eBay Delays Business Policies Feature until Next Year

eBay announced it would roll out "business policies" as part of the 2012 Spring Seller Update, but later delayed deployment. The new feature is now scheduled to roll out on a limited basis in November and to the entire population of sellers next year.

Business policies are settings for shipping, return and payment information that sellers can customize and manage from one central location so when they create listings, they can apply different settings across their listings. As eBay explained, "You can create multiple policies for payment, shipping, and return and select the business policies you want to apply to a particular listing, or listings, as you list with just a few clicks."

eBay UK published a video explaining business policies in more detail.

Initially eBay was to invite a few sellers to try the feature in May and then roll it out to all sellers by July 15th.

When asked if eBay had a new deployment schedule, spokesperson Ryan Moore said business policies would begin to rollout in early November to a limited number of U.S. sellers. "We plan to open this up to a broader seller base for our first seller release in 2013," he said.

In a May AuctionBytes Blog post, one seller advised waiting until the feature had been fully tested. "It will take minutes to set policies for hundreds or thousands of listings, then take days to fix them if eBay's process has any bugs," wrote Ric. "Sellers would be wise to wait for a couple of months before attempting to make use of this new eBay process solely based on eBay's history of rolling out programs that have not been fully debugged."

Another seller, Henry, wrote, "We use Auctiva for listing management and have had this capability for quite some time."