How does everyone feel about this "Best Match" Feature?

[gifts_of_elegance]

I hate it! I noticed my listing that ends in 4 hours is shown AFTER listing that ends in 18 hours!! I sell authentic Swarovski items, made by Swarovski and bearing the swan logo yet fake items that are posted as "Swarovski" (only resemblance is it sparkles too) take precedent as "Best Match" over my authentic items. I also noticed that many auctions that end within a minute are down at the bottom of the list, preceded by listings that have hours to go.
I can understand eBay feeling the need to "reward" their best customers and I have no problem with them showering them with gifts or other perks, but not at the expense of other sellers. We all pay the same for a listing and it makes no difference if we sell one 99 cent widget a month or a dozen million dollar items, we all deserve to have our products marketed equally. History has shown that such practices of favoritism is an invitation for corruption (kick backs, protection money, extortion) and limits freedom of expression from the little guy trying to make a living.

[pierrelebel]

I did the same search, came up with over 5,000 results and your item were shown on page 1 .

[gifts_of_elegance]

I have three necklaces for sale. Did you see all three?

[recped]

I have three necklaces for sale. Did you see all three?
Make sure you are not logged in when you do a test search for your own items. When you are logged in the results may be "personalized" for you and obviously under normal circumstances you are not looking for your own listings.

I'm not sure of all the minutia of Best Match but it seems to me that different users are getting slightly different results when doing the same search.

[gifts_of_elegance]

I just looked again. Item 180242014666 is on the first page. Items 170218490978 and 170218492188 (with 1 hr. 12 minutes before end) are still on Page 14 (200 listings to a page).

[gifts_of_elegance]

I logged in with my wife's account. These two necklaces are still shown on Page 14 (200 items per page) and they have a bit over 1 hour before auction end.

[gifts_of_elegance]

Logged in with my son's account. With less than an hour to go, these two are still on Page 14, same as 2 hours ago. Looks like new listings have been added before mine to keep me there.

[gifts_of_elegance]

With one minute before auction end, it was still listed on page 14 (200 items per page).
Guess what? It didn't sell.

[futuretech_liquidations]

Like I said BEST MATCH is going to be a major problem for alot of sellers and this first level of Best Match is only the beginning - Best Match v.20 will have even more.

[dipmicro]

I did not take effort to investigate before and now after reading about Xena's analysis, I typed in few kewords and my listings are waaaaay to the top. Funny, the sales are down, but that can be explained by me having only few very specific listings instead of spread through categories like I used to due to my neglect of sales and all time spent on on new product development.

My wife hates Best Match when shopping. I can imagine this is turning many buyers off because since they do not follow eBay press releases, for them it may seem eBay is broken.

I recently did not do any shopping, but firs thing I would do is to switch the sorting type to Ending Time.

So long story short. It works, but I don't like it.

[recped]

I recently did not do any shopping, but firs thing I would do is to switch the sorting type to Ending Time.

Which is what huge numbers of buyers will do therefore making Best Match irrelevant.

I must say that Best Match is similar to Amazon's search result sort (relevancy) I find it also useless and almost always have to do a secondary sort.

[dipmicro]

I think the home country has something to do with the match.
I got little more interested in this.

On Canadian eBay my 6d 12hr listing for white bright LED is on the top of 160 listings, one of them ending in 20min.

On US eBay, same listing is buried on 4th page out of 9. That's still not that bad considering it's still just a brand new listing with 6.5 days to go. All listings ending at similar time as mine and closer to beginning are from US sellers.

Best Match favours domestic before foreign. Perhaps big part of my listings being on top on .CA is that I am only Canadian seller for that particular item and the rest is China and Hong-Kong.

[tea_past_times]

It's really too late now to be upset at Ebay's latest round of changes. The time to make your voice heard was Feb 18-25. Now you just have to suck it up or move your business elsewhere. The company knows from past experience they can treat you any way they wish any time they want. As for me 95 out of every 100 eggs are now in other baskets than this rusty, decrepit, hole filled basket called Ebay.

[tea_past_times]

Sorry the chickens are coming home to roost. If a majority of sellers had taken a vacation from Ebay like I did from Jan 29 to March 4, things might be different. LIVE WITH IT

[lina-mallows]

BEST MATCH is something we have ranted about.
IT IS AWFUL !!!

[gifts_of_elegance]

Its not bad if you are selling an item where there is not much competition. But if you are selling an item that brings up thousands of listings, then your done.

[momoftwingles2]

I've not quite figured out the Best Match search results yet. At times I'm at the top of the list and other times I'm way down. What is puzzling to me is when sellers who have a lower feedback score and lower DSR's are placed before me or others...it makes no sense. I realize that I do not have shipping stated, but many of the others do not either.

Mind you I don't use Best Match as my default search. I set my search to what I want as I'm sure that many others do.

Susan
momoftwingles2

[westernstargifts]

Hi Susan,

I have found the same thing with Best Match. They are supposed to be fine tuning it so maybe they have been trying different variations to test the results. That would account for different placements. Even with their fine tuning, though, I can't understand either why lower FB and DSR sellers are coming up ahead of me. They are supposed to be rewarding those with higher ratings.

I would never use Best Match myself to search for products. I might miss something really good that is ending soon but shows up on page 3. By the time I got to that page it could be gone.

Judy

[recped]

I realize that I do not have shipping stated

That will demote you considerably in Best Match.

[momoftwingles2]

Hi recped,

Yes, I know that I will be demoted severely in Best Match for not having shipping listed. I've still not figured out how to put shipping with individual listings as it would end up overcharging buyers drastically. My goal by the end of the summer is to work on displaying shipping. I'm taking most of the month of July and part of August off as our daughter and granddaughter will be visiting then. We plan on fine tuning my store at that time and working on other web projects.

Suggestions from anyone out there that sells items similar to mine would be greatly appreciated.

I'm always game for good solid advice!

Susan
momoftwingles2

[coxengines]

Susan,

I am not sure why you can't show shipping.

I am not sure what it is that you are selling (my blonde does show) Prints? Die cast models? Sorry, but I am not familiar with those items but it looks as if they are small items of 20 cm, no?

For each item, shipping to anywhere outside of Canada would cost exactly the same (flat rate to anywhere in the USA and for Int'l there could be a 15 cent difference, who cares?)

For domestic shipping, lettermail is flat rate and for expedited parcel, just add min and max and divide by 2. At the of the month it's all a wash.

Xena