eBay's Vice President of Seller Experience appeared in a video published on YouTube yesterday where he answered questions about the ongoing glitch that began October 15 that impacted sellers in the Clothing Shoes & Accessories category particularly hard.





"We have been on this since Oct. 15 every single day, 24/7," Harry Temkin said from the floor of a November 6th eBay event in New York. However, he seemed to downplay the impact of the Item Specifics glitch, which eBay is continuing to work to resolve. Listings were always visible in search, he said.





On October 17, eBay explained the various problems it encountered when it rolled out changes that week. Among the issues - some Item Specifics did not update correctly and the new, required field showed up as blank, so the listing appeared incomplete.





eBay said the issue also created a problem in search, with the new Item Specifics not appearing in the left hand navigation search filter, and sellers expressed concern that the glitch negatively impacted sales.





In that October 17th announcement , eBay also said, "Behind the scenes we will map the new item specific to the original item specific."





It's not clear how long it took eBay to fix the mapping issue, but in the weekly chat session on October 21, an eBay moderator wrote, "Size has been mapped to the "new" fields in our backend, so any existing listings you have will not be blocked when you revise and will be available in search results."





eBay then acknowledged there were holes in the mapping: "We have discovered a small number of categories in shoes where not all of the listings have been mapped," an eBay employee wrote. "We're actively working on fixing the mappings, but you can always manually fix them if you wish."





During that weekly chat session, a seller asked if eBay would be issuing credits to sellers whose listings had been invisible due to the Item Specific glitches. "I'm not trying to be greedy here, but business is business and this most certainly is costing me money."





The last update on the Seller Announcement Board about the glitch was two weeks ago (Oct.31), when eBay wrote, "We are still diligently working on resolving all outstanding issues with item-specific requirements, and we will provide an additional update soon."

In the video taken during the eBay Upfront event in New York, Temkin said the following:





"I know we created friction on that day, but your listings were always visible in search, right? People were selling. We didn't lose any data. All the Item Specifics were there. What we didn't do a good job of was sort of showing you when we renamed an aspect like "US Women's Size" to "Size," we didn't show you that mapping. Because under the covers, that was all mapped. So we had your aspect."









Temkin also said that going forward, eBay will never change an aspect and make it mandated at the same time, "because that's what created most of the issue."





You can view the entire interview above, and feel free to share your experience below and any questions you may have.