Search results - missing items.

[runrun18]

Hi all. Daily, I meticulously do both 'ending soonest' and newly listed'-type searches on eBay.com ('Worldwide' and with 'Include description' ticked) and eBay.co.uk ('UK only' and with 'Include description' ticked) for items by a certain music artist but I get hugely annoyed when, in separate 'Sold' searches, I often see items that most definitely did NOT crop up in my searches when 'active' but that I would have certainly bid on had they. How the hell does this happen? Thanks.     

[mudshark61369]

@runrun18,

I cannot tell you for sure why you are finding items listed in Sold searches that did not appear on your initial searches.  My initial guess is that since sold searches may not be filtered by Items that were not able to be shipped to the U.K. or Ireland, they may be included in sold searches, whereas a search for items to buy will filter out items that the seller will not ship to either the U.K. or Ireland.  To figure out if that is the case you would have to open some of the items you did not see in your initial searches.   Keep in mind, that just because a seller lists an item for sale "worldwide" doesn't mean they do not exclude items to be shipped to some countries or regions from their list. 

Your main search results page filter may also have something to do with the results you receive. Best Match may give you results mostly for Buy It Now items, from higher volume sellers, before displaying Auction items from low volume sellers.  That is why I sort by: Time: Ending soonest or Time: Newly listed.  It is known that using Price: lowest + shipping, does not return all available results. Auction listings by lower volume sellers may not show up in the first few pages of a search until there are less than 48 hours remaining in them, meaning if you do not search every day you could be missing those listings.

Still, as I stated above I am only guessing, and some of my info may not apply to what results are shown on the U.K. site's searches.  You may get better answers if you post your question on its Community,

https://community.ebay.co.uk/  

You have posted your question on the U.S. based site's community (ebay.com)

[runrun18]

Thanks for that. I’m in Ireland but as I don’t need to immediately myself receive a lot of the items I buy, to save on postage I have stuff delivered to four different territories/addresses (family, including importantly the US and UK) so I’d like to think that covers the most ‘worried’ of sellers who won’t even ship outside of their own country.

If at any particular time the ‘shipping to’ address I’ve set as ‘Primary’ (mostly it’s the US one) doesn’t match the seller’s shipping settings I’d still like to think also that with the other addresses I have in my settings it wouldn’t affect what listings I get to see. Even if an eBay employee sees this (unlikely) I wouldn’t be confident of getting a definitive answer on this.

[eburtonlab]

I often see items that most definitely did NOT crop up in my searches when 'active' but that I would have certainly bid on had they.

If you are only searching once per day, you may miss some items that are indexed, appear, and are sold within the twenty-four hours since your last search. Some listings might show up as sponsored ads with placement within other listings before they are indexed -- before they appear in any search results.

You may want to consider using a third-party automated search to send you a message when an item matching your search criteria is listed. Google automated searches eBay to see some possible options. Some searches can be run many times per day to allow users to quickly find new items as soon as they are indexed and appear.

At one point it was possible to use an RSS feed to see newly listed items, though I am not entirely sure if that still works. There may be other ways to search eBay using API calls directly rather than relying on eBay's search feature, particularly if you want to see new listings from a single seller.

In addition, there may be some listings that sell but do not end if the seller is using the "out of stock" feature to keep the listing active with zero inventory. The seller may end the listing months later, at which point it would appear in the "sold" listings sorted by the ending date -- not the actual sold date.

[runrun18]

Thanks for replying. Phew! As meticulous as I (think I) am in my searches, RSS… API… (and beyond?) stuff looks like a bridge too far for me. 🙂 Using, say, a third-party automated tool to notify me of new listings would have me opening, very roughly, somewhere between ten to twenty separate extra emails/messages a day and that’s just not workable... especially for the few extra useful-to-me-personally 'hits' it would give me, so I think my best bet is to just stop my occasional ’Sold items’ searches. At least with that I won’t get depressed on what I don’t know and can’t ‘resolve’. 😞

[eburtonlab]

Using, say, a third-party automated tool to notify me of new listings would have me opening, very roughly, somewhere between ten to twenty separate extra emails/messages a day

Not necessarily. If you are able to set up your searches so they only return results when something matching your search criteria is listed, you only get an email when such an item is actually found.

That may not be suitable for all your searches, but for very rare items that only turn up once in a while, where you want maximum chances of seeing the item before someone else buys it, that might be useful.

[runrun18]

On eBay I’m 90+% about music and I do have saved searches that revolve around specific artists and individual releases of theirs but in the case of this query it’s around whatever's connected with a certain artist - not just record releases (of which there have been well over a thousand worldwide) but right on through the whole gamut of 'memorabilia' - so that’s why there’ll be those 10 to 20 new listings every day and the (already) 'Sold' items I belatedly happen on can and do include records, magazine articles, flyers, 8-tracks and onwards.   

[worivqeylar]

Also still happening for me. If i search for a related term basically, a brand name, versus the offbrand that I’m looking for, The item will come up, but if I search for terms that are actually in the title, it doesn’t!