Search manipulation

[xadonxander]

Is there anyone else that is sick of the search manipulation going on? I am fed up with searching for an item and the searches come up with very low prices. When I click on them the low price is not even related to what I search for. There are so many of these listings the searches are spammed by them. I read the ebay discussions and it said to report the listing, how can anyone report 75% of the listings on ebay? This could be fixed if the variation option had to be items of the same price. Another option would be a hide variation option on the search. I have been using amazon more and more because I can not find what i am looking for on ebay. I cant imagine the business they loose overall because they will not correct this problem.

[shipscript]

eBay is aware of this "bait and switch" problem where sellers (mostly from China) list similar items in a variation and then add a cheap bait item, like a bag, for 99 cents. All we can do at the moment is report them. When reporting that type of listing, select these options:

1. Listing practices
2. Search and browse manipulation
3. Other search and browse manipulation

This problem might be resolved when eBay requires using the catalog and requires a UPC or EPID in the variation because the cheap bait won't match the catalog item.

I like your idea of normalizing the cost of all items in a variation. But the most common examples of a variation, a shirt in different sizes and colors, or shoes in different sizes, might not actually cost the same due to different manufacturing costs or due to the limited availability and production of some colors or sizes. 

Instead of requiring all items be the same price, perhaps they could be somewhere near the same price, within a certain percentage spread. We could easily argue that if the item prices differ too significantly, then they aren't really variations of the same item. Something must be significantly different to affect the price so much. But that won't work when the variation contains groups of quantities, like a set of 5 or 10 or 25.

What about a demotion in search for too large a spread? The problem then is that the cheap bait would just be listed at a higher price to keep within the range, but at a price that is lower than the real item. So your idea of absolutely matching prices would be better. What if absolutely matching prices in a variation were given higher rankings than a spread?

The cheating listing performs better than its complying peers when searching by lowest price first.  What if "lowest price first" search doesn't actually pull the lowest item in a variation? What if it calculates a median for ranking? The bad sellers could still game the system, but not as successfully.

When a listing contains variations, eBay currently displays the spread price in search. Most can see from the spread whether a bait item is included, but can't confirm until opening the listing, thereby improving the listing's "interest" ranking, which is the intent of the violator. So what if the display starts with, and sorts by, the median and then shows the spread as a parenthetical?

Having variations disappear entirely in search would be at cross purposes to eBay's reasoning behind pushing variations at sellers. The variation purpose is to reduce clutter by lumping similar items, not to remove items from search entirely.

I think it would be a great idea for sellers to formulate ideas and solutions that could be implemented by eBay. As we can see, every solution will have a downside for legitimate sellers. Can we contain the violations without further damage to compliant sellers?