eBay

cord001 · ‎02-01-2023

Hi, I tried chatting to the terrible AI bot that eBay uses but you get nowhere.

I think there is an issue with the search on .com for the term "Garbage" (as in trash, eg: the 1990's band) within the Music category.

Example search:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/176985/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=garbage

Screenshot 2023-02-01 at 17.27.25.png

This returns just 1 result, and its always for this auction: https://www.ebay.com/itm/354550317041

If I do the same result on any other eBay site, eg: UK, Australia, France, Spain or Canada, I get over 1,000 results returned, as I have done multiple times per day for the last 23 years, and it looks something like this

Screenshot 2023-02-01 at 17.28.12.png

This issue on .com started last week, when I first saw that auction appear, I think there is either something wrong with that auction (possibly a character breaking the results) or the search results on .com.

I have tested this with a US VPN enabled to see if it's something related to me being in the UK, but I get the same results.

This set of results can not be correct, there is no way that 1000+ items which were being returned suddenly sold.

The related items sections on the auction that is showing link to other Garbage items on .com, these should all be showing in the search results

eburtonlab · ‎02-01-2023

If a search that has worked well previously suddenly starts behaving badly, often the problem has something to do with a faulty keyword substitution or an inappropriate automatic category navigation issue.

You can bypass many of these sorts of search issues by putting one of your keywords in quotes. This forces eBay to bypass the "smart" features and to search for the literal keywords without any substitution or category switching. You may have to manually specify your category once again.

Try this as a starting point:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=%22garbage%22&_sacat=176985&LH_TitleDesc=0

cord001 · ‎02-02-2023

While this is helpful, this isn't the solution, this is a serious bug on ebay.com, it doesn't happen on local country sites, buyers are all missing out on seeing thousands of auctions with the most likely way users search, whereas sellers are missing out on potentially millions of views because of it.

Is there no way to get this raised as a bug with eBay's technical team?