Categories, brands and sizes

These three fields cause most rejections, because they are the ones where marketplaces disagree most and where there is no shared identifier to copy.

Categories

There is no universal category ID. eBay has tens of thousands of leaf categories; Vinted's tree is much shallower; Mercari and Depop have their own again. "Women's running shoes" is a different number on each, with a different name and a different depth in the tree.

So the category is not copied — it is resolved per marketplace, from that marketplace's own live category data rather than a hardcoded table that would go stale.

Why the category matters more than it looks

Most other requirements hang off it. Choose the wrong category and you get a cascade of unrelated-looking errors: a required attribute you have never heard of, a condition value that is suddenly invalid, a size field that will not accept your size.

If a listing is failing for reasons that make no sense, check the category first.

When Reskale gets it wrong

Change it in the marketplace panel before submitting. The suggestion is a starting point, not a decision.

Categories that are reliably hard: bundles and lots, anything vintage, handmade items, and items that could plausibly sit in two departments. If you sell a lot of one of those, set the category once on the item and it carries forward.

Brands

Marketplaces handle brands three different ways:

• Free text — anything you type is accepted.
• Matched against a list — your text must correspond to an entry they recognise.
• Required, with an explicit "no brand" entry — blank is rejected, but "unbranded" is a valid answer.

Mercari and Depop both require a brand. Neither will take an empty field:

• Mercari — set "No Brand / Not Sure" on the item for unbranded goods.
• Depop — use its own "No Brand" entry.
• Vinted — defaults to "No brand", so it rarely blocks anything.

Spelling

Match the marketplace's spelling of the brand, not yours. Their list is what gets searched, and a near-miss can mean the listing is invisible to anyone browsing that brand — which is worse than an outright rejection, because nothing tells you it happened.

If a brand is genuinely absent from a marketplace's list, use their unbranded entry and put the brand name in the title and description. Buyers search titles.

Sizes

Sizes are the messiest field in reselling. The same shoe is US 8, UK 6, EU 39 and a marketplace-specific size ID that is none of those.

Enter the size in your normal system on the item. Reskale converts it per marketplace.

Where it is required

Size requirements are category-dependent, not marketplace-wide. Apparel and footwear categories require one nearly everywhere. Non-apparel categories — art, homeware, books, electronics, which Depop and Vinted both carry — have no size control at all, and gating those on a size would reject items the marketplace would happily have taken.

The practical rule: if a person wears it, give it a size.

One Size

A real value, and the right one for scarves, hats, most jewellery and most bags. Do not leave the field empty for these — empty is a missing field, "One Size" is an answer.

Measurements

Include them in the description regardless of the size field. Sizing is inconsistent across brands and countries, and measurements are what prevent "doesn't fit" returns. The description is also the only field that survives intact on every marketplace.

eBay item specifics

eBay is its own case. Beyond category, it requires aspects that vary per leaf category — Department, Type, Style, Closure, Sleeve Length, and so on. Which ones are required depends entirely on the category you chose.

Reskale reads the required aspects from eBay's own taxonomy at crosspost time, so the list is current rather than a snapshot. Many can be filled from what the item already knows, and eBay's error responses name the exact aspects that are missing — those come back as named fields rather than a generic failure.

Details: eBay.

When a mapping is wrong

Fix it on the item where the value is genuinely universal — a brand, a size, a condition. Fix it in the marketplace panel where it is genuinely specific to that marketplace — a category, a per-marketplace price.

If you see the same mapping come out wrong repeatedly, that is worth reporting: contacting support. Mapping bugs affect everyone selling that category, so they are worth fixing centrally rather than each seller working around it.