Since my listings showed up when searched by "nearest first" (rarely used by buyer unless they want local pickup) and did not show up when filtered by "price + ship, lowest 1st" (most common search) I do not think it is related to descriptions. I think I have contacted ebay around 6 times in the last 2 years for a similar problem.
Here is the scenario. We use the best offer option. We get an offer that seems low, so I do a search to see if we are over priced. I always search price plus shipping lowest 1st. My item is not there. In each case where I have called in the ebay tech duplicated what I found and said they would open up a ticket. With this issue, my item would show up in searches other than price plus shipping lowest 1st. On one item my part was $100 less (33%), than the next cheapest item. In almost every case we were the lowest price available but were not visible when the buyer searched price plus shipping lowest 1st.
I just did a test and under price plus shipping and there were 527 results. Then I switched to nearest 1st and there were 1700+ results. Best match 1600+, highest 1st 1700+, I changed nothing but the filter. No search had the note that only relevant listings were being shown. I have never seen this fixed or had any feedback from the tech report being submitted. There is clearly a problem with the price plus shipping, lowest 1st search. As a buyer and a seller I find this very frustrating. I am looking for the best price when buying but do not have confidence that I am being shown the best price. We try to be the lowest price as a seller but that does no good if our listing is not being shown to the buyers. In each case I copied my search from my listing title. How can a search engine scanning a database not bring up an exact match?
