eBay Listing Quality Report Update

It’s been over 2 months since I first got a look at the new eBay Listing Quality Report. It’s due to be rolled out to all sellers this month, so it’s a good time for an update.

Several of the original issues I raised have been addressed, including Manufacturer Part Number (MPN) and Promoted Listings Rates incorrectly showing at 0%, inconsistent use of icons, and removing irrelevant “opportunities” (such as suggesting a 14 day return period when I was already using a more buyer-friendly 30 day return option).

However, several major issues still remain, the biggest of which appears to be Google Shopping Insights.

Google Shopping Insights was supposed to be one of the crown jewels of this report. When Head of Seller Experience Harry Temkin did a demo back in December, he showed what it would theoretically look like if any of your listings were rejected by Google and didn’t qualify to be displayed in Google Shopping.

The report has always shown me there are no rejections, but I’m not sure if that’s based on accurate data.

From the beginning I questioned this data because it was showing 0% Google Shopping Applied, while also showing all individual listings with a checkmark (presumably indicating the listings were submitted to Google Shopping and not rejected).

In response to my feedback in the eBay community, Harry addressed the Google Shopping issue by saying

Google Shopping showing at 0% - we show the data we received from Google, and we are checking with them some suspected misalignments.

Since that time, this column has changed positions multiple times, sometimes shows as just a blank, and sometimes shows data that cannot possibly by accurate (-100%?!).

I suspect that eBay may be having difficulty consistently and reliably receiving data from Google. When asked about inconsistent timing of updates to this report, Harry Temkin said

LQR Data Update Frequency - The seller data (including Google Shopping data) takes approximately 48 hours to process. Our roadmap includes improving the process time.

Despite the roadmap including improvements to processing time, I still occasionally see delays in updates to this report that go past 48 hours. Currently the most recent report I have was updated on March 16th and covers listings as of March 13th.

There have been no updates since, which makes me think eBay may have “paused” the report for some reason or maybe they haven’t been able to pull data from Google since that time.

While looking at the report from March 16th, I noticed a very interesting change. This column that has always said “Google Shopping Applied” now says “Google Shopping Rejections”

Why the change in terminology? Was this column always supposed to be for rejections and was just mis-labeled? If so, that would make the blank or 0% accurate (assuming the other part of the report is correct that there are no rejections), but that would be a pretty big oversight on eBay’s part.

If not, then I have to wonder why the change now - the original version of the report seemed to indicate this column would represent the number/percentage of listings accepted by Google. Did eBay have to scrap that idea due to challenges pulling the data from Google or other technical limitations?

Speaking of things being mis-labeled, it may seem like a minor thing, but I provided feedback to eBay last month that the “Handling Time” column should say “same day shipping” not “same day delivery” - and it still hasn’t been fixed.

Despite receiving detailed feedback from sellers, it appears this report is still not ready for prime time. When it was originally released to some sellers in December and January, there was no mention of this report being a “work in progress”. After multiple issues were pointed out to eBay, they said it was a work in progress but would be finalized and released to all sellers by “end of March.”

All I can say is Harry Temkin and his team have a lot of work to do in the next 2 weeks if they hope to roll out a finished product that is at all useful for sellers.

As it stands now, the suggested opportunities and insights are still not particularly helpful (pointing to things sellers already know eBay wants us to do, like Free Returns, Free Shipping, Promoted Listings, Best Offers, and Discounts) and the data is still clearly inaccurate and inconsistent in enough places to make the entire report suspect, in my opinion.