I got an email from ebay this morning. First time I had got an email like this, that tells me they found an item I've been watching for a better price. I knew they showed other sellers items on listings but to actually start emailing buyers saying "hey, buy from this person instead" **bleep** ebay. How long have they been doing this?
Oh, it's from ebay alright, and the only thing that matters is the price, condition does not account for anything.
So say you were watching a brand new item for $20, ebay will send you a message showing you a used one for $10, saying why don't you buy this instead. Happens all the time now.
As a practise, it's a bit contentious because sellers feel like their competitors are being rewarded for hard work, and buyers are worried they'll click on something they didn't mean to buy because they thought it was another item from someone different.
Two times in the last couple months I have had people buy a lot that was either not the lot they thought they were buying of mine or it was markedly different from what they thought they were buying and I don't think it was even my lot they thought they were buying.
In the most recent example what the buyer thought they were buying wasn't even anything I offer so I am very confused as to how that happened.
I've been receiving one of those emails on an item that's not even on my Watch list.
Meanwhile my Watched Items are ignored. And I wouldn't mind a better deal on poly envelopes than the ones I've found. Though I'm pretty happy with those too.
Oddly, I was getting 'Watched Item Ends Soon' notifications for items that had sat briefly in my Shopping Cart. Looong after they had been emptied. They had never been watched. I was doing a 'combined shipping' experiment for another seller, wanting to make sure their rules were being properly applied. They were, my cart was emptied, I went about my other business. About ten days later (or more) when those items were starting to end, I began to get notifications at the Top Right Bell here.
I got another one of these emails this morning. Today's email was only going to save me $3. These are different than the "watched item ending soon" emails. They're simply "buy this one instead" emails. I also didn't even think about it the other way that I might get lucky & someone is told to buy something from me thinking it's something different that they were watching.
