AI and keyword spamming reporting; bad combination

[vacheron_nl]

When doing research on eBay, ocasionally I see Keyword Spamming. When I do, I always report it. Since a month (might be longer), AI is doing the replies. " We looked into your report and didn’t find the listing to be in violation of our policy. This determination was made using automation or artificial intelligence. "

As a result Keyword spamming in description and Item Specifics is no longer handled as they used to be.

For example:

A Sicura watch with Breitling in the title and item specifics. 

A pocket watch crystal, non-branded, where in Item Specifics a whole list of Compatible brands is listed that is unrelated, such as Rolex and Omega.

My main concern is the mis-use of Item Specifics to spam with Keywords and the fact that AI now is in the lead to make the decision. It leads to bad customer experiences and is where it comes to seller-competition a bad practice.

[eburtonlab]

Although I am not sure how seriously eBay treated reports of keyword spamming prior to using AI, just because you got a form letter response to your report indicating that a bot could not find a policy violation in the listing does not mean that a human won't examine the listing at some point and come to a different conclusion.

The more independent reports eBay receives regarding a listing, the more likely that it will be examined in detail by someone other than a bot, I think.

Plenty of fraudulent listings I have reported have been removed -- even after receiving similar bot form letters -- but I have no way of knowing if the removal was related to my report or someone else's report or some other entirely different reason.

My hope is that the more reporting data that eBay has to work with to train the bots, the more likely the bots will be to predict which listings will be problems sooner, which sorts of reports are correlated with serious issues and should be acted on quickly, and which sorts of reports are frivolous and should be ignored.

[vacheron_nl]

In all honesty, Compatible Brand in the Item Specifics make keyword spamming very easy and that's where I see it happen most often.

What does eBay mean with Compatible? Other words are "suitable, appropriate, suited, fit, capable, convenient",  meaning that I can name every brand I want to in for example my watch band listings. 

But when it comes to Search Manipulation these brands come up in the results, which in my view is not attractive for potential buyers. What would happen if it's not in the Search first result but can only be selected on the left side?

[eburtonlab]

In all honesty, Compatible Brand in the Item Specifics make keyword spamming very easy and that's where I see it happen most often.

Agreed. Many users have been calling for eBay to allow users to bypass item-specifics when searching and allow searching based on item titles alone, as was possible in the past.

Unless that happens, or unless eBay cracks down on keyword spamming, users will have to take other steps themselves to avoid spam listings.