,
while a File Exchange format includes proper headers for upload to Seller Hub Reports.
To use as a Seller Hub upload, the file must be saved as comma, semicolon, or tab delimited. It can not be uploaded in an HTML format.
Reports can be further filtered to selected shipping services, making it easier to review and edit in your spreadsheet.
When one or more shipping services are selected, the tool will find any listings that contain that service in the first,
second, or further shipping columns.
The File Exchange report includes more columns than are necessary for a revision, like title, selling format, and item price.
They are included to help the seller identify the items.
There are also a few informational columns that will be ignored by eBay.
By default, the report will translate "USPS First Class" to the "Ground Advantage" code of "USPSParcel".
Check to see if all items are packages. If some are to remain as letters, remove them from the revision list or change them back to the "USPSFirstClass" code.
Additionally, a File Exchange upload will reset ALL shipping services for an item, including domestic, international, discounts, and rate tables.
Thus, a full spreadsheet of services would be required to change just a single service. This tool can not capture shipping discounts or rate tables,
so those would be lost in a File Exchange upload unless manually added to the spreadsheet.
If the tool returns "-missing-" for a shipping service code name in the File Exchange report, then the shipping option is not in the tool's current shipping list.
This could occur with listings posted to international eBay sites that are not yet supported by the tool.
IMPORTANT - Before saving data in your spreadsheet tool, or after making any changes and resaving, be sure that the number columns display as numbers and not as exponential notation.
[Screenshot]
If you see something like 1.63E+11 in a column, right-click the column header, choose "Format cells", and change the format to "Number" with zero decimal places.
Pay particular attention to columns that contain the Item ID and long numbers like UPC/EAN.
You will have to make these changes every time you open the CSV. To preserve your number changes instead of fixing every time, save the file as XLS. You can export a CSV from that file later.
If you don't convert the exponential numbers to whole numbers prior to saving, your long numbers may be converted to useless numbers with a lot if trailing zeros, like this: 162260000000.
Useful eBay links
• Shipping Calculator: http://www.ebay.com/shp/Calculator
• Shipping Preferences: https://www.ebay.com/ship/prf
• Offer Carrier Discounts: https://www.ebay.com/ship/prf/carrier
eBay Help Forum links
Use Shipping Policies to update shipping.
Use eBay Bulk Editor to update shipping.