Newly listed items being abused by sellers
Scenario:
- Seller has dozens of newly listed cards. This part is perfectly fine.
- The same seller keeps relisting the same cards every couple of hours and the sames items are brought right back up to the top of "newly listed."
Normally, I don't care about this for some amount of cards, but this seller in particular is relisting an amount of cards where I have to scroll a lot on mobile and even desktop. I have "items per page" set for 240 but having to scroll down over halfway down before seeing actual newly listed cards.
This is kind of nuts. There should be some kind of limitations to relist the same cards over and over to be seen at the top of the list. I assume it's done to be "more visible" or some janky kind of logic for sellers.
Would be nice to see some deterrence for this behavior.
reallynicestamps
·2 years agoMy own default. I set it up myself.
The eBay default remains Best Match which generally isn't, especially when I am buying in the USA for shipment to me here in Canada.
reallynicestamps
·2 years agoMy default Search is Highest Price plus Shipping.
This knocks out all the low end, fake, and misdescribed listings and allows me to quickly sift down to my price point.
YMMV
mam98031
·2 years ago@reallynicestamps
When did they change that? In my experience the default sort return is Best Match. I had mine set for Lowest first, I restored the default options and Best Match was now the search return.
You click on the down arrow beside Best Match and then you can see your options.
inhawaii
·2 years agoThere are some buyers out there (like myself) who search for something and couldn't care less if it was newly listed or when it was listed.
fbusoni
·2 years agoWould be nice to see some deterrence for this behavior.
My first thought reading your description of the seller's behavior was that he must be suffering horribly from some sort of psychiatric condition.
What he is doing is completely counterproductive and, unless I am mistaken, will have minimal impact on the way many buyers search.
His listing and re-listing the same items can in fact be prevented with a short snippet of computer code.
But lets not hold our breath.
mam98031
·2 years agoAll excellent points. I would just add that we get a lot of our traffic on Ebay through Google searches. When a seller participates in this kind of behavior they pretty much cut off that avenue for buyer all together as Google doesn't re-index that fast.
Google like GTC listing the best.
richard1rst
·2 years agoThen don't search by "newly listed". There are other options. Best match, ending soonest (that would cut them out completely), or by price. And obviously by some degree of specificity if you are looking for some specific card or theme.
selsa84
·2 years agoIf ur hunting for rare items newly listed is the way to go. Rare stuff at a fair price doesn't stay long, it sells
albertabrightalberta
·2 years agoI don't think it's a violation of policy but IMO, it's a waste of the use of the seller's 250 free listings.
I know many sellers (legally) avoid the auto-relisting of GTC listings by ending them and either relisting or selling similar in order to have them come up as newly listed.
In those cases, the seller isn't violating a policy and if they don't mind the extra work, it's okay to do it.
buyselljack2016
·2 years agoCould be a seller with thousands of available to use (not just 250)
I know that I am not clever enough, (I'm challenged just location the on button) but could someone write a program that would do that short interval repeat relisting automatically?
sapphire_studio
·2 years agoBasic store subscribers get 10,000 free listings in the trading card category.
taffgiraffe
OP2 years agoThat explains a lot. And I was being generous with a couple hours and it's still going on.
slippinjimmy
·2 years agoYes, third-party tools such as SixBit that I use could accomplish this using automation if you wanted it to do that. I'm sure it's a function that is coded into many third-party tools.
Even doing it in the Seller Hub is pretty simple, sort Active by listing date, select a recent bunch and end, then from ended unsold select the same bunch and relist. Thing is that in the intervening time between relisting and when indexing is complete (could be minutes or could be hours) nothing is visible in Search.
Personally I think it's a pointless exercise......
monica-sells
·2 years ago@eburtonlab
is this a thing going on out there in 'coding' land?
if so, would that violate policy?
eburtonlab
·2 years agoif so, would that [repeated rapid ending and relisting to keep "newly listed" status] violate policy?
I suppose that would be up to eBay. If eBay was concerned about it, there are many things that eBay could do to make it less effective or to discourage it, probably without needing to change any existing policy.
Any time an item is ended and relisted manually, there is potential for the item to not appear in search for up to 24 hours. In practice, even if indexing does not always take that long, that would seem to put an upper bound on the number of times a seller could quickly end and relist without hiding the item from search more than it actually appears. But that does not mean that some sellers will not engage in self-defeating strategies under the mistaken impression that it helps -- like keyword spamming.
If enough buyers were annoyed by the repeated manual relisting, there are also things that buyers could do to make it ineffective as well, up to and including blocking those sellers' items from appearing in searches.
mam98031
·2 years agoThat is a great deal of work for a seller to do with likely little return on their investment. FYI, why any seller would do all that work every couple of hours is certainly compulsive and NOT productive. A listing is considered a new listing for at least 24 hours.
The order on your search return is Promoted Listings first not matter what your sort is set.
selsa84
·2 years agoBecause it stays closer to the top and newly listed. Seller in my category ends and relists his inventory daily. It used to drum up sales but that's a while back
nobody*s_perfect
·2 years agoI don't know of any eBay policy about this. But as a potential buyer, you can use Advanced search to exclude this seller from your search results.
frugalmarketplace
·2 years ago@nobody*s_perfect
Actually I find relisting items (not daily) and I have not done it for awhile, but maybe every 3 weeks did kick up sales. I don’t think what that seller is doing is wrong, maybe excessive..however ending and relisting did jiggle the sales.