When is Ebay going to fix this BUG IN THEIR SEARCH ALGORITHM that must be costing Ebay MILLIONS?

[konksplatt]

There is a significant bug in the Ebay search algorithm. I believe this bug SIGNIFICANTLY affects Ebay sales. This bug causes probably half of my inventory to not show up in buyer's search results. This bug significantly affects my sales. My sales can be searched to see I am a reasonably high volume seller for the category. I will show I am not the only seller affected by this bug. This bug will more likely affect sellers with larger amounts of items listed, like myself. Therefore, this bug affects Ebay's earnings. I have called "help" at least 5 times and I could provide the case numbers for each if needed. Every time I call I spend an hour on the phone explaining this bug to the person, finally showing them what the issue is, finally having them see it, documenting it all, only to never hear from anyone again and the bug does not get fixed. Therefore, I am trying this approach.

Below is one example in detail, but holds in many cases. I sell especially in the sports memorabilia trading card category. For example, type "1960 topps psa yogi berra" into the Ebay search box.  To be clear for a not sports card person what it being search for: this is a "baseball card", 1960 is the year the card was made, Topps is the brand, PSA is the grading company, and yogi berra is the player. Select "buy it now", all categories, then select sort "price +shipping: lowest first".  This is a VERY common method for buyers to search. Buyers who want to buy now, not in auction, and therefore search price lowest first.  This defines this item. At the time of writing this 21 results are displayed. Now, change the search to sort "Price + shipping: highest first." At the time of writing this 25 items show up.  Four items DISAPPEARED when searching for price lowest first! THIS IS AN EXAMPLE IN A NUT SHELL OF THE PROBLEM. When there is a list of items in a column and the user sorts by lowest first versus highest first, the user does not expect items to disappear as they do on Ebay! So what is happening?

Here is what is happening. I am one seller. I have 4 different 1960 topps psa yogi berra cards listed. They are all DIFFERENT grades, or conditions, so they are all DIFFERENT cards listed at different prices. These cards are :

1960 Topps #480 Yogi Berra PSA 3 Graded Baseball Card MLB New York Yankees

1960 Topps #480 Yogi Berra PSA 3.5 Graded Baseball Card MLB New York Yankees

1960 Topps #480 Yogi Berra PSA 5 Graded Baseball Card MLB New York Yankees

1960 Topps #480 Yogi Berra PSA 8 (OC) Graded Baseball Card MLB New York Yankees

Note that although these are the "same" card, they have different grades or conditions. The grades are 3,3.5,5, and 8 (OC). These are vastly different cards because as any collector knows, condition is a huge part of collecting.  The price varies significantly depending on condition. THESE ARE DIFFERENT CARDS!

Another very big collectible seller, Dean's Cards, has two of these cards listed:

1960 Topps #480 Yogi Berra Yankees HOF PSA 7 - NM

1960 Topps #480 Yogi Berra Yankees HOF PSA 6 - EX/MT 11B 00 0255

These are also DIFFERENT cards because of the grade or condition, and listed with much different prices.

If you look carefully, when the buyer sorts by price lowest first, which again is likely the most common search to do, the only card that I have listed that shows up in the search is:

1960 Topps #480 Yogi Berra PSA 3 Graded Baseball Card MLB New York Yankees

and the only card that shows up for Dean's Cards is:

1960 Topps #480 Yogi Berra Yankees HOF PSA 6 - EX/MT 11B 00 0255

The other three cards I have listed DO NOT SHOW UP! The other card that Dean's Cards has listed DOES NOT SHOW UP! Therefore, a buyer searching for this card would have NO IDEA that these other choices of cards with different conditions and prices even exist! I have many, many cards listed that have several examples of the card listed for different conditions. This bug in the Ebay system occurs for all of them as far as I can see. The Ebay search algorithm seems to believe these are the same cards and removes them, but only removes them when sorting price lowest first and not price highest first. I could understand the algorithm doing this for cards that are also the same grade, but these are different grades and therefore different cards. This means that like only half of the cards I have listed on Ebay show up in Ebay search results. My sales have been significantly affected, and likely many other sellers, which means Ebay sales have been affected. THIS BUG IN THE SEARCH ALGORITHM HAS BEEN PRESENT FOR A YEAR AND NEEDS TO BE FIXED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kensgiftshop]

Search has been screwed up for years.

My sales went to nothing and noticed nothing was showing up in searches, so I just pulled my listings earlier this year.

[nilis13]

Something happened at least for me, 2nd week in May - My sales have tanked, views/impressions down also.  At least 70% of my listings have no views? I list daily.  I did call and rep told me there was an issue as my impressions & views based on my account should not be like this & others have called also.  So far nothing has changed since - he said he would put a ticket in, usual response.  This morning, each time I go to revise anything I get "an upstream" error, refresh and then it's ok - it's been glitchy since last week.  I have been doing this here for 19 years, so very disappointing. 

[eburtonlab]

If an obvious problem with search persists, and it seems like the problem would cost millions of dollars of sales, there are three main possibilities.

One: eBay may not be aware of the problem. Seems unlikely in this case.

Two: eBay is aware of the problem but the fix is not obvious or easy to implement. Also unlikely in this case.

Three: eBay is aware of the problem but does not think it is actually costing millions of dollars of sales, or else eBay thinks that it is not actually worth fixing, or that fixing it will actually result in fewer sales. Or perhaps eBay is unaware of the true extent of the problem.

The "Price plus shipping: lowest first" sort order provides filtered results -- often drastically filtered. And the option to "see more results" may not always be shown as it should. The filtering may vary depending on the keywords used.

Some filtering is obviously intended; there is a message that often appears indicating results have been streamlined or filtered. Someone programmed that on purpose. But the filtering may not be intended to be as drastic as it sometimes is. So perhaps eBay is not aware of how badly the feature is failing for some keywords.

If you encounter a drastically filtered result for a keyword search using a desktop browser, you should be able to use the "Feedback" link in the lower right corner of the search results, or the "Tell us what you think" link at the bottom of the page to provide feedback on your search to eBay developers. The more users provide info, the more likely something is to be done about the over-filtration problem.

You can avoid that problem entirely by using a different sort order.

If you have few results, try sorting by "highest first", then starting at the end of the results, scroll up instead of down. This also avoids the problem of variation listings with low-cost variations appearing at the top of the lowest-first sort.

If you have a bookmarked or saved lowest-first search that you use a lot, you can avoid the filtration by adding the following to the end of the search URL, then saving the resulting search:

&_blrs=recall_filtering

If a search returns results that do not appear to contain your chosen keywords in the titles or item-specifics, try putting one of your search keywords in quotes.

Using quotes around one of your search keywords forces eBay to avoid any keyword substitutions or corrections and search for literal matches only.

[a_c_green]

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@eburtonlab wrote:

The "Price plus shipping: lowest first" sort order provides filtered results -- often drastically filtered. And the option to "see more results" may not always be shown as it should. The filtering may vary depending on the keywords used.

Some filtering is obviously intended; there is a message that often appears indicating results have been streamlined or filtered. Someone programmed that on purpose. But the filtering may not be intended to be as drastic as it sometimes is. So perhaps eBay is not aware of how badly the feature is failing for some keywords.

---

I would say that by this time they are painfully aware of the problem, which is not a Search issue but a Result Sorting issue. The Sort Order is a user-selectable option on how to arrange the Search results; it's not a factor of the search itself.

Any other of the available coded options will return much the same number of results (generally about the same number, give or take a few, which I would attribute to system variances), except for "Price + Shipping: Lowest First," which returns a dramatically lower number, sometimes less than 50% of the matching Search records. It appears to have some kind of de-duplicating flag set that the other sort orders do not, removing otherwise-valid results for no apparent reason. (I don't know if it thinks it's removing duplicate listings, or if it's trying to screen using some other logic instead.)

On some platforms (I think mostly mobile), selecting that Sort option will then be followed by a popup offering to show more results in that Sort order, without the "Streamlining" of the first go-round. This euphemism ("streamlining") looks like a seriously awkward coding patch, offering to execute a corrected version of the "Price + Shipping: Lowest First" Sort without the problem flag setting. It appears that no one wanted to go into the original code to fix that Lowest Price option, but instead stuck a piece of followup code onto that branch that offered to do the Sort properly this time.

It's been this way for literally years, and there has been very little if any discussion from eBay about what the code is trying to do there.

[tobaccocardyahoo]

I might be costing you money but I am not sure that Ebay is losing much business.

The search results are giving buyers plenty of graded cards to choose from, even if they are not given all of your cards or all of Deans cards to choose from.

It may just be an income distribution issue, not any lost sales for Ebay.

That is pretty common to many of the searches that sellers complain about.

This could be a "it's not fair" thread. It has never been fair.

[eburtonlab]

except for "Price + Shipping: Lowest First," which returns a dramatically lower number, sometimes less than 50% of the matching Search records.

I have seen searches that drop the number of results from millions to hundreds by changing the sort order.

Try this search, for instance:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=topographical+postcards&_sacat=0&_sop=10&_ipg=120

Then change the sort order to "Price plus shipping: lowest first" and watch the results go down. The "streamlining" message does not appear at all. Some buyers may have no idea that they are not seeing all the results available.

eBay may be aware of the issue generally, but eBay is obviously OK with the idea of the sort order changing the number of results. The drastic filtering is entirely a function of the precise keywords used, and if users do not report individual searches that show those drastic results, eBay techs may be assuming that the problem is limited to a few odd keywords and not significant enough to address.

Lately the "Best match" sort has begun to have the opposite problem; showing more results than other sort orders.

[konksplatt]

I do appreciate the interesting and thoughtful comments. Some great points being made. From my perspective though, the reality is that I sell on multiple platforms. My Ebay sales used to be 80% of my sales while now it is more like 45%. As far as I can see, the reason for this significant change is simply that my items do not show up in Ebay search results. If buyers can't see them, they will not purchase them. It is possible that by using a search algorithm that sacrifices having items from higher volume sellers like myself show up in search results, that their overall sales are not affected, but it is hard to understand that in a time when every bit counts, that this could be acceptable. I do not understand how Ebay could be comfortable with having a search algorithm that when a search with 21 hits is used 4 items are excluded, but it is true that there may be other factors involved. Thanks for the comments. Hopefully, someone in the Ebay search team fully appreciates this issue and the decisions behind this.

[a_c_green]

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@eburtonlab wrote:

Try this search, for instance:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=topographical+postcards&_sacat=0&_sop=10&_ipg=120

Then change the sort order to "Price plus shipping: lowest first" and watch the results go down. The "streamlining" message does not appear at all. Some buyers may have no idea that they are not seeing all the results available.

---

Well, for me, I do get the "streamlining" message: 

...but that's known to be just a flaky software patch, so it doesn't surprise me that I am seeing it here (on a Windows 10 box running Chrome) where you're not seeing it in your own testing.

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@eburtonlab wrote:

Some buyers may have no idea that they are not seeing all the results available.

---

Yes indeed; perfectly valid search results are simply being dropped on the floor, but only for that one specific choice of sort order. It has "coding error" written all over it, a sort option with some flag setting accidentally left in place where all the other options don't use it.

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@eburtonlab wrote:

eBay may be aware of the issue generally, but eBay is obviously OK with the idea of the sort order changing the number of results.

---

 I don't know if I would say that they're okay with it -- the presence of that followup "streamlining" prompt (which triggers a second attempt at sorting the results that does not accidentally remove any listings) suggests that they made an attempt at patching the sort option without disturbing the original code.

---

@eburtonlab wrote:

The drastic filtering is entirely a function of the precise keywords used, and if users do not report individual searches that show those drastic results, eBay techs may be assuming that the problem is limited to a few odd keywords and not significant enough to address.

---

But no, it's not a result of the keywords used for the search; it's entirely a result of the Sort By choice that's selected for sorting the results. The number of listings in the search result set should not be affected by a Sort choice that's simply supposed to order them by Price + Shipping: Lowest First. Instead, that specific Sort choice is also applying some kind of unwanted filter that is throwing out large percentages of valid results.

eBay has not shown any desire to discuss this at all, so we can only guess at why they have not been able to fix it.

[eburtonlab]

I don't know if I would say that they're okay with it -- the presence of that followup "streamlining" prompt (which triggers a second attempt at sorting the results that does not accidentally remove any listings) suggests that they made an attempt at patching the sort option without disturbing the original code.

Prior to the "streamlining" message there was a different message, with a link to "see all results". Using the "see all results" link (or the newer "see more results" link) adds an extra parameter to the search that undoes the filtering.

If eBay did not want the filtering to occur by default, eBay could simply make the "see all results" search the default by adding that parameter to the search.

The fact that eBay has not done that at any point in the last five years leads me to conclude that eBay intends there to be some filtering of the "lowest first" sort.

But no, it's not a result of the keywords used for the search; it's entirely a result of the Sort By choice that's selected for sorting the results.

It is both: keywords and sort order. And, to some extent, the number of results. Only "lowest first" sort order produces the filtering above a certain number of results. Only certain keyword combinations produce the drastic filtering. Change the sort order or the keywords and the filtering changes.

[regis23]

I encountered a similar issue - my listings are not showing up for some countries, to which I ship the items per my shipping policy. For example, if I choose the shipping to the US, the listing is showing up (I'm searching with item no for my item to show up):

if I switch "ship to" country, let's say, Greece, I get this:

Now if I go directly to the listing page, I can choose the shipping to Greece with no issues:

however, the item does not show up on my store or search.

I contacted eBay about this, and they mentioned something about "a glitch", but no further updates were provided. I pinged some of the members of the eBay team here in the forum, as well, but had no response.

[urban_picker]

I have been complaining about the search mess for a very long time now and have said many many times, it's got to be costing them millions because it costs me at $200 a day for over a year now since the Ai change.

[rudy2828]

Just started selling my childhood cards, and noticed that after you check off the grade sometimes it doesn't take.  

[rudy2828]

Sounds just like Quickbooks Online. They say they make note of it and blah blah blah. Nothing changes.

[konksplatt]

I am writing on this again for three reasons

1) It has not been fixed.

2) I encountered a particularly egregious example of this bug which I will show.

3) One of the biggest card dealers Ebay had, Burbank Sportscards, has publicly announced that they are leaving Ebay for Fanatics. There is discussion other dealers may follow. This is significant to what I am discussing here because, as I pointed out already, this bug in the Ebay search algorithm affects sellers who have a lot of cards listed, i.e. larger dealers. Therefore, this particular dealer's sales were likely affected by this bug. If this dealer's sales were better, perhaps they would have been less likely to leave Ebay. THIS BUG MUST BE ADDRESSED.

As I will show below, just for the examples I show, only 15% of my listings are shown to buyers, and only 3% of the total value of these listings is shown to buyers. Obviously, this would have a HUGE affect on sales.

Here is an egregious example of the bug as of 8/11/2024.

Search for the collectible vintage baseball sports card "1949 Remar PSA Jackie Jensen." Here "1949" is the year, "Remar" is the brand, PSA is the grading company (by far the most used, collected, and popular grading company), and Jackie Jensen is the player. This is a very common type of search. Now, sort the search by "Sort: Price + Shipping: lowest first." I suggest that this is a  very commonly used filter as a buyer.  I would suggest that almost everyone wants to get an equivalent item for the lowest cost.  Searching by price lowest first allows the buyer to readily scan listings for value as a function of condition. For cards, condition is everything. Note that in this case, filtering by buy it now versus including auctions does not change this discussion because this card is so rare there are no auctions of it currently running. So, if this search is entered two different listings show up:

1949 Remar Baking Bread Jack Jackie Jensen Oaks PCL PSA 2 Graded Baseball Card $49.96

1949 REMAR BREAD JACK JACKIE JENSEN PCL PSA 8 OC OAKLAND OAKS $199.99

The top card is my card, and the the second card is a second seller's card. (Note that the second seller's card is shown twice because they are "sponsored." This is not relevant to the point I am making. Two different cards are shown in the search as stated by the Ebay search algorithm "2 results for 1949 remar psa jackie jensen").

Now, switch the filter to "Sort: Price + Shipping: highest first." You will see 6 different cards show up. As stated by the search "6 results for 1949 remar psa jackie jensen". These are:

1949 Remar Baking Bread Jack Jackie Jensen Oaks PCL PSA 7 Graded Baseball Card $269.96

1949 REMAR BREAD JACK JACKIE JENSEN PCL PSA 8 OC OAKLAND OAKS $199.99

1949 Remar Baking Bread Jack Jackie Jensen Oaks PCL PSA 6 Graded Baseball Card $109.96

1949 Remar Baking Bread Jack Jackie Jensen Oaks PCL PSA 5 Graded Baseball Card $89.96

1949 Remar Baking Bread Jack Jackie Jensen Oaks PCL PSA 4.5 Graded Baseball Card $79.96

1949 Remar Baking Bread Jack Jackie Jensen Oaks PCL PSA 2 Graded Baseball Card $49.96

Five of the six cards listed are cards I am listing. It is important to note that each of the cards I have listed has a different condition grade, that is the "number." THESE ARE DIFFERENT CARDS. In card collecting, condition is everything. A collector may only want a higher grade card, and is willing to pay for it. These are different cards and it is imperative that all cards are shown to the buyer. The buyer may be looking for a high grade version of the card, not want the low grade PSA 2. After searching, they assume that no other cards exist on Ebay because they are not shown the other cards and do not anticipate that other cards would show up if they changed the sort from price lowest first to price highest first. Then after their unsuccessful search, they would purchase the card elsewhere. Ebay loses the sale. I lose the sale.

It is important to note that when sorting a column in a spreadsheet from lowest first to highest first, the order is simply reversed, items are not removed as they are here. A buyer would not anticipate this happening in their Ebay search.

It appears clear that what is happening is that while the Ebay search algorithm works properly when sorted by price highest first, showing all cards that satisfy the search parameters, when the search is displayed as price lowest first the algorithm somehow assumes that all cards listed by a seller are the same, which they are clearly not, and only shows one card, the cheapest one. Since it is the bigger dealers in the hobby that are more likely to have the card available in multiple conditions, it is the bigger sellers on Ebay that are mainly affected. I have already shown in my first post that other big dealers are affected by this bug, so it is not just me.

To make matters even worse in terms of dollar amount of sales, the search is only showing the buyer the lowest grade card that I have listed. This is by far the cheapest card.

When changing the sorting of a column in a spreadsheet from highest first to lowest first, one does not expect that rows are removed! This is what is happening here.

As a dealer with a large inventory, I have many cards where I have the card in multiple conditions available to the buyer. These are all listed, but do not show up in Ebay searches. Here are just some other examples that I happened to look at recently.

If a buyer searches for "1960 Topps PSA Bart Starr" with the buy it now and sorted by price lowest first, I have 8 cards listed and only 1 card shows up. The 8 cards are:

1960 Topps #51 Bart Starr PSA 2 Graded Football Card Green Bay Packers NFL $36.96

1960 Topps #51 Bart Starr PSA 3 Graded Football Card Green Bay Packers NFL $53.96

1960 Topps #51 Bart Starr PSA 4 Graded Football Card Green Bay Packers NFL $68.96

1960 Topps #51 Bart Starr PSA 5 Graded Football Card Green Bay Packers NFL $119.96

1960 Topps #51 Bart Starr PSA 5 (MK) Graded Football Card Green Bay Packers NFL $68.96

1960 Topps #51 Bart Starr PSA 8 (OC) Graded Football Card Green Bay Packers NFL $156.96

1960 Topps #51 Bart Starr PSA 9 (OC) Graded Football Card Green Bay Packers NFL $262.96

1960 Topps #51 Bart Starr PSA 6 Graded Football Card Green Bay Packers NFL $156.96

 The only card of these that shows up when the buyer searches for buy it now with price lowest first is the cheapest and lowest grade version "1960 Topps #51 Bart Starr PSA 2 Graded Football Card Green Bay Packers NFL $36.96." I have 8 cards listed with a total value of $925.68 and the only card shown to the buyer is the 1 card at $36.96. All cards show up if the buyer sorts from price highest first.

If the buyer searches for "1960 Topps PSA Unitas", I have 8 cards listed, but only 1 shows up. The cards I have listed are

1960 Topps #1 Johnny Unitas John Unitas PSA 4 Graded Football Card Colts NFL $89.96

1960 Topps #1 Johnny Unitas John Unitas PSA 1 Graded Football Card Colts NFL $39.96

1960 Topps #1 Johnny Unitas John Unitas PSA AUTH Graded Football Card Colts NFL $29.96

1960 Topps #1 Johnny Unitas John Unitas PSA AUTH Graded Football Card Colts NFL $73.96

1960 Topps #1 Johnny Unitas John Unitas PSA 3 Graded Football Card Colts NFL $73.96

1960 Topps #1 Johnny Unitas John Unitas PSA 5 Graded Football Card Colts NFL $144.96

1960 Topps #1 Johnny Unitas John Unitas PSA 1 (MC) Graded Football Card Colts $39.96

1960 Topps #1 Johnny Unitas John Unitas PSA 6 Graded Football Card Colts NFL $269.96

 I have 8 cards listed totaling $762.68 and only 1 card is shown to the buyer if they search buy it now with price plus shipping lowest first which is "1960 Topps #1 Johnny Unitas John Unitas PSA AUTH Graded Football Card Colts NFL $29.96". If the buyer flips the search to price highest first, all cards show up in the search.

If the buyer searches for "1984 Topps 358 PSA Joe Montana", I have 5 cards listed, but only 1 shows up when the buyer searches buy it now with sort price lowest first. (Note the 358 is the card number which needs to be included in this case because there are several different Joe Montana 1984 Topps cards made). The cards I have listed are:

1984 Topps #358 Joe Montana San Francisco 49ers PSA 8 NM-MT Graded Football Card $49.96

1984 Topps #358 Joe Montana San Francisco 49ers PSA 9 MINT Graded Football Card $69.94

1984 Topps #358 Joe Montana 49ers GEM MINT PSA 10 Graded Football Card NFL $1996.96

1984 Topps #358 Joe Montana San Francisco 49ers PSA 7 Graded Football Card NM $29.96

1984 Topps #358 Joe Montana PSA A Graded Football Card San Francisco 49ers NFL $22.96

I have 5 cards listed for a total of  $2169.78. The only card that show up in the search is"1984 Topps #358 Joe Montana PSA A Graded Football Card San Francisco 49ers NFL $22.96" . All cards show up if the search is sorted price highest first.

Therefore, for just this very small subset of my listings, I have 26 cards listed and only 4 show up in a search. That is 15% of the existing listings are shown to buyer when they are searching for this card and enter the proper search parameters. In terms of total dollar amount sales, the 26 cards are listed at $4457.94. The 4 cards that show up in Ebay searches to the buyer value at $139.84.  That is 3% of the total value. It is no small wonder my sales have plummeted. Importantly, this is the case for other dealers that sell a large amount of cards as well.

Also, as a I mentioned earlier, I have spend literally hours on the phone multiple times with customer service help center explaining this issue with no results, which is why I resort to this avenue.

I can only hope someone in Ebay with the knowledge to address this issue reads this. It saddens me to watch my sales on Ebay, which used to be 80% of all my sales on all sites, dwindle to like 35% of all my sales. I attribute this to the bug in the Ebay search algorithm.