"Throttling" and "listing limitations" and what is possible | Selling

fbusoni · 2024-08-25T14:07:19.711000Z

Not sure if this has ever been discussed, and I do not mean to sound pedantic, but in the interests of sharing knowledge and stimulating discussion, I'd like to offer some brief observations in layperson terms about what it is possible to do with software. (I am not and never have been an IT professional. Many years ago I built websites in my spare time and learned a great deal about how code can be used.) There is at the moment a thread which features a lot of back and forth about "throttling." Also some references to "invisible selling limits." Some believe these phenomena to be real, others say such activity interferes with eBay's bottom line and that there is no proof of same. It is correct to say that there is no proof. And the reason is simple: if such a practice exists, the ONLY evidence of same is buried somewhere in the trillions of lines of computer code that run Ebay's servers. There is, however, no debate about whether individual selling accounts among the millions that exist here can be throttled. In the same way, for example, that "limiting visibility" can be applied to seller listings to align with a political aim or cultural imperative (like eBay's "Economic Opportunity for All"). And both can be done even as eBay's bottom line is protected since a desired revenue stream is merely one more variable that can be programmed. I used open source software in my work that could be manipulated to do almost anything to individual user profiles, whether the site was an online store, a bulletin board, etc.. Who was to say whether the aim was to "limit visibility" or to "throttle"? To "punish" or to "reward"? Only the site owner. If a client wanted to limit the visibility of a certain product on his online store on Tuesdays between the hours of 11 pm and 4:32 am, and restrict those buyers who could see the product to 47 specific zip codes, I could arrange the software's user interface so that he could do so with ease. If he wanted to tweak the setting to further limit the visibility of that same product strictly to a subset of buyers who had a specific letter and number combination in their username and password, no problem. The refinements, and combinations of refinements, that can be applied to "throttle" or to "limit visibility" or otherwise manipulate what appears on a computer screen for any single seller account are nearly limitless. Now imagine what happens when you add AI as a force multiplier to the mix. A seller receives negative feedback which he / she feels is unjustified. Seller responds in writing and calls the buyer a "moron." AI eventually scans seller reply and sees the offending word. Only eBay knows how it wants to respond, if it opts to do so, but in theory it would be a cinch to program the code to reprimand this seller by hiding his / her listings from eBay search results on Fridays between the hours of 3 pm and 11 pm for a set time period. There is also a reward side. A seller is always polite in his message correspondence. A seller adds a banner and a video to his store front fills out ALL the recommended fields, as eBay suggests. This seller periodically refunds buyers who pay too much in shipping... and seller regularly sends coupons to buyers. Perhaps eBay says "Wow, this seller deserves to have his listings put at the top of the search queue every other weekday for three weeks." In both the "punishment and reward" scenarios, there will be no discernible cause and effect because it might take weeks for AI to find what it is looking for. And yes, all of this most certainly could have an impact on whether one's promoted listings achieve the desired results or not. Really, there are only two constraints to all of this: the sanctity of eBay's bottom line (which obviously would factored in to the equation when all these calculations are being made so as to preserve revenue) and the imagination. regards to all

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"Throttling" and "listing limitations" and what is possible | Selling | eBay Community