eBay made a major policy reversal on Friday, announcing it would roll back subcategories and temporarily eliminate "Item Specifics" in the Pottery & Glass category. eBay also announced minor changes to the Book category, and had announced minor changes to the Art category on June 30 (http://digbig.com/4bjjq).

eBay rolled up the Pottery & Glass category in early June, causing sellers to complain that their sales had dropped because, they believed, buyers were having a difficult time finding items under the new structure.

Before the category rollup, buyers could browse through items by drilling down into subcategories. eBay eliminated most of the subcategories and replaced them with "Item Specifics." Many sellers complained this took away the serendipitous sales they had previously generated from users who were browsing, not searching. (For more information about Item Specifics and Category Rollups on eBay, see previous article here: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y204/m03/abu0115/s03).

eBay has rolled up several categories on the site this year, including Movies, Music and Video Games; Clothing; Books; Art; and Pottery & Glass. Many sellers are finding the transition painful, and some sellers believe the changes are hurting their sales. But until Friday's announcement (http://digbig.com/4bjjp), eBay had not reversed rollups in any categories.

In the Book category, eBay announced it will keep Item Specifics and will not roll back down the category structure, but it will make some minor changes, including splitting Fiction & Nonfiction back into separate areas; adding Fiction & Literature subgenres to the Antiquarian & Collectible subcategory; and adding First Editions and Signed item specifics to Fiction & Nonfiction subcategories (http://digbig.com/4bjjk).

Despite seller complaints in the Clothing and the Art categories, eBay said it would make no additional changes to those categories. Art sellers are petitioning eBay to change the way items are viewed. Many buyers like to look at auctions "ending soonest," but eBay took away the "Going, Going Gone" feature.

Now, when browsing items in Art categories by "ending soonest," auctions with the optional Featured Plus upgrade appear before regular listings even if they are ending later. Sellers claim that buyers don't realize that there are other art items ending sooner because they may be listed 20 pages out from the first results page. It costs sellers an additional $19.95 to add the Featured Plus option to their item listings (http://pages.ebay.com/sell/listingupgrades).

One UK seller who has been selling art on eBay for the past 3-and-a-half years wrote to AuctionBytes, "Because of the way eBay now run things, you get pages and pages of featured plus auctions before you even GET to regular actions that might be running out in the next hour. Because of this, it literally forces you to list everything featured plus in order to be seen at all!"

Another art seller said "eBay is beating artists to death and most of them don't know what to do." Sellers began a petition on the eBay forums in April asking eBay to revamp the way items were displayed (http://digbig.com/4bjjm).

A third art seller said, "sellers have posted that they are leaving eBay permanently because it has been three months of lost business because of these changes."