Deceptive listing titles/practices
Summary: A participant expressed frustration with deceptive advertising on eBay, where sellers list expensive items at low prices within multiple listing options, misleading buyers. aeparts1 mentioned avoiding such sellers, while airsheep pointed out eBay's slow response to report-based actions. simba6 noted this tactic has been an issue for a long time, and bennotbill suggested filtering searches by setting minimum prices to avoid misleading listings.
So many ads cheat on the multiple listing by having one selection a crazy cheap part but the one you seek, and ALL other choices as the expensive part. Therefore they can list the expensive item at the cheap price. Egregious example: I've been looking up mobility scooters and they know they can't get away with $20 (for charger for example) so this ad was for $99, but when you select, you are given the multiple listing drop down. FOUR scooters are like $1499 and the only $99 was the separate basket. I've see this for computer parts, bike accessories, all kinds of stuff and it should be easily addressed by ebay.
eburtonlab
·2 weeks agoIn addition to setting a price floor, another way to weed out these deceptive listings is to sort by "Price plus shipping: highest first", then jump to the end of the results and scroll up instead of down. This forces eBay to sort the results by the highest variation in your price range, which is typically the item you are interested in anyway.
bennotbill
·2 weeks ago · EditedThe way to get rid of most of those junk multiple listings is when you do a search as well as entering your max price you also enter a minimum price.
In your four scooter example if you simply enter $1500 as your top price and say $500 as your min price, that minimum price will get rid of the basket nonsense and similar listings.
So generally you enter a max price that suits you and maybe experiment with the min price but obviously you’re not going to get one for $99.
simba6
·2 weeks agoThat's been going on since they offered that option. You see a listing for a very good price on a camera, only to see that price is just for a lens cap.
airsheep
·2 weeks agoSadly, as long as ebay gets money from dishonest sellers, very little will be done about them, until enough people report them that they get removed.
aeparts1
·2 weeks agoI address it myself, by not buying from sellers that do that.