Special treatment?

[amethyst1415]

Does eBay offer certain sellers special treatment? I've noticed (when trying to do searches for stuff that I have listed to see if I can find my stuff) that a certain seller or a certain place (china) is always shown more than anyone or anywhere else. Even when I search Canada only. How can it be that it is a Chinese seller who also shows up under Canada only? I don't understand how they make it so people see your stuff when you are competing against sellers who are everywhere.

[amethyst1415]

I guess what I was asking was if certain sellers pay more for higher places when searched for or is it because they have stores?

[froogal_electronic_parts_and_overstock]

you are not alone. 

The ebay apologists will come up with may excuses. 

There are thousands of sellers who think the same thing as you. Ebay admits they have a process for how to determine what to show buyers. Technology is capable of doing what many people suspect. 

In the end, there is no way to prove anything. The total conspiracy nuts may be right, but it's doubtful. The idea that ebay is being up front with their business is also doubtful. The answer is probably in between. Is ebay manipulating sellers and buyers in order to try and increase their own profitability? Would this include favoured status, search, prevalence to certain sellers, locations, etc.?  Undoubtedly. 

[reallynicestamps]

Those of us who maintain TopRatedSeller status don't pay more for higher placement, in fact we get a discount on our fees. But to get TRS we have to keep up our feedback, make a minimum number /value of sales, and avoid disputes. In other words pay lots of fees and not rock the boat.

Even without TRS, many of those Chinese sellers are selling hundreds of items per day, which gives eBay lots of renimi (cashy money).

Now if you could find a seller with very low feedback (under 95%) and horrible DSRs (under 4) who has made very few sales and is still consistently higher than your listings, we should be calling in Mulder Fox.

[pjcdn2005]

I doubt that any sellers pay more for better visibility. In fact the really big sellers (such as Toys R Us) likely pay less because they sell more. The search placement system is supposed to have a number of factors but one factor that seems to have a fairly heavy weight is the more that you sell, the better the placement. That could be why you might see an Asian seller with their listings first...they sell hundreds of items a month.

[rose-dee]

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@jg01302 wrote:

Even when I search Canada only. How can it be that it is a Chinese seller who also shows up under Canada only?

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You've asked the million-dollar question here.  It's one I've posed to eBay.ca staff in the past and have never received a satisfactory answer.  The true answer: they'll never tell us why.