Ebay Stores: Too Hard to Find Items

[peggyowl]

When I see "Visit Store" I often skip that seller. Why? Different sellers list the items I am looking for in different categories. For example, a tie tack or men's pin might be in "Men's Jewelry," (or if it's a service pin from an employer) it might be in "Historical Memorabilia," "Advertising, " "Travel" (if it shows a hotel name), or "Fraternal Organizations," or anything else. Since stores have 1000's of items, I know I'm wasting my time in most cases. Is there a way to standardize where stores will list which items?

I always breathe a sigh of relief if the seller has no store, because I can easily scoll through a 100 items or so to see if they have other things I want to buy.

[nuclearomen]

you don't have to visit a store, you can easily visit any sellers "See All Items" page and scroll til your hearts content - issue solved - by your own words.

[dhbookds]

just do a search in the store......

[chapeau-noir]

That's fine.

[yuzuha · Accepted solution]

This is EXACTLY why eBay is phasing out categories in favor of item specifics.

[this*old*attic]

Yeah, and then they'll be Amazon for real - with a crummy search.

[7794heather]

You can easily do a search in a store, OR look at their store categories to narrow down what youre looking for. Not hard at all. 

[mudshark61369]

@peggyowl,

  "Since stores have 1000's of items, I know I'm wasting my time in most cases".

I've probably visited hundreds of stores that have less than a hundred items listed at one time. As others have said you can search within stores.

  " Different sellers list the items I am looking for in different categories. For example, a tie tack or men's pin might be in "Men's Jewelry," (or if it's a service pin from an employer) it might be in "Historical Memorabilia," "Advertising...".

A service or advertising pin would not usually be within jewelry, they are normally found in a collectibles category.  The left column on a store page should show how many items are listed in the basic categories. Sometimes, the second search page has "suggestions" when you type in a search title. Properly writing a search title helps as well, if you are too broad with your terms you may not get any results and being too specific sometimes doesn't return items either. There's usually a sweet spot when searching.

"Is there a way to standardize where stores will list which items"?

Only using the info a seller gives ebay. If they do not add all of the categories they list in, then it can be harder to search. However, a good search title and using All categories can get you to where you want to be, if the seller has any of those items for sale.

[peggyowl]

Thanks for the suggestions.  Maybe I didn't explain well enough the problem I run into on a daily basis. I've been using Ebay for over a decade, use Advanced Search to narrow down exactly what I am looking for, and have 49 saved searches which feed the items to my home page when I log in.  I run into a problem when a search locates a nice item at a nice price and I want to see if the seller has similar items in stock.  I click on "Visit Store" or "See other items" and the seller's page or store comes up with their categories listed on the left side. The categories are not standardized and I sometimes spend 20-30 minutes searching for the location of items I am looking for.  Often I can't even locate the item I originally saw.  I notice you said "normally" and "usually" when you explained where sellers put things. The fact is they could be anyplace. Some sellers see a "pinback" only as a campaign-style button with a simple metal pin with no clasp. Other sellers see a "pinback" as all pins that are worn on a lapel. Some separate "scewbacks" from "pinbacks," or separate them into "tie tacs," and "pinbacks."  I encountered a seller yesterday who called small employee pins "award pins," a title I had never seen.  Some separate pins that auto companies gave to employees from pins that insurance companies gave. Some separate fraternal organization pins from all others.  With still others, if they are 10K or 14K gold, they put them in "jewelry."  "Historical Memorabilia" is pretty reliable, but not all sellers use that category, and many break "Historical Memorabilia" down further into a confusing array or categories. I have seen sellers who put Masonic and fraternal pins in "Historical Memorabilia," but then put pins that are just as old or older in other categories.  Military pins and are a complete crapshoot because they really could be anywhere. So lately I have just been skipping trying to search within the stores of sellers that have 600 items or more.  When I run accross a seller who has 400 items or less, whether they have a store or not, I will take a look at what they have and try to search as well as I can.

[peggyowl]

Stores typically have thousands of items, and each store does not organize their items the way every other store does. From the buyer's point of view, a store with over, say, 600 items presents a time challenge when the buyer is looking for something specific. I simply don't have time to try to figure out where or how a particular seller classifies items I am looking for.

    Maybe there is no solution, or no one has thought of one yet. In the meantime, I will continue to avoid stores which have a very large number of items (over 400) because I know from experience I will waste too much time searching them.

[peggyowl]

Good to hear that. In general I find searching on eBay to be harder than it should be.

[peggyowl]

What you suggest is quite time-consuming, when I have already done either a search from the search window, used the Advanced Search, or used one of my saved searches. If I encounter an item that is in an eBay store, and want to see if the store has similar items, I have gotten in the habit of simply skipping that store if it has more than 400 items. I then use my time to look at what smaller sellers have. Ebay is huge obviously, and time is finite.

[soh.maryl]

When you go to the store, why can't you search for "Blue Silk Dress, size 12", for example? 

[pjcdn2005]

I've never done a search that ended up showing me an item in the seller's store but if you do end up in their store, go into a listing and on the right side of the page under 'visit store' click on see other items.  That will bring you to a seller's search page with the regular ebay categories. When a seller has a store there are always 2 ways to search their items...in their store or the same way that you would search through another seller's items.

[nuclearomen]

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@peggyowl wrote:

Stores typically have thousands of items, and each store does not organize their items the way every other store does. From the buyer's point of view, a store with over, say, 600 items presents a time challenge when the buyer is looking for something specific. I simply don't have time to try to figure out where or how a particular seller classifies items I am looking for.

    Maybe there is no solution, or no one has thought of one yet. In the meantime, I will continue to avoid stores which have a very large number of items (over 400) because I know from experience I will waste too much time searching them.

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it is more of a question of how lazy a seller is - that they can't organize their own store categories and simplify for buyers. It's not hard, in fact it's pretty easy and takes 2 seconds to create a category, another two seconds to create sub-category to main category. For instance, on my store, i few main categories, take music as example, click that and then there is sub categories, vinyl (is what i basically sell), picture vinyl, double LP, triple LP, box sets, CD's... or Gaming as main category, click on that get sub categories - all that is just breaking the main or general categories down into smaller more specific items within that general category for buyers to find things easier. Again, not hard, can take a bit of time especially if sellers doesn't select categories on the listings, they then have to edit each listing and do that, but from there that is what divides the listings up into their store categories and they can name their own or use ebay specified categories.