Search & Sort Totally Useless Now

[currietp]

It was bad enough when eBay started letting sellers put multiple items at different prices in a single listing so the listings would come to the top when search results were sorted by price based on the cheapest item.  Sellers quickly figured out that they could list some completely unrelated piece of junk for a low price just to get manipulate the process.  At least originally eBay did show that such a listing was for a range of prices "$1.00 to $96.50" -- although the listing was sorted based on the $1 price.

Now eBay has changed how those multiple price listings are shown in the search results so that they only show the lowest price with no indication that the real price for the items is much higher.

And, to make it worse, now sellers are creating these listings with blatantly no item at all for the lowest price.  There are listings where the cheapest actual item is three or four dollars, and the listing is sorted based on a price of $1.01 for the cheapest "item" but that cheapest item is to have the seller contact the buyer outside eBay to arrange a bulk purchase directly!    Such listings would seem to violate several eBay rules, but eBay allows them and does nothing even when they are reported. (Of course, eBay does nothing about most reports anyway, but these seem more eggregious than most.)