eBay continued its global “Reinvigorate Tour 2007″ (eBay should have cool t-shirts with this on it) with several initiatives designed to make buying and selling easier (and more attractive).

Front and center is the announcement that listings starting at 1 Euro now cost 49 Cents and include the free Gallery option (as a native German I have taken the liberty to translate this). And while head of eBay Germany Stefan Groß-Selbeck stated that this new price is effective “at a minimum” through the end of the year, I would not be surprised if Germany will follow eBay France’s lead to always include Gallery in the listing fee (starting August 28th).

Other enhancements include a new eBay.de home page, new My eBay, updated community forums and a reduced eBay Premium Store price (299.95 Euro down from 499.95 Euro), many of the same changes we have been seeing on eBay.com (Chris at TameBay has additional details) — except the compulsory Gallery of course …

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Surprisingly few people ask me for relationship advice, and this week is no exception. Instead, this week “B.” in Springfield writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
My items’ categories look like this: Top Level>Mid Level>Bottom Level. How would I write a rule to append the top-level of the category to my keywords?

Hopefully now my post title makes more sense; B. needs to break up her category hierarchy into its pieces, using the “>” character as a guide. If you think about it, this sounds like the opposite of what last week’s JOIN function does, and of course we have a function that does just what we need.

GETPART
Remember that JOIN will take a bunch of pieces of text and join them, using another piece of text that we call the delimiter as the “glue” between each piece. The GETPART function, which I said does the opposite, has three inputs:

• The text to break into parts
• The delimiter, which determines the breaking points
• The index of the part that you want

Wait…what’s that last one? Well, really you can only do something with one of the pieces at a given time, so GETPART only gives you one of them. The index tells GETPART which one. So, taking B’s example, GETPART("Top Level>Mid Level>Bottom Level",">",1) would output Top Level, and so her rule would be:
CONCATENATE($keywords," ",GETPART($merchantcategory,">",1))

Now suppose that B. doesn’t want the top level category; she wants the bottom level. No sweat, you say; just change that 1 to a 3. Ok, well suppose that not all categories have exactly 3 levels; suppose there are categories like this:

• General>Misc
• Home>Appliances>Kitchen>Countertop
• Toys>Video Games>Console>Games>Sports>Football>Former Head Coach, Commentator, and Hardware Store Spokesman 2006

Fortunately, we’ve thought of that. If you make the index a negative number, it counts from the other end. So if you want the bottom level category, use a -1. If you want the next-to-bottom level, use -2, and so on.

That’s all for this week. Be sure and send me your questions, about feeds, or relationships, or whatever.

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