Sadly this is yet another scam that you will come across on eBay. (It’s getting to the point where eBay just isn’t worth using anymore. 
)
What happens is that the seller (often Chinese sellers) is abusing the More Options feature of listings. The option is supposed to allow them to combine several similar items into a single listing instead of posting them as separate listings.
Normally, you would use this function by providing multiple identical items of different colors or styles or something and they will usually be the same price (or at most a little bit higher or lower).
What some disreputable sellers do is to take advantage of the fact that eBay always shows the lowest price of a multi-item listing in the search results. So they will put a few high-priced items (which may be very different or even unrelated to each other) in the listing as different “Options”, then they will add a very cheap item (<$1) as another option. Then they will modify the listing so that the photo of the high-priced item is the primary photo (shown in search results), and keyword-spam the title to include the high-priced items, and sometimes exclude the cheap item from the title.
Now, when you do a search for the higher-priced items and sort by price, you will see that there is such an item available for a very low price. The photo and title both indicate that it is what you are looking for. You click the item to open the listing and see the photo of the item you hoped for and get happy. You look at the description and see photos and text about that item (and maybe the cheap one, often not). You then scroll up to the Buy Now button.
If you click it as is, you end up getting the cheap item for a cheap price and get upset that you didn’t get what you thought you were buying and hopefully leave negative feedback (though the seller will likely counter that you got exactly what you purchased).
If you click the options drop-down and select the correct item, you will be disappointed to see the price for the actual item is much higher than what you were tricked into thinking it was and the seller loses the sale because theirs is at best, the same price as everyone else, if not higher.
So basically you get disappointed either way and possibly ripped off for a few bucks for something you didn’t want (of course multiply a few bucks by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of buyers who got tricked, and the seller really racks up a fraudulently earned pile of money).
So far, eBay either has not noticed this scam/exploit, is powerless to do anything about it, or is indifferent and doesn’t give a **bleep**.
For the record, one way that they can close this vulnerability is to simply make the search results always show the photo associated with the correct item. In other words, if it is going to show the cheapest item, then it shold show the photo associated with that item, not the one associated with a higher-priced item. (Of course this doesn’t change the fact that the title is still keyword-spammed to show up in results for the higher-priced item.)
As for the suggestion to “sort by highest price and work your way down to your price-point”, that is ridiculous. I don’t know how rich that person is, but most people are not. Most people’s “price point” is as cheap as possible. Telling people to scroll through potentially hundreds of items on dozens of pages to avoid seeing a few cheaters is absurd.
A much easier way to detect them used to be to simply skip over any and all listings in the search results that include the More Options control, but those are no longer shown on the search results page. Way to go eBay! You made it WORSE! It’s almost as though instead of figuring out a way to stop this exploit, they are encouraging it by making it easier to hide it and harder to detect! 
I suppose since (at least for now), most of these tend to be from Chinese sellers, you could skip over any listing from China (you know what they say about a few bad apples…)
For a while there, I was using the Report Item function to report these kinds of scam listings, but after several dozen, I got exhausted and gave up. Of course if everybody reported them, then maybe eBay would actually do something about it.
To learn more about the new search program at eBay, please invest a few minutes:
http://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/eBay-Explains-Cassini-Search/m-p/127151#U127151
