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Hi! I am trying to find listings for just the actual garden tractors without hundreds of other listings for parts, etc showing up. I used to be able to do that, but now that category is filled with hundreds or thousands of parts instead! Thanks!
3 comments
eburtonlab
Mentor2 years agoThere is a Tractor category under Business & Industrial Heavy Equipment:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/91953/i.html?_nkw=tractor&_oac=1&rt=nc&_oaa=1&_dcat=91953
If you still wind up with lots of parts or accessories, try using the filter options to narrow the search to a specific type of tractor, if possible.
440dodgevan
OP2 years agoThank you very much for your reply! As you no doubt saw, there are over 1000 listings in the search you linked, and very, very few are actually for tractors! I've found it impossible to filter out enough listings to make the category useful without running into the search word limit. It's needless to spend the time it takes to weed through hundreds of off-topic listings to find a handful of tractors. If I wanted parts for tractors I would specify that in my search! eBay has grown so large that in most cases the time is past for simply browsing a whole category to find what one needs. Vendors have run wild posting off-topic listings hoping, I suppose, to maximize sales. I believe eBay needs to educate sellers on how this practice can actually decrease sales in the long run, including for eBay itself. Does this not hinder the usefullness of searches, a feature which is obviously needed to help buyers find what they need in hundreds of sub-categories with millions of listings? As it is, I find it is pretty much useless to find Tractors on eBay, and there must be thousands of other buyers who also find this situation to be non-productive, very annoying, and who simply give up searching eBay. Could not eBay find some way, perhaps in it's pricing structure, to enforce the placing of listings into only the categories to which they are specific? Perhaps a fee high enough to be of some consequence to vendors for placing listings in multiple, off-topic categories?
eburtonlab
Mentor2 years agoWhat sorts of tractors are you looking for? Perhaps you can narrow your search that way.
The kinds of keywords you would use to search for tractors are also found in listings for tractor parts, so if sellers are listing parts in the tractor category, that would seem to call for some different approaches to dividing up the listings into relevant and irrelevant results.
By looking only at buy-it-now listings, and limiting the results to items priced over $500, you can eliminate a lot of parts, though not all:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/91953/i.html?_nkw=tractor&_oac=1&_oaa=1&_dcat=91953&LH_BIN=1&_udlo=500&_sop=10
Depending on exactly what you are trying to find (or to avoid), you may be able to adjust that cutoff up or down, or add some well-chosen exclusion terms, or filter options to narrow your results further.
If you are interested in auction items, you could create a search just for those without the cutoff, as there are not very many to look through:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/91953/i.html?_nkw=tractor&_oac=1&_oaa=1&_dcat=91953&_sop=10&rt=nc&LH_Auction=1
eBay could do lots of things to limit the ways that sellers list, but until eBay actually does those things, you will still have to deal with the listings as you find them, and find ways to filter and sort them yourself.