Contents of email alerts for saved searches differ radically from running the search on theEBay site

[tao_101]

I think we've all saved a search at some point, whittling it down keyword by keyword, to get exactly the item(s) we're after. I've run into a strange problem over the last few weeks where I have email alerts enabled, but the items in the emails differ radically from the same results if I run the saved search on EBay proper. I went back yesterday and added more keyword exclusions, but this morning the email was full of even more junk. Is is possible that whatever process is generating the emails is dropping some search criteria, like "product category"?

Posting here before I take this directly EBay or just stop all the emails. Thanks.

[tao_101]

Still ongoing, and I'm not the only person reporting it. Why is this not included in the "Current and resolved technical issues"thread?

[eburtonlab]

If the sort order is not specified in the Saved Search URL, is it possible that your default sort order in your account is, say, "Newly Listed", but the Saved Search links in the emails are using "Best Match", which lately is prone to providing additional, loosely-related results?

[tao_101]

Interesting. If I run one of these searches on EBay, the sort order is "Price + Shipping: Lowest First". If I manually toggle the sort to "Best Match", I do see the type of junk that appears in the emails. If I then re-run the search, sort order goes back to "Price + Shipping: Lowest First". So it does appear saved.

If your reference to URL  means the actual HTTP GET request, what should I be looking for to verify the sort order?

Perhaps it's possible that "Saved Search" emails currently just ignore the preferred sort order, no matter what you do?

[eburtonlab]

If the sort order is specified in the search URL, it will have a parameter like this:

&_sop=1

where the number corresponds to the sort order selected.

If that parameter does not appear in the URL, your account's default sort order will be used when you perform a search in your account. If you have not specified a default sort order, I believe "best match" is the default for new users that have not specified a sort order, though it has been a while and that may have changed since the last time I created an account.

Perhaps it's possible that "Saved Search" emails currently just ignore the preferred sort order, no matter what you do?

I have Saved Searches that use different sort orders than my default sort order, so it is possible to save a search with a specific sort order; unfortunately I do not have any Saved Search emails that I can look at to compare the links.