eBay New Sell Your Item Transition -- On Hold Until January 2007

[mandy]

***New Sell Your Item Transition -- On Hold Until January 2007*** 

Hi everyone...After over a year of development and testing with the Community, we officially unveiled the new Sell Your Item form in August. At the same time, we outlined our plans to slowly transition sellers over to the new form by the end of September. I'd like to share some of our progress, as well as our change in plans.

Over the last couple of months, we've transitioned over 40% of our sellers who use SYI to the new form. In general, new sellers have found the flow easier to use, and we've seen sellers complete listings about 20% faster than they did with the old SYI.

We've also received important input that has led to a number of product changes. You've helped us identify issues with the new form, and we appreciate hearing from you. Based on your feedback, we've made the following enhancements:

    * Ability to add your self-hosted Gallery URL easily. Sellers let us know that they need the ability to specify a separate self-hosted picture URL for their Gallery image. Last week we added this capability to the new SYI form, so now sellers can use either eBay Picture Services images, or those hosted on a 3rd-party website, as their Gallery image.

    * Quicker relist process. Members pointed out that it took longer and required more clicks to relist items with the new form. As a result, we've redesigned the relist function so that if you don't need to make any changes to your listing, you can relist it with one click right from the first page of the process. This change will take effect next week.

In addition to these two major areas of improvement, we're working hard to respond to other issues reported by the Community. For example, we've found that some members are seeing errors when they try to copy certain HTML code they used in the old SYI form into the new form. We've started a thread on the Seller Central board with some common troubleshooting techniques to help them out.

Transition on hold for the Holidays and will resume January 2007
The SYI form is one of the most important features on the site, and we want to make sure the transition goes smoothly for our sellers. We also understand that from mid-October to the end of December, a majority of our sellers experience their busiest time of the year.

Even though we believe the new SYI form will make sellers more efficient in the long-run, having to learn a new tool during a busy time of the year is challenging. So, we are putting the transition on hold until January 2007.

But do try the New Sell Your Item Form if you can
While we will not be automatically opting sellers into the new SYI form who haven't already moved over, I do encourage you to try it if you have time. It's faster and more flexible than the current form, and it contains some valuable features (such as the shipping features we recently announced) that are not available in the current SYI form. Simply click on the "Start selling with the new version of the Sell Your Item form" link at the beginning of the selling process.

If you've already started seeing the new SYI, and would prefer to use the current version, you can do that, too. Just click the "List using the original Sell Your Item form" link.

I also encourage you to continue leaving your comments on our feedback thread. Thanks to everyone for your input and support, and on behalf of the entire Selling Tools team, we hope you have a very successful holiday season.