Improving search criteria

[davicare-380]

For collectors of true antiques and vintage pieces, eBay searches can be extremely frustrating as they often serve up countless listings for reproductions and unrelated items. This causes buyers to prematurely end their searches and results in a lost sales for sellers. The problem? Sellers are not ticking the boxes identifying their item as "Original" or "Reproduction" (my search for "vintage advertising tins" resulted in about 58,000 hits, and about 56,000 of them were "unspecified"). Worse, many sellers are claiming their items are original even when they are clearly quite recent. Interestingly, sellers are much more willing to tick the box for "Used" as opposed to "New" items - and this might be a way to help resolve the problem. Instead of merely "New" or "Used", eBay should introduce more granular tick boxs - e.g.   New;   Made after 1970;   Made between 1940 - 1970;   Made before 1940.  eBay could note that dates are approximate. Better defined tick boxes would stop a lot of vendors from fudging their listings, make life easier for buyers, and boost business for sellers of true vintage pieces.

Please help us, eBay! For the good of all.

[reallynicestamps]

Sellers are not ticking the boxes identifying their item as "Original" or "Reproduction

And sellers scream when eBay tries to make them use Item Specifics.

Then again when eBay removes some Item Specifics.

Many categories do have date ranges for the products, and most have an option to add other information to listings.

Plus sellers can put anything they feel would be useful and attractive in Descriptions.

I agree it does make things more difficult.

The best I can think of is to only choose "original" even though there will be a lot of reproductions mixed in from ignorance or malfeasance.

And try to believe the journey is the better part.