Please do an Ebay search for one of my listings for me
Summary: fergua3 is experiencing difficulties with their eBay listing not appearing in search results on ebay.ca when searching within Canada only for "big farm john deere." ricarmic found the listing only when using a different search term and explained that using full titles and special characters might affect visibility. A participant and ericsells75 reported similar experiences with listings disappearing temporarily, suggesting possible eBay glitches. flipistics advised ensuring item specifics are complete, while dinomitesales discussed category assignments impacting search results, noting that fergua3 had difficulties changing the category due to eBay's default settings. fergua3 concluded the platform's search engine needs improvement, with several participants suggesting these glitches and search behavior are common issues on eBay.
Please search ebay.ca, searching for 'Canada Only'. Search for "big farm john deere" and tell me if this listing shows up:
TOMY BIG FARM 1/16 JOHN DEERE 9620R TRACTOR WITH DUALS....BIG TOY! ertl | eBay
When i search for it, it does not. Despite those exact words being in the title. Five listings do appear, none of which are mine. Maybe this is why my sales have tanked.
cherryblossom63
·2 years agoyes, i saw it.
dinomitesales
·2 years agoWhenever you enter a search term into eBay they will only show you the results in a specific category. It's eBay's way of trying not to overwhelm a potential buyer with too many listings; they'll narrow it down to what they think is the most appropriate category for the search term.
When you search for "big farm john deere" eBay defaults to the category of:
Toys & Hobbies --> Diecast & Toy Vehicles --> Farm Vehicles --> Contemporary Manufacture
You can see this by looking at the categories listing on the left-hand side and seeing which one is currently selected.
Your listing is in the category of:
Toys & Hobbies --> Diecast & Toy Vehicles --> Construction Equipment --> Contemporary Manufacture
So if you simply go up one step in the category hierarchy to "Diecast & Toy Vehicles" then yours shows up in the search results.
In this case I actually agree with eBay that your farm tractor toy is more of a "Farm Vehicle" than "Construction Equipment".
fergua3
OP2 years agothanks for the tip.........it should have been in 'farm vehicles'.
However, if that's Ebay logic it makes no sense. Buyers aren't going to get overwhelmed by the 5 listings that do show up. Why not show everything that has those key words in it up to a certain amount? Poor coding.
And when i do many Ebay searches, i get many hundreds to thousands of returns, the vast majority of which have nothing to do with what i searched for. Many of these returns vanish once i choose 'price plus shipping lowest first' or 'newly listed' etc. But under best match i get bombarded with irrelevant items. Ebay's serach engine right now, is the worst i have ever seen it.
EDIT: the reason why it was in 'construction vehicles' is because that was the category Ebay recommended. I tried changing it to 'farm vehicles' 3 times but it kept reverting to 'construction vehicles'. Finally on the 4th attempt it stayed 'farm vehicles'. I'll watch to see if it reverts back at some point in the future.
dinomitesales
·2 years agoI can't speak to other searches, but in this specific example I actually think eBay's search worked quite well.
If your Average Joe just went to eBay and typed in "big farm john deere" there would be 664 results by default if it showed all categories - things ranging from toys to clothing to books. eBay correctly identified that "Big Farm" was a line of toys so narrowed it down to the most obvious category and cut the listings shown down to half to make it easier to peruse for the potential buyer. The buyer is still free to change the category if they wish, but it gives them a good place to start. If you search for a more generic term like "john deere" then it has no idea what category of item you're looking for so it defaults to everything (790,000+ listings). But as soon as I had another modifier like "hat", it's going to immediately drill down to Clothing --> Men --> Men's Accessories --> Hats, as that's the most common category for that specific search term.
Now that your listing is in the correct category it's actually showing up as the #1 (non-sponsored listing) of all 307 available listings in that category - no need to even narrow it down to Canada. However, that might be because you've gotten so many views over the last 24 hours from people here looking at it lol.
It's also for this reason that, whenever I have an item that may have an ambiguous category (or could potentially fit into multiple categories), I will always search it first in an incognito window (so as to not skew the results) in order to see which category eBay focuses in on. That's the one I'll choose.
fergua3
OP2 years agoyou make some good points, however since i always had in item specifics that the brand was TOMY/ERTL, the search engine should already have identified it as a toy and shown it as such, without it needing to be in the 'farm vehicles' category. Afterall, 'farm vehicles' could also mean real farm vehicles , and that could also be interpreted as actual parts for maintenance or repair.
Besides, the category kept defaulting to 'construction vehicles'. It took me 4 attempts to make it stay with 'farm vehicles'. I'm going to check back every now and then to make sure it doesn't go back to 'construction vehicles', perhaps when the listing rolls over in a month.
And how many 'average joe' buyers are even going to know to change categories? They'll just see the results Ebay shows them and figure that is all there is for sale.
Yes, my views have sky rocketed on that listing.....lol.
ricarmic
·2 years agoYes us all looking at your lot and boosting the views, helps too as it makes the "bots" think this is a very interesting item....hopefully it helps it sell!
fergua3
OP2 years agoif all these views does help it to sell then maybe we can all start a mutual support group by having all of us looking at each others listings frequently, thereby boosting views, thereby boosting search visibility and thus resulting in more sales for all....lol.
msau4301
·2 years agoShowed up immediately for me, very top of page from .ca site - Advanced Search Canada only
regs43
·2 years agoI searched on .ca, and refined to Canada only, It does not show up for me. and it doesnt show up in the 306 listings i see, i scrolled through, price highest to lowest
I clicked on your listing linked AFTER the fact just to make sure I didnt miss it.
I wonder if the ALL CAPS might be an issue, I think ebay hates that (I had someone call me from ebay last summer and said capitalized words gets better results and not everything in Caps) Could be a myth lol
flipistics
·2 years agoDo you have all the required item specifics input? I notice most of the other listings have scale and UPC entered, so try doing that. It wouldn't hurt to also enter the vehicle make as John Deere. I suspect the search engine is simply not picking up on it because of the item specifics being lacking.
fergua3
OP2 years agointeresting.....but you'd think with those 4 exact words in my title and only 5 other listings, a SEARCH engine would pick it up. Often when i do searches i have listings appearing that do not have one single word in their title that i input into search.....eg i look for a model kit of a specific scale and get greeted with dozens of mufflers and oil filters, cause ya know, that's what i really must have meant to search for. :eyeroll
Seems the glitch mentioned above is the more likely culprit. Makes me wonder how many other of my listings aren't showing up. btw yes all requried specifics are in my listing.
femmefan1946
·2 years agoIt's been my observation that if you make multiple searches for the same thing, you will start seeing different items with each Search.
Possibly the program is set to change the (sometimes thousands) of listings shown if none are clicked on, apparently showing that the searcher was not attracted to that one.
BTW if your title is "TOMY BIG FARM 1/16 JOHN DEERE" and your unsuccessful Search is "big farm john deere" maybe you should move the "1/16" to later in the title.
dobo5250
·2 years agoyou very coorect the more times you search for an exact item the more as time goes on you will get other items of simllar results but not the orginal --- its been this way since i started here couple years ago
ericsells75
·2 years agoI've had this exact issue happen from time to time when i do some auditing of my listings. I've posted about it here before.
I've reached out to support on chat several times about it, showed them the problem, they acknowledge it and say they will escalate and then a few days later it's fixed. It's happened 3 times that i can recall over the last couple of years, never gotten a reply, just magically fixed.
There is definetley something wrong and i am sure if i audited more often I would see it happen more often.
* That said, I searched for your item and it came up as the only result in Canada.
fergua3
OP2 years agothanks for the responses. Seems the Ebay Canada search engine is not good these days. This is the second significant issue i've found in 2 weeks (the other was 'price plus shipping lowest first' showing some higher priced items before lower priced ones).
As an aside, if a listing has zero views will it show zero for the number of views? I have several listings where there is no view count at all.....not even the word 'view' is there.
ricarmic
·2 years agoI did a search only for "Tomy Big Farm 9620R" and your item on .COM was there, number 4 getting good visibility. On .CA was the only item returned.
(Note that if you're searching using the whole title, you've got special characters near the end, and a lot of ...s those might affect a search on the exact title wording).
fergua3
OP2 years agothanks. But when i search on ebay.ca (ebay canada) and refine to "Canada Only" and search for:
big farm john deere
My listing does NOT appear. As i said, five other listings do appear but not mine, despite it having those exact words in the tittle. Since i listed this item on Ebay Canada, with the intention of selling it in Canada the Ebay Canada search results are what matters to me..
Edit: I just noticed that you searched on ebay.com. This listing should not even be appearing on ebay.com. I have it set up for shipping to Canada only. Wow, never ending problems with this site.
ricarmic
·2 years agoRe .COM, it should be showing on .com because you show it as shipping to Canada and I'm in Canada. Someone in the US wouldn't see it because you don't ship there. Generally I "live" on .COM so you do kinda hope that it does show to canadians who happen to use .COM as the site they most often search from.
Re search, hhmmm it came up fine on .CA UNTIL I put in the Canada Only and now it does not come up at all, whether Canada Only is clicked or not..... it might be a glitch, hopefully only a temporary one.....