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Sorting by lowest price first makes listings disappear
I searched for a specific motorcycle part, and there are 257 search results. When I choose list cheapest items first, it jumps down to 47 items. And, when sorting through the unfiltered, larger results, I saw many that were cheaper than the cheapest on it showed me when I sorted by cheapest first. And this is not a "streamlining issue" There was no message that they streamlined my results as they do when you get like 35,000 hits for something. And besides, why would they streamline the search when I pick a filter of cheapest first? This is kind of lousy. Yes, when I am buying a 50 year old bike part, I will tend to go with the cheapest item that fits my needs. The price variation in that market is crazy. This really amounts to some sort of social engineering. Maybe they'd rather I pay more so they can take more from the seller huh? Who knows its just annoying to have to sort highest first and then run through pages of listings to get to the cheap ones. (Yeah, forgot to mention, no other filter reduces the number of results, only the cheapest first one)
simba6
·2 years agoThat has been going on for some time now.
j2774
·2 years agoI noticed the same thing!!!! It drives me positively doolally!! I noticed long, long ago that etsy does this, but eBay never used to do until relatively recently. It seems VERY unethical to me, and yes, I think you are right that there is some sort of profit motive in it. Some items I search for will turn up as many as 7K listings. Who can wade through 7K? So, of course I try to order the listings by least expensive first, and boom! Suddenly, now there are only perhaps 520 listings to look at!
bademu42
·2 years agoThe eBay search algorithm is following in Amazon's crappy footsteps by being only vaguely related to what you typed in. It's a little better in that you can still use -foo to weed out stuff that's absolutely not what you wanted, like for instance I was looking up Verizon Xcover Pro, and they kept putting in ATT results in. I accidentally bid on one, fortunately it was a way low bid, and I got outbid, but still, I had to go back and put -att, -715A, etc.
I don't even mind them putting a few sponsered listings on top, just make sure that's big and bold, and doens't take up the whole first page.
soutrikdd-2008
·2 years agoThis is a very critical issue - removing the ability to search by 'lowest price first' definitely will stop serious shoppers (collectors of trains, stamps, comics, such as me) from using eBay as the go-to site to shop/auction/list items.
eBay has clearly done this by design - I tried a workaround of searching by 'highest price first' and then going to the last page and working backwards. Seems they blocked that too - after page 44 or so the screen blanks out with a message saying 'We're unable to show you more than 10,000 results. Please refine your search to narrow your results'.
It's super annoying and frustrating. eBay has become greedy(ier) and have taken a chapter from Amazon's books. Amazon is the first site to block searching by lowest price.
I preferred shopping on eBay when they didn't try to pull such scammy stunts. Seems I will need to find other sites to shop from.
eburtonlab
·2 years agoI tried a workaround of searching by 'highest price first' and then going to the last page and working backwards. Seems they blocked that too - after page 44 or so the screen blanks out with a message saying 'We're unable to show you more than 10,000 results. Please refine your search to narrow your results'.
eBay has long limited searches to 10,000 results -- this is nothing new. Very few users have the patience to sort through so many results.
You can get around that limitation by narrowing your search first, or by splitting your one large search into smaller, non-overlapping searches. For instance, by setting price ranges. eBay even provides default price ranges that split the results into three roughly equal sized ranges.
There are often multiple ways to accomplish any search. If one method does not work, there is likely another method that can be used to achieve much the same results.
Searching by multiple methods is also a great way to determine if there are any blind spots that a particular search technique is subject to, and to potentially find items that other more casual buyers may be missing out on.
bademu42
·2 years agoI think I can still sort Amazon by lowest price, but they ignore what you typed, and won't let you search for only cell phones, say, and not accessories, or if they do, they lump it all in anyway, and they choke you with pages of 5 dollar cases. And they won't even be the right cases, even.
safan80
·3 years agodebbimitchell-hickma-0
OP3 years agoAnd one more thing....I hate that they shove the "ebay motors says it will fit" video in my face every time I scroll through the item pictures. Cheap overseas junk says it will fit anything and everything when it is NOTHING like OEM parts. and the "We need to know what vehicle this is for" NO YOU DONT. asshats.
vbwiz2000
·3 years agoIt appears to me ebay and amazon are becoming increasingly the same in how they do business. this is because ebay sees the amazon business model as being more profitable. the ebay of old, where individuals put used items up for sale, is dying. it is being replaced by billionare controlled listings where lowest price items are hidden from users (amazon business model). instead, ebay will control what you see based on how much money ebay can make showing the listing and in allowing the listing to sell. face it, ebay takes a percentage of sales and what incentive do they have to sell cheap when they can force you to buy expensive. this is the continued consolidation of control of commerce by the top 1,000 billionares who own america (arent you one of the 250,000,000 americans who own basically nothing but a portion of the countless trillions of dollars of national debt?). why do you think consumer prices are shooting through the roof for no reason other than the billionares can jack up prices and are jacking up prices (thank the republican/democratic congress men & women who are getting rich supporting the billionares in doing so). ebay is owned and run by billionares, as is amazon.
this search phenomenon of almost all the items disappearing when trying to return search results sorted by lowest price seems to be a recent change (august, 2023), in fact,it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the lowest price item of anything on ebay. why is that? trying searching for the lowest price of 10lbs of green coffee beans. you cant. because almost all the search results come back for multiple prices of sellers listing 1lb, 10lb, 20lb, etc. you can no long find the lowest price seller for 10lbs of green coffee beans. ebay wants to shaft you, and the people selling coffee beans want to shaft you. they dont want to compete on price. they want to price gouge you endlessly. and apparently ebay is changing the design of its website to allow price gouging by billionares and to discourage, even eliminate competing on lowest price (the lowest price you see will not be the lowest price someone is willing to sell).
the old ebay is dying. i even suspect a merger between ebay and amazon as ebay looks and operates more and more like amazon every day. the more money amazon makes, and the more money ebay makes, all that extra profitability comes on our backs, the average (hopefully) working american who has to pay more and more to support the insatiable appetite of the billionares.
what ebay and amazon are doing is illegal. but, given that congress is filled with criminals, and our major corporations are owned and run by criminals, who the hell is going to stop them?
eburtonlab
·3 years ago@vbwiz2000
The lowest price I can find for a single buy-it-now 10 pound bag of green coffee beans is $56, as seen in this search:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=green+coffee+beans+10-lb&_sacat=38179&LH_TitleDesc=0&_sop=16&rt=nc&LH_BIN=1
Go to the end of the exact results, skip over the two sponsored listings and the one listing that appears to be sold out of ten pound bags and the lowest available result is $56 for decaf. $59.50 for regular.
vbwiz2000
·3 years agoHow many of those search results actually show you the price for only for ten pounds of coffee? Most are for amounts other than 10lbs or are from multiple combine listings.
You have to open up the vast majority of those search results, check them one by one, to see how much they are selling 10lbs of coffee. Ten years ago on ebay the majority of search results showed you how much every seller was selling 10lbs of green coffee beans because sellers did not combine multiple listings. Almost all of those search results are combined and the price of 10 lbs is hidden unless you open up the listing and select 10lbs from the drop-down list.
How does someone know that $56 is the lowest price which you can buy 10 lbs of green coffee beans? Is anyone going to bother to open up every listing with multiple items for sale, one by one, choose 10 lbs from the drop down menus, and verify that $56 is actually the lowest price any seller on ebay is offering 10 lbs of green coffee beans? That seller came up as the lowest listing not because he is necessarily the lowest listing, but probably because he had a listing with only a single item of 10 lbs, not a multiple listing combined in a drop down menu.
And how do you know that your search results are returning listings for all sellers who are offering 10 lbs of green coffee beans? Several users have noticed that when trying to sort by price & shipping leads to items disappearing. Perhaps someone is selliing ten lbs of green coffee beans for less than $56 and their listing is missing from the search results.
This behavior of items disappearing when trying to sort by price is what happens when doing searches on amazon. It didnt used to happen on ebay.
eburtonlab
·3 years agoYou have to open up the vast majority of those search results, check them one by one
No you don't. Not if you sort by highest price.
Start at the bottom, skip over the sponsored listings. I opened three listings in total. The first was sold out of the 10 lb option, the next was the $56 decaf. The third was the $59.50 regular. Done.
Sorting by highest price eliminates the two major flaws in the "lowest price" sort: the excessive filtering, and the sorting by the lowest cost variation of multiple quantity listings.
j2774
·2 years agoI am going to try this. Thank you.
kh-laura
·2 years agoHi everyone,
Due to the age of this thread, it has been closed to further replies. Please feel free to start a new thread if you wish to continue to discuss this topic.
Thank you for understanding.
j2774
·2 years agoExactly! This is highly unethical and immoral in my opinion. Who would shop at a brick and mortar store who did the equivalent? I did not realise Amazon did this, but I know etsy was doing it a long, long time ago. eBay is actually late to the party on this one.
On the other hand, maybe it is exactly this sort of behaviour that is going to force consumers away from on-line shopping and back to brick and mortar stores. What do you think?
I am so disgusted with on-line shopping these days. eBay was a great site in the early years, but it is not now.
Another thing I noticed that changed some long while back was that you could not post questions, answers, or comments on the forums anymore without registering with something/someone. I had no idea who it was even, but I gave up using the forums because of it. I only just looked at the forums today for the first time in eons. What was that all about???
debbimitchell-hickma-0
OP3 years agoWow.
Yeah I figured the part of getting more in fees out. The rest, yeah, well...yeah. 10 years from now I will be outside awaiting the Amazon drone to drop me my weekly ration of genetically engineered protein blocks.
j2774
·2 years agovbwiz2000, this is the most astute analysis and explanation I have read. Thank you. I agree with you 100%. I am so disgusted with the things that some people can get away with here that they could not get away with in other countries.....
ravensbeak
·3 years agoYes, I've had the same problem here, too. It's very frustrating. The old search format before this latest change was much better. When ebay went to this new and "improved" <cough, cough> search, well, in my personal experience, it's made searching for something a miserable and tedious experience. The only way to get a high number of search results is to use the "best match" selection, then you have to wade through the results with prices all over the map just to find the lower prices. If I know the approximate price of the item I'm looking for I will use the minimum/maximum price, but even then it seems like the results are skewed from doing that. Not all appropriate results are shown.
I have several complaints about the new search format and this is just one of them. All in all, in my opinion, this latest search format has made searching for something on ebay a royal pain in the a$$. For me personally, this horrid search format on ebay has made me do something that I never have liked doing... shop more on Amazon. Over many years I've pretty much stayed away from Amazon and almost exclusively shopped ebay. But since the new search format was implemented and my frustrations with it have grown, Amazon is now getting a nice chunk of the money from my shopping that ebay always used to get.
eburtonlab
·3 years agoThe only way to get a high number of search results is to use the "best match" selection, then you have to wade through the results with prices all over the map just to find the lower prices.
Try sorting by "Price plus shipping: highest first" and then starting at the end of the search results and scrolling up. This avoids both the streamlining and the problem with variation listings with an irrelevant 99 cent option that interferes with the "lowest first" sort order.
debbimitchell-hickma-0
OP3 years agothanks. I have done that before, but I saw a search today that changed even with highest first...it was actually a higher number of hits than the original search. So I had the original search, the lowest price was 10 percent of that, and the highest price was 125 percent of the original search. Far out.
debbimitchell-hickma-0
OP3 years agoYes, while Amazon throws in a lot of irrelevant items in their results, I too have shifted the bulk of my online buying in general over there. For vintage used cycle parts, Ebay still has an edge there. For new parts that fit my old stuff, and nearly everything else new, its Amazon for me these days.
I noticed another weirdness today....three different numbers of listings, original hit was lets say 18000. Lowest price first was 8400 and highest price first was 23000! 🤣
j2774
·2 years agoravensbeak I feel the exact same way. eBay is copying etsy on this. I have yet to figure out exactly why they have done this, but I suspect it is to increase profits. All it does it turn me away from eBay.
mudshark61369
·3 years ago@debbimitchell-hickma-0,
If your original search was for Best Match, some of those 257 results may not be for the specific part. eBay is known for adding irrelevant results into searches. You can use the filter in the left hand column to set prices From:$___ To:$____ if you have an idea of what the part costs.
When searching ebay for vehicle parts, especially the lower priced ones, you definitely have to check each seller's feedback profile page and click on the numbers of neutral and negative feedback they've received, to read only those comments. Never go by a seller's feedback percentage alone.
There are many sellers whose low priced items are made in China and have poor fit, low quality materials, and tolerances issues. Some of those sellers drop ship from China so there are longer than stated delivery times. Unbranded items made in China often do not match the OEM specs, that branded aftermarket parts do.
eburtonlab
·3 years agoThere are at least two possible bugs at work with the "Price plus shipping: lowest first" sort order: (1) the lack of the message and link at the top of the results:
(2) the excessive filtering going on for some searches.
Avoiding using the "Price plus shipping: lowest first" sort order seems prudent if you want to be sure to see all results.
For saved searches or searches you have bookmarked, you can avoid the streamlining by adding the following at the end of the address:
deltilogical
·3 years agoMaybe try putting one of the key search terms in " " to stop the reduced volume return when you resort ? I vaguely remember doing this as a work around.
buyselljack2016
·3 years ago............................