How to END the scourge of multiple-price listings, and fix "sort by price" in one fell swoop!

[kmartind]

Sick of searching for a particular buy-it-now item, sorting by price, and ending up with hundreds of listings at the top that have multiple options with different prices, and the cheapest option (which eBay has sorted to the top because of the low price) is "empty box" or something equally useless, instead of the actual product you were looking for?

This deceptive seller practice ruins the user experience for all buyers.  It has frustrated me so much with certain products that I've given up and purchased elsewhere instead.

The worst part is, this has gone on for years and it would be such a simple fix.  All eBay would need to do is: When sorting by price, always use the highest priced option in each multiple-price listing to determine the sort order.

That's all it would take to largely eliminate all abuse of this feature.

I would recommend that anyone else who is bothered by this also contact support and complain about it, as the more customer feedback they receive, the more likely they are to (finally) do something about it.

[kitschy*loot]

I've just about had it myself. I was searching for sunglasses yesterday and found out that about 75% of sunglass sellers are doing what you describe. 

I usually search highest price first to avoid some of that behavior, but it doesn't seem to matter in that category. Sellers are blatantly selling Oversized retro sunglasses for $3.00-$50.00, but when you click on the listing, all the sunglasses are $50.00 and a pouch is $3.00. Since when is a pouch considered sunglasses these days?

In frustration I reported one seller and put the item on my watch list, where it will usually disappear if eBay takes any action; the listing is still running. They don't care.   

[eburtonlab]

@kmartind 

I agree that eBay could remove the incentive for a lot of these sort of price variation games by changing the way these listings are sorted.

Until eBay does see fit to change things, there are some practical suggestions about avoiding price variation listings in this thread:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Bidding-Buying/How-to-EXCLUDE-listings-for-multiple-items/m-p/29246437...

Unfortunately, now there are some variation listings that do not display any price range; yet when you choose any variation, the price increases, often greatly. These are harder to filter out:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Fashion-Women-Faux-Fur-Warm-Snow-Boots-Winter-Thermal-Classic-Slip-On-Flat-...

[kmartind]

While that's helpful, it's ridiculous to have to use custom javascript in an attempt to work around a system that has been broken and ticking off customers for years.  It probably just doesn't work on items with multiple pull-down menus.

When I have time, I like to report all such listings, something like the following:

Category: Listing practices
Reason: Search and browse manipulation
Detailed Reason: Other search and browse manipulation
Description: Combines an unrelated $x.xx item into listing to manipulate search/sort by price.

However, that is a never-ending process.  There are likely in excess of a million active listings that do this.

[eburtonlab]

@kmartind 

While that's helpful, it's ridiculous to have to use custom javascript in an attempt to work around a system that has been broken and ticking off customers for years.

It is helpful -- and I will take any advantage I can get. It is no more ridiculous than using third party ad blocking software; I do not have to use that either, but all in all, I would rather do that than have to put up with ads.

It probably just doesn't work on items with multiple pull-down menus.

It has been my experience that berserkerplanet's scriptlet will eliminate any listing in a search result that displays a price range, replacing it with a text link.

[kmartind]

It is no more ridiculous than using third party ad blocking software; I do not have to use that either, but all in all, I would rather do that than have to put up with ads.

I personally think it's much more ridiculous than ads as it's part of the most important core functionality of the site.  Pretty much every single user wants a list of buy-it-now items sorted by the ACTUAL price.  Ads are a mere nuisance, but this is a completely broken fundamental feature of the site.  It's like going to the grocery store and on every shelf there is a label that says SALE: $1-$500 and you have to go pick up and examine every single carton of milk and loaf of bread to figure out how much it actually costs.  Nobody would ever put up with that and the store would go out of business.  How can eBay be that blind and deaf to their customers?

[mudshark61369]

@kmartind,

While I agree ebay should be tougher on sellers who use price manipulation in Multi Variation listings, they have proven that they aren't doing anything about it.   As a result I do not sort searches by Price: lowest... 1st.  If I search for an item and find many multi variation listings, especially those with a price too low to be the item I am searching for, I check out the average price for the item, then use the price filter in the left column to exclude the fake listings.  If I know an item is trending at $20, I'll set the lowest price to search at say $16, that way I might find it for 20% less. 

[kmartind]

I check out the average price for the item, then use the price filter in the left column to exclude the fake listings.

That's also a good strategy, though sometimes the listings are so pervasive that I can't even figure out what a good/average price is for a given type of product, but still, I honestly can't understand what eBay's problem is with regard to this issue.  It would be trivial to fix.

Not only does leaving it broken fail to increase revenue, I can pretty much guarantee it's significantly hurting revenue, and it's definitely ticking off hundreds of thousands to millions of customers.  If even 1 in 10000 customers would just report it/complain about it, that would still be far too many complaints to ignore,  but I suspect only dozens actually take the time to do that, and so the issue continues to get ignored.

[mudshark61369]

@kmartind,

  "sometimes the listings are so pervasive that I can't even figure out what a good/average price is for a given type of product".

Use the Advanced Search option for the item, and first select Completed listings. The prices in Green are the sold item prices, by scrolling through those you should be able to get an idea of the average price.  Then hit the back button select Title & Description, and just below that option you can add in a starting price to start your search from. You can also filter out the most egregious sellers, by selecting Location > US only, which should cut down on the number of the fake multi-variation abusers. 

"I honestly can't understand what eBay's problem is with regard to this issue.  It would be trivial to fix. Not only does leaving it broken fail to increase revenue, I can pretty much guarantee it's significantly hurting revenue, and it's definitely ticking off hundreds of thousands to millions of customers".

That would mean changing the corporate mindset of people who believe they are infallible, and have hitched their wagon to dead horses, but still keep flogging them.

[kmartind]

Use the Advanced Search option for the item, and first select Completed listings. The prices in Green are the sold item prices, by scrolling through those you should be able to get an idea of the average price.

Fair enough.  These types of suggestions, though they involve extra and unnecessary effort, would work for probably 95% of my purchases.  Occasionally though, I actually want to include non-US sellers and they're basically all multiple-price , so I don't want to just blanket-exclude all of those.  Many of the sellers may even be doing that only because if they don't then their listings will get buried under all the sellers that do; more out of peer pressure than dishonestly or malice.  It's like the stories we hear about cheating at certain ultra-competitive schools, where so many people started doing it that it became nearly impossible for an honest student to compete.  So, while that doesn't excuse the behavior it's at least understandable.  The best solution is to change policies such that cheating is nearly eliminated, rather than essentially punishing the honest students by giving them poor grades (discouraging the behavior you DO want) and encouraging the cheaters with good ones (incentivizing the behavior you DON'T want).  That's essentially what eBay is doing by ignoring this issue.

eBay really needs to just sort using the highest price in each listing by default (or at least ALLOW customers to sort that way if they want to).  It would remove the incentive to cheat, and over time all the sellers would stop doing it and everyone would be much better off.

[berserkerplanet]

>>Unfortunately, now there are some variation listings that do not display any price range; yet when you
>>choose any variation, the price increases, often greatly. These are harder to filter out:
>>https://www.ebay.com/itm/Fashion-Women-Faux-Fur-Warm-Snow-Boots-Winter-Thermal-Classic-Slip-On-Flat-...

I'm a bit confused here. That listing shows ranged prices in search results, and the bookmarklet to hide ranged prices works to hide that one in search. Has something changed I'm missing? Do you have another example listing and more clarification of why the are difficult to filter out (using the bookmarklet or native search filters)?

When I first read this I started looking at the bookmarklet again, and realized it didn't work on seller search result pages (like //https://www.ebay.com/sch/superduperseller33/m.html or https://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?_ssn=superduperseller33 (then I got sidetracked and wandered off trying to customize the Firefox bookmarks interface to make it easier to edit bookmarklets on the fly... can't figure it out yet - I have a multiline display working in FF3.6.24, but will not work in FF31, Grrrrr.)

Anywho, I reworked the Ranged Price bookmarklet to handle every search result page I can think of so far - regular SCH and DSC type pages, grid or gallery view pages, and specific seller "other items" pages for all those variations.

(there are a lot of commonalities, just some different combinations of page structure, and once I recognized them just took a minor change to the orig bookmarklet logic and addition of 5 bytes on one of the conditional checks)

Will post the updated bookmarklet to the other thread:
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Bidding-Buying/How-to-EXCLUDE-listings-for-multiple-items/m-p/29635477...

[eburtonlab]

@berserkerplanet 

I'm a bit confused here. That listing shows ranged prices in search results, and the bookmarklet to hide ranged prices works to hide that one in search.

The current listing appears to have changed; while the item page shows a single price, the listing that currently appears in search has a range and can indeed be filtered using your bookmarklet.

I will see if I can find the original thread -- a poster was complaining about what I thought was a standard price variation listing. But when the poster walked me through the search the item appeared at the top of the search as having only the 74 cent price with no variation at all. Of course, choosing any variation caused the price to jump up, but there was no effective way to filter the item from the search results page.

The fact that it was so prominent in search may have prompted eBay to yank it or (hopefully) close whatever loophole allowed it to list in that fashion.

If I find another listing with those no-variation fake low price properties, I will let you know.

[eburtonlab]

@berserkerplanet 

Here is the original thread:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Bidding-Buying/1000-s-Million-s-of-Chinese-quot-Bait-and-switch-quot-l...

And here is what I see when I run the search as described by the OP:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=womens+boots&_sacat=0&_sop=15&rt=nc&LH_BIN=1

[berserkerplanet]

I'll take a look at them and see if there is something about them that reliably gives them away in search, and add detection for those results to Bookmarklet v3 if so.

The current v2 update was just to allow the bookmarklet to operate on seller specific search result pages also once I realized it did not.

[hanhunk]

This is a bigger problem than the ranged prices because those I can distinguish easily in the presented sort list, but the other others don't indicate that I will be jumping through hoops to find the item listed at the disclosed price, or that it is for an item that is not pictured. Sometimes there are no products that have any item at the represented price. Flagging them does not remove them, and there are more than the public or CS is willing to deal with.