Big Bulk Edit Problem

[LuckyTarget]

A possible solution (take a backup of your listings first) - simply hide the existing table.

Use Bulk Edit to replace

<table

with

<table style="display: none;"


The table will still exist but will not be displayed when the listing is viewed.

Damn. This one didn't work. Any other ideas?

[astral276]

Damn. This one didn't work. Any other ideas?

In what way doesn't it work?

Does Bulk Edit not allow you to do it, Bulk Edit does it but it does not have the desired effect, or something else?

Give enough details on what you did and what the results were to help others help you.

[LuckyTarget]

Yeah, I tried it twice. It processed successfully but didn't alter the listings at all.

So, I thought I better try contacting Ebid Help. They sent me this message back:

'If you login via your My eBid. Then click on the ?Auctions I?m Running? tab. Click on the ?Export Listings? link in the top right hand corner side of the page. Once downloaded, bulk upload again with a '0' quantity (this will remove the present listings).

Once done, bulk upload again for a second time with the correct quantities and corrections made to the original.

This will have the effect of removing the originals and the second upload will post the newly updated listings.

You can filter the items using the drop down on auction im running to only download certain categories of your items this will allow for smaller downloads'

I am not actually familiar with using Export Listings or Bulk Upload. I have not used Turbo Lister or Ninja Lister etc. The instructions are a bit vague but I tried it, or the first parts anyway. I have now replied asking for more detail because I am not sure whether I actually need to downoad something suitable for the Listings to be Exported into (they seem to be saved in Notepad when I just tried it). I am not sure where the quantity '0' goes and I'm really not clear where I make the changes to remove the old table, add new table (as well as change my listing prices) but I get the impression that I'll have to do that one by one on a spreadsheet and I'm not familiar enough with Listings spreadsheets to know how long that will take or if it will even work.

So, I am waiting to see if they send me more detailed step by step instructions back. I really don't want to dive in and lose/make a mess of 4000 listings.

[Gothicina]

You need to open the exported file in a spreadsheet, if you don't have Excel,
you can download either Open Office or Libre Office for free, they both have a built in spreadsheet.

There are a couple of How To Videos
http://uk.ebid.net/htv_selling.php

[johnwash1]

...
Upload that image somewhere on the web,
photobucket,
...

How long does photobucket keep images? I've had trouble in the past, seemed like they vanished after a few months.

[LuckyTarget]

This is unbelievable. Why is there a default formatting for item description and a bulk add for item description when there is no bulk edit or delete for item description? I have said this in Website Suggestions and been completely ignored. If whatever you put in Item Description is going to stay there forever then there should at least be some kind of warning about that.

I have spent a whole week on trying to sort out this postage table for nothing. Ebid told me (through really poor communication) there is nothing I could do except Export Listings and remove the table from each one. So I spent days doing just that. Deleted my old listings. Uploaded the amended ones. Added a new table via Snapagogo. Bulk edited all the prices.

And now I look at my listings and the old table is still there in every one! So now I am going to have to go through them all online and remove them. The other comics dealers that I know on here did that in the first place because, unlike me, they probably had the sense to know they would not get any real help from eBid and that, as usual, anything they put in the forums would be ignored by the administrator.

If I had not already put so much work in to my eBid shop I would close it right now as this site has seriously let me down.

[johnwash1]

This is unbelievable. Why is there a default formatting for item description and a bulk add for item description when there is no bulk edit or delete for item description? I have said this in Website Suggestions and been completely ignored. If whatever you put in Item Description is going to stay there forever then there should at least be some kind of warning about that.
...

[later] LuckyTarget: I wrote the following after only reading your first para. Now I've read the rest I'm not sure I understand what your problem is. But I'll leave this posted anyhow, perhaps it'll help someone else. Or perhaps someone else will blow it out of the water pointing out my errors. At least it may help get the discussion going. [end of later addition]

I can understand your frustration, but the implementation is very believable, from a programmer's perspective. It's the difference between 'linking' and 'copying'.

Imagine you design a nice poster on a sheet of A4 paper, then pop down to your local print shop and ask them to run off 100 copies for you. You're about to start pinning them up around the village, suddenly you realise you've omitted something, or you got the phone number wrong. You go back to the print shop, you ask nicely for this change. All they can do is run off another 100 copies and charge you.

In the Real World, I guess you'd expect that intuitively.

You're quite right, a computer could be programmed to store your original and generate each auction by including it at the time of display to the visitor. But that has efficiency implications, it's harder to program, and it would also risk confusing users who subsequently thought they were editing just one auction and found to their surprise a whole load had changed (though careful design of a good user interface might get around that).

The answer, for the future, is to accept this limitation (do you know of any auction site that does it the way you describe?) and work around it by including within your auction an image that you host elsewhere and control. Although it's an image, you could put just text in it (i.e. a picture of some text). When you want to update your auctions you change that one picture.

Indeed, you can get a great deal of control this way -- you can organise your auctions into different groups, e.g. with one pic that all auctions include and another pic that is for the specific group.

Sorry, hindsight is a wonderful thing. I don't know how to roll the clock back, but I hope this helps you in the future.

[Gothicina]

How long does photobucket keep images? I've had trouble in the past, seemed like they vanished after a few months.

I think it depends if they are in use or not.
I don't really use it, as I keep my images on my webhosting