eBay

baku-fan · ‎10-20-2024

I know that eBay reporting for things like "search and browse manipulation" and "keyword spamming" no longer works. I have proof. The proof is - I messaged the seller and point-blank asked them if two specific words in their title were there because of "search and browse manipulation" only. The seller replied "yeah." I reported it to eBay saying exactly that... And an automatic artificial intelligence report investigation said the seller did not violate eBay policy.

I tried it probably about 20 more times after hunting for "search and browse manipulation" violations - and literally every single one of them had the same auto-reply saying AI didn't find anything wrong.

I'm concerned about this because now that "search and browse manipulation" cannot be stopped... **bleep** is the point of the report button anyways?

eburtonlab · ‎10-20-2024

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.