i guess the ebay product pages are coming to us wether we agree with it or not..

[esclyons]

this is an item i only viewed,, when i click on the link it shows, 12 other similar items.  Not exact items.. And as a seller , how dare you through up 12 other items i am competing against..  This is so wrong, and certainly isn't helping us as seller's..  So what is next..

Here is the item you want to buy, but we found a seller selling it for cheaper, so you should buy it here instead.. Wow ebay, i realize you don't care who sells the items, but you need to treat every seller fairly, and stop picking and choosing which sellers you want to promote..

We are all paying store fees, final value fees, and everything else to jump through your hoops..  Stop with the games, and treat all your seller's fairly..

Stop trying to make the game to hard for all sellers to do well, by telling us we have to pay more to be advertised better, or to be put up higher in the search levels..

Why are we paying store fees, if we can't get the same search  results as everyone else on here,

And why do you keep adding things , like pay us more and we will advertise more for you.. 

Not fair, and not what i signed up for.. You keep changing the rules..

[esclyons]

wouldn't let me do a screen shot, but , the item i viewed, came up, but , then there where 12 big pictures of similar items, right under the ad.

[femmefan1946]

Sell an item for $10-- eBay gets $1 FVF.

Sell a similar item for $100-- eBay gets $10FVF.

Were the eBay execs sick that day in MBA school?

[momcqueen]

I do more online buying for my household than I do selling on eBay and I can assure anyone listening at eBay that I do NOT look for the cheapest option. I wasn’t born yesterday! I look for the one offer most likely to actually deliver what I need in a timely fashion. Like, that item by that time. Seller reputation and speed of service is more meaningful to me than saving ten bucks. I don’t have time to waste with orders that never arrive or contain trash instead of what was advertised. My time is valuable as is my patience. I don’t waste either.

[hlmacdon]

The growth strategy is hedged on promoting ebay as the cheapest "brand name" marketplace/retailer to buy goods. If selling by part number (as opposed to unique/one off/OOAK/etc) is your category, it is only going to get a lot worse here.

[momcqueen]

I know, I caught a glimpse of that when they were playing with the Group vs Ungroup results. I didn't match ANY of the product identifiers despite having them and even if I did, my price is almost always in the highest quarter because, well, I'm Canadian and it probably includes Free Shipping AND the stuff I sell isn't counterfeit like the cheap junk coming from overseas. I provide only fast, authentic and completely reliable service and not cheap **bleep** with **bleep**ty service. 

[hlmacdon]

Yep. I suspect a lot of sellers will just game the system in many ways. Counterfeit merchants have already started mapping their phony MPNs while quite a few sellers will just employ various tactics to avoid getting mapped to competitive MPNs.

The goal is to consolidate as much of the listings as possible as ebay thinks that is the major impediment to sales because you know, buyers can't sort by price or whatever else they think is relevant. It has as much to do with creating permeance as far as product pages that can be indexed by search engines and just plain driving prices into the ground. At some point that grouping will be automatic as I have already seen that in action in some of the testing depending on links followed. 

Where sellers should be concerned is other methods they use to consolidate listings as ebay has shown in tests that they are employing clunky methods and accuracy leaves a lot to be desired. There are etailers that literally employ hundreds of people just to manually massage product listings to maintain order and coherence. Crowd sourcing and poor technology are just a recipe for migraines and upset buyers, hence eBay's push to implement their no questions asked return policy moving forward.