Need to archive, review, or revise your eBay Item Specifics to meet the requirements of eBay's Structured Data? This tool can speed that process by creating a spreadsheet of data across all of your items or across specific categories.
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Extract Item Specifics from eBay Listings
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Need to archive, review, or revise your eBay Item Specifics to meet the requirements of eBay's Structured Data? 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 listings will be organized by Category, and Item Specifics will be extracted from each listing.
At this time, variations will not be addressed.
The tool will retrieve and scan up to 10,000 items (approx 400 items per minute).
Use the search criteria to reduce the search range if you have more than 10,000 items,
thus creating subgroupings based on category, price, or date order.
This tool will also accept an input list from File Exchange,
which can retrieve adult, out-of-stock, and greater then 10,000 items.
Concerns - If you have many thousands of listings across a large range of categories, consider limiting your item retrieval by category, using the category filter in the Advanced Settings. Otherwise, the tool may retrieve more columns than would be manageable in your spreadsheet tool. Alternatively, you can select groups of categories in the report feature to generate more cohesive reports. The report categories are organized by each category's long name to make this possible.
The Item Specifics collected by this tool are returned directly from eBay's shopping-oriented database and may include more headings than just the custom item specifics. The extra headings may not exactly match the headings that eBay uses on their listing tools or in File Exchange. The tool has attempted to remove some of the extra information (such as return policy), but because of language differences, this tool may not catch them all and does not attempt to convert the headings. If feeding this data into another tool, the user should check all the columns to determine if adjustments are needed. All of the Item Specifics headings will be given a C: prefix (eBay's designation for "custom") to differentiate the Item Specifics from other listing details, but not all of the Specifics returned by eBay are custom, as just explained. Some are details that are found elsewhere on eBay's listing form.
Custom Item Specifics - When the seller is allowed to create custom item specifics, listings may contain various spellings and capitalizations of each column heading, resulting in multiple columns where only one is intended. Use a spreadsheet tool to combine duplicate misspelled columns under one common heading. Because of this potential problem, eBay is now providing a list of most popular headings for each category, and sellers may now choose from those lists. Sellers may find it worthwhile to clean up their Item Specifics to match values recommended by eBay, as this may result in better search results.
Report -
The report option will produce spreadsheet reports that can be pasted into an open spreadsheet or into a text file.
Select the tab format if pasting directly into an open spreadsheet,
or use the comma format if saving directly to a text file that will be given a .csv suffix so that it can be opened later in a spreadsheet tool.
Reports are generated by category, and multiple (or all) categories can be selected for a single report.
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 will be converted to useless numbers with a lot if trailing zeros, like this: 162260000000.
Resources - Item Specifics Editor:
Use the Bulk Item Specifics editing tool to help standardize all of your item specifics to match eBay's values.
Bulk Item Specifics Editor
Resources - Links to helpful eBay pages:
2021 Spring Seller Update
July 2021 Structured Item Specifics
2021 eBay Tool to Bulk Edit Item Specifics
2019 Spring Seller Update
June 2019 Category Changes
June 2019 Structured Item Specifics
Item Specifics by Category, eBay Lookup Tool (retired)
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.