Category Panel no longer auto-suggests based on item title

[wellingnorth]

When I create  a new listing I start from an existing listing and first edit the listing title.

After this I edit the category.

Until recently when I did this the Item Category panel would be prefilled with a list of suggested categories based on the new title. Now I have to manually type something into the box at the top of the panel for the suggestions to appear.

This is happening in firefox and chrome. Is anyone else seeing this and if so is it a deliberate change or a bug?

[dave@ebay · Accepted solution]

Hi @wellingnorth 

This was part of a change that was rolled out across the site. You should be able to see the category suggestions if you click on the magnifying glass when you finish entering the title. 

We've had feedback from a number of sellers about the change and flagged it with the site development team. 

Thanks,

Dave

[wellingnorth]

Thanks for the reply Dave, that's good to know, it would be good to have the functionality back as it saved a few seconds where you now have to click and type the title or part of it again to get a category. Actually regarding clicking the magnifying glass, currently in Firefox that's not possible as the textfield seems to overlap it - whatever you type in the first letter is on top of the icon.

I wondered whether you might also be able to ask them about the search functionality and how it picks up categories. I quite often find that it doesn't get to what I want and I have to use the tree navigation to find the category. As an example if I'm looking to use Collectables > Vintage & Retro Collectables > Plastic I type in plastic collectables in the box and it doesn't find it whereas you might have thought it would be the first result.

[eshopforce01]

It was working perfectly fine before the update.

Now, if you have a template with a pre-selected category it no longer auto-suggests based on item title.

[modernvintagevibes]

dave@ebay  - Has there been any update on this?  I do the same as @wellingnorth and since it the category doesn't auto populate, it really adds time to listing.  I am hoping more folks see this post and also add that it affects their listing speed as well.  Thanks!

[wellingnorth]

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@modernvintagevibes wrote:

dave@ebay  - Has there been any update on this?  I do the same as @wellingnorth and since it the category doesn't auto populate, it really adds time to listing.  I am hoping more folks see this post and also add that it affects their listing speed as well.  Thanks!

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Yes, I'm still seeing this and it would be great it if it went back to the old way of working - I think whenever you open the category panel it must be because you're hoping to change category and suggestions based on the title is always a decent place to start.

[wellingnorth]

Just to add as well the search functionality still seems a bit dubious, for example if I put "australasian collectables" in the search box it doesn't come up with the Collectables / Ethnographic Collectables / Oceanian/Australasian. It only picks it up if I type specifically 'Oceanian/Australasian'

It would be good also for near misses if the suggested categories let you click into categories above the suggestions it shows, so with the example above if I type 'ethnographic' in the box and it suggests 'Collectables / Ethnographic Collectables / African Collectables' it should let me click the middle bit, 'Ethnographic Collectables' to jump into that part of the tree and me then navigate down from there to choose 'Oceanian/Australasian'.

I recently worked a workaround for this which is that after you have chosen a category for your item you can then navigate into the tree where it shows the category selected. So in the example above if I choose 'Collectables / Ethnographic Collectables / African Collectables' after that I can separately click 'Collectables' or 'Ethnographic Collectables' to jump up to the higher level categories and choose a different route down, but it would still be good to have a shortcut to jump into the tree without having to actually select a specific category as an intermediate step.