Watch this!
Summary: peakxv expresses frustration with eBay's use of bots, arguing that automation has diminished the authentic selling experience that characterized the platform's early days. eburtonlab clarifies that eBay has attempted to distinguish between bot and human views, impacting how view counts are displayed. They suggest that the current watcher counts include bots used for data mining and affiliate marketing, leading to a skewed perception of buyer interest. mandicrafts notes that bot watchers should not be counted according to eBay's previous announcements.
Letting bots clog up the "watcher" metrics, has absolutely destroyed the exact
thing that made eBay great in its heyday: the thrill of a genuine, peer-to-peer transaction.
In their desperate last ditch attempt to compete with higher performing platforms by pushing
automation and AI features, they have made the site as cold, void and uncertain as possible.
Will it return to it's golden age of sales (1999-2005), with this present AI Model? Don't bet or bid on
it ......
mandicrafts
·5 days ago"bot" watchers are not supposed to be counted anymore. They announced that ages ago.
peakxv
OP5 days agoeBay’s automated systems are designed to strip out scraping bots from your view count so your conversion data looks cleaner. However, Watcher counts are handled by a completely different algorithm. They use direct API scripts to add items to centralized automated monitoring lists. Because these items are explicitly added to a "Watch List" by an authorized account or integrated software application, eBay's system registers them as permanent, valid watchers. That primarily explains why my items can have six watchers, none of which are valid to send an offer to.
eburtonlab
·5 days ago · EditedView counts and watcher counts are distinct things.
In the past, bot views were counted -- or at least eBay made no attempt to distinguish between bot views and human views when displaying a view count to the seller.
eBay changed that when eBay switched from a cumulative view count to a rolling thirty day view count, and eBay began attempting to remove bot views from the count.
Many, many things can affect whether a buyer buys an item, but changes in how view counts are displayed to sellers are probably not among them.
https://www.ebay.ca/help/selling/listings/listing-tips/page-views?id=4165
peakxv
OP5 days ago10 watchers do not mean 10 interested buyers. It usually means 2 or 3 collectors checking market values, 5 background market-indexing bots, and possibly one real prospective human buyers. Watchers are more about datamining.
Many bots "watching" your item are affiliate AI agents. If an external site or AI shopping bot links a human buyer back to eBay to purchase your item, eBay splits a microscopic fraction of their final fee with that developer. They actively encourage external scripts to scan your descriptions so those apps can keep traffic flowing into the central marketplace ecosystem.
It is a rigged loop that leaves individual sellers holding the bag while corporate aggregators scrape the data. re: Watch this .........