eBay

tandro4 · ‎01-22-2018

Im getting soo sick of this ebay. Sellers are adding an item to the listing that has nothing to do with the title to make the price lower. What's friggin worse is now ebays sponsoring it. **bleep**. Looking for gifts for my gf. 500 listings for sweaters starting at .99 cents. Title is sweater, but click on listing and its a headband for 99 cents and sweater is $20.00.. thanks for wasting my time and making filters useless. Thinking of going to wish or amazon as at least im not wasting hrs of my time going threw useless listings. Fix this **bleep**. Stop allowing sellers to manipulate the listings. If item is not the title, or price listed then remove it. So sick of this..

amcdc79 · ‎01-27-2018

I agree that stuff like that should not happen, just a heads-up, the Amazon catalog is even worse, you never know what you will receive. Sellers there are changing the listings all the time.

momcqueen · ‎01-27-2018

Ebay doesn't 'sponsor' those listings, the seller does. It's an advertising program within ebay for its sellers. The issue with what buyers feel is search manipulation on multi-variation listings seems to be a common theme lately, I wonder what had made this suddenly worse.

My short-term advice to avoid the chaff like this is to sort your results Price: Highest Down and then work backwards. There is less crud at the top and it's faster to get to your price point than trying to sort the offerings via price from the bottom-up.

Long-term is to go to the listing itself which you feel is being manipulative and using the Report function on the right-hand side of the page, halfway down the item listing.

Or talk to ebay staff at the Weekly Board hour, which opens for questions usually on Tuesday night for response on Wednesday and is staffed by Tyler who is a real, live employee of ebay (as opposed to everyone else here who is another user like you and I) and tell him how you feel this is a manipulative practise. If you give him an example (item number or search term) of what you're talking about, he'll be happy to look into it for you.

femmefan1946 · ‎01-27-2018

You are using the wrong Search.

The default is Best Match- and no one understands that one, but the drop down menu also gives other choices.

I would suggest using Highest Price +Shipping First.

You are not going to be buying the $500 Chanel sweater, but it is faster to drill down through several dozen listings to your price point than it is to slog up through hundreds of mis-described, poor quality items to find something suitable.

You can also use the Item Specifics in the left column to specify colour, material, size, and possibly most important LOCATION.

There is nothing worse than having a carefully chosen item turn up a month late for her birthday (and be too small because the Chinese cannot believe how big we Westerners are.).

tandro4 · ‎01-30-2018

The example is easy to find, its almost every item. Just go to something simple like a sweater, filter free shipping, and low to high. Will see hundreds of listings that say "xxx sweater" 1.99$ .. open listing.. there's a headband or item unavailable listed for the 1.99 and the sweater , true title of the listing is 9.99$ or 15.99$. Theres thousands of listings like this on ebay. Shouldn't have to scroll threw hundreds of manipulated listings just to find the lowest price when theres a filter made for it. Its obvious why sellers manipulate the search its to put there listing at 1.99 closest to the top even thou price dont reflect it or counting on ppl not to realize what they are doing. Made a point of this before, ebay shouldn't rely on me n you to vollunter all our time to moderate their site , that they make millions on per year and can afford to have moderators, checking listings to make sure they adhere to the polices.

momcqueen · ‎01-30-2018

I'm not sure what I can add that hasn't already been said by me or femme in terms of how to fix this for you. Use a different method of search so that you don't see all this misleading crud, try reporting the sellers who do it, or come to speak to ebay staff at the Weekly Board Hour with your concerns, it will open tonight.

momcqueen · ‎01-30-2018

Or, and the moderators are for the Community boards, there are different checks and balances for listings.

reallynicestamps · ‎01-30-2018

Since Lowest Price First gives you poor results, change your Search to Highest Price First.

At the bottom of each Search page are the page numbers.

If you are Searching Highest Price First, and there are 200 pages, click on Page 150. If the prices are still too high, click on Page 75.

Continue until you find your price range.

The higher the price the more accurate the description.

If eBay hired moderators, you'd only hear eBay's side of the question.

With us b~~usybodies~~ volunteers, you get a mix of opinions.

proalexe · ‎09-17-2018

got the same problem this morning, trying to find bluetooth headset, put the order by cheapest first... its all 20-30-40-50+$ stuff listed at 99 cents because there is also a case or a protector or any other **bleep** in the listing that makes it listing as cheapest.

and its like this for THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS search results, i gave up after more than 1200 results of this. ill go to amazon pay more and at least ill help an honest seller and not one that expressly try to manipulate search results or a company(ebay) who endorse it

momcqueen · ‎09-17-2018

The easiest way to avoid this problem which, by the way, also exists on all other online shopping sites, is to sort items via Highest First and work backwards to what you want to pay.

pjcdn2005 · ‎09-17-2018

Although there are sellers who do this in every part of the world, I have found that filtering to look only at North American listings helps eliminate many of those type of listings.