As a user, I can no longer easily find what I want, for the price that I want due to poor usability.

Question

Sellers advertise Black Front and Back brakes for a low price. I don't want to buy either or, the minute I select Black and Both Front and Rear the price doubles. For shirts, I filter on XL and get all shirt sizes of a shirt I like. The price is great. Then when I select XL from the dropdown, the price suddenly changes. Whether other stores do this or not it is misleading sales practice and should be removed from the site.

This makes it harder to comparison shop. Is this intentional or just annoying?

eburtonlab · Answer

This makes it harder to comparison shop. Is this intentional or just annoying? Clearly some sellers are taking advantage of the way the search works with variation listings -- and perhaps including various options that do not necessarily belong together -- in order that the seller's item gets a more favorable sort order position than it otherwise deserves. You can often work around this problem by first limiting your results to a manageable number using various filter options or price ranges, sorting by "Price plus shipping: Highest first", and then scrolling to the end of your search results and scrolling up instead of down to find your price point. This has the effect of ordering your results by the highest priced item in a variation listing in your price range rather than the lowest, and this provides better sorted results -- at least until sellers figure out that they can add higher priced variations to their listings to combat this workaround.