Thursday, in a move that reinforces eBay’s Hopalong Cassidy complex toward Amazon and makes me wonder if those CareerBuilder television commercials may actually be filmed at eBay headquarters, eBay announced upcoming changes to Item Specifics in the Jewelry & Watches, Books, DVD & Movies, Music and Video Games categories.

In part, the announcement states:

“In particular media areas, we will introduce Condition values “Brand New”, “Like New”, “Very Good”, “Good” and “Acceptable” in place of the current values “New” and “Used”“

Does any of that sound familiar? If you sell on Amazon it should.

The affected categories will include fiction and non-fiction books, cookbooks, audio books, textbooks, children’s books, DVDs, VHS, and other video formats, video games, CDs, and cassettes.

The announcement goes on to say:

“These changes won’t affect items currently listed on the site. However, during the re-list or revise process, items that currently have their Condition as “New” will be defaulted to the “Brand New” value and items with the condition “Used” will be defaulted to “Acceptable”.“

This means that if you sell any media items using eBay’s Item Specifics sometime in August or shortly thereafter, no matter what condition they are actually in, all your used ltem listings are going to be come “Acceptable”. Not something you want happening.

If you manually re-list your store items every 30 days, it will become necessary to edit your listings before re-listing them. If you use the “Good Til Canceled” listing format, the first time your items re-list after the change goes into effect, all items listed as ‘used’ will change to “acceptable” and it will be necessary to go in and edit each listing so it reflects the true condition of that item.

I don’t believe an exact date has been announced, but the changes will be implemented sometime in August. It would be a good idea to keep your ear to the wind so you know when it does happen.

Photograph by Shiny Things.