Listing titles and searching with "ñ" character
Noticed today that eBay search doesn't handle "ñ" (and probably other non-English characters) very well. I'm trying to figure out the best way to list a Ronald Acuña Jr. baseball card.
If I search using "Acuña," the search results also include "Acuna" - but not vice versa. I assume most users would search for "Acuna" and not bother with the special character.
Would I be best off with "Ronald Acuna Jr." or even "Ronald Acuña Acuna Jr."?
12 comments
pennpicker
·10 months ago800 sold results for Ronald Acuña Acuna Jr
$2,600 highest
6,700+ sold results for Ronald Acuña Jr
$2,600 highest (same price but different card than previous)
33,000+ sold results for Ronald Acuna Jr
$11,995 highest
includes 33 higher results not found in two previous searches
adamcartwright
·10 months agoThis is a good discussion, as I've grappled with this issue also.
When title space is tight, I've settled on using the word I think the average bear would use, but then I include both versions in the description.
wastingtime101
·10 months agojonathanbrightlight
·10 months agoGood point on the Item Specifics, but I'll note that sometimes if it's in there without the special character I'll add it as a second entry with the special character if the field allows it (like Author, which can have multiple entries).
wastingtime101
·10 months agoAnother factor @jonathanbrightlight is considering how the buyer will search. This is why I never put special characters in the title.
If you're searching for ... I don't know ... a Häagen-Dazs t-shirt ... are you going to search using the umlaut and the hyphen or are you just going to search haagen dazs t shirt ? Right, that's what I thought. 😄
Assuming the shopper knows how to spell the brand name, that is. 😆
eburtonlab
·10 months agoIf a search using Acuna finds Acuña, then it would seem that using the keyword Acuna in your title would allow users searching either way to find your listing.
I tried a search for ronald acuña jersey and got 2700 results. There was a note at the top of the results saying "Including results for ronald acuna jersey. Search instead for ronald Acuña jersey". Using that specific link showed 95 results with the special character by disabling the spelling autocorrect.
If you are concerned that someone might be searching in a nonstandard way for one spelling or the other and might not see your listing because of that, you can include the alternate spelling in the item-specifics.
onlinecentral
·10 months agoI would use "Ronald Acuña Acuna Jr." in the title to get the most views.
I haven't figured out how to use Special Characters on my Samsung phone that uses the Android operating system.
You can copy and paste these special characters on a desktop PC.
https://www.alt-codes.net/
Special Characters Help
‘ à Ç ü é â ä
à å ç ê ë è ï
î ì Ä Å É Â À
’ ô ö ò • ù ÿ
Ö Ü Ã ã Ë È á
à ó ú ñ Ñ Î ·
à ¿ Ì ™ ® © °
Ó Ô Ò Õ õ Ú Û
Ù ¢ ¡ — – |
You can hold the Alt key as you enter the number (on the number keypad) on a desktop PC.
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/spanish.html
HTML Entity Codes for Spanish characters:
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type señor you would type señor.
The numbers in parentheses are the numeric codes assigned in Unicode encoding. For instance, because ñ is number 241, señor can also be used to input señor. These numbers are also used with the Windows Alt codes listed above.
HTML Entity Codes for Spanish characters: Capitals
à Á (193)
É É (201)
Ã Í (205)
Ó Ó (211)
Ú Ú (218)
Ñ Ñ (209)
Ãœ Ü (220)
Lowercase
á á (225)
é é (233)
à í(237)
ó ó (243)
ú ú (250)
ñ ñ (241)
ü ü (252)
Punctuation
¿ ¿ (191)
¡ ¡ (161)
º º (186)
ª ª (170)
« « (171)
» » (187)
‹ ‹
› ›
€ €
: — dos puntos — colon
; — punto y coma — semicolon
— — raya — dash
- — guión — hyphen
« » —comillas — quotation marks
" — comillas — quotation marks
' — comillas simples — single quotation marks
¿ ? — principio y fin de interrogación — question marks
¡ ! — principio y fin de exclamación o admiración — exclamation points
( ) — paréntesis — parenthesis
[ ] — corchetes, parénteses cuadrados — brackets
{ } — corchetes — braces, curly brackets
* — asterisco — asterisk
... — puntos suspensivos — ellipses
=-=-=-=-
á = ' + a
é = ' + e
à = ' + i
ó = ' + o
ú = ' + u
ñ = ~ + n
ü = " + u
=-=-=-=-=
Hold the Alt key as you enter the number (on the number pad)
130 - é
144 - É
160 - á
161 - Ã
162 - ó
163 - ú
164 - ñ
165 - Ñ
168 - ¿
173 - ¡
174 - «
175 - »
a_c_green
·10 months agoThe seller that I mentor is selling classical records, many of which are by European composers, so you can imagine how many accents he has to deal with. I pulled a typical search out of the air for testing, using the name of composer Gabriel Fauré, with or without the accented é (which you can key in as Alt+0233). In the second search below, eBay detected the presence of matches using an accented letter, and asked me if I wanted only those entries:
fauré LP: 1,500+
faure LP: 1,200+
"Including results for faure lp. Search instead for fauré LP"
Search repeated with "_blrs=spell_auto_correct" added: 357
So it appears that eBay is equivalencing "e" with "é" if you bother to use the accent initially (1st search above), but not if you don't (2nd search). If you follow the "Search instead for [accented version here]" link, it adds "_blrs=spell_auto_correct" to the previous search and runs it again, yielding only the accented matches that time around.
If I was coding this, I would word that prompt as "Search instead for fauré LP only", which makes it a little more clear that it's a search for that pattern and no variants.
So given all that rigmarole, I would say yes, if you have room in your title (and your Item Specifics), I would use both forms of the name, with and without accents, which looks like it would cover all the bases. If room is tight, I would go with the unaccented form in the title (as I think the average user has no idea how to type accented characters) and use the accented form in the Item Specifics.
tortuga_trading
·10 months agoAgree completely. And bonus points for using the word "rigmarole" (correctly) in a sentence.
jonathanbrightlight
·10 months agoWhat I've usually done is put it in the title of the listing without any special characters, but in the Item Specifics (which are included in the search results), I put the special character. I'll try and track down an example and search for it both ways to check if that works properly!
Edit: yes, it seems to come up in about the same place in search results with either search that way.
slippinjimmy
·10 months agoI do a similar thing but usually I have extra space in my Titles and include both versions of the specific word with the accents or similar non-standard characters.
meme6253
·10 months agoI agree they should offer non-English characters to better inform our foreign customers & to be more specific to a given item.