One user (ChuckMcB) recently pointed out a major quirk with WordBay that never occurred to me, and I just wonder how no-one complained of it before! I thought I’d better let you know about it!

The problem is if you specify a category (any other than All categories) such as, say, Antiques, erm, well, there’s a slight problem I never realised before! The category codes are all different for different eBay sites. The codes were all taken from eBay US. So choosing Antiques will always use code 20081, even though on eBay UK Antiques are under category number 353.

What I can’t figure out is how come people didn’t run into this problem before! Like, if you were setting up a non-US site and you chose Antiques, what happened?! Surely you would get a drastically reduced listing. And of course if you are using geotargetting there is no telling what will happen when a Belgian visitor comes and gets Cuckoo Clocks instead of USB Flash Drives…

What to do?

Oh boy, this is a tricky one… I mean, why can’t the category numbers be the same across all eBay sites?! There really is no ready solution for this - I am really not prepared at the moment to use the eBay API to let users choose from the live list of categories. It’s a LOT of programming, the category numbers are going to change occasionally, so you would have to periodically check up on them, and anyway, my eBay API keys are tied up elsewhere right now.

I am going to have to go away and think about this, but basically, the most likely solution will be to allow users to MANUALLY enter category numbers, possibly for each eBay country. Some people have asked for this anyway, as it would give them greater flexibility - at the moment WordBay only allows the 30 or so top-level categories to be selected. The other way would be to set up an internal list of all the top-level categories for all the different countries. These do not change all that often (while categories lower down the hierarchy certainly can), so it might be a reasonably safe solution. But it will take a while to implement.

In the meantime…

Unfortunately the only solution in the meantime, unless you are solely targetting eBay US (and not using geotargetting) is to choose the All categories category (which is the same for all countries) and be very judicious about your choice of keywords. Sorry. Actually, this is what I have done on all my WordBay-based sites anyway - with a good choice of keywords, you can usually narrow things down pretty well anyway.

Meanwhile, I will go away and bang my head on a wall somewhere and try to think of the best solution.

Posted on December 22nd, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized