Check your search standings.

[toby0711]

CHECK IF YOUR LISTINGS APPEAR AT ALL!!

I have been selling antiques/china/glass etc on EBay for around 20 years. Today, I thought I would check the standings of my listings when searched for. I performed a search for ‘SPODE ITALIAN’ (of which I have 29 listings with those words in the title) – and the sorted them into NEAREST FIRST. Only three of my listings appeared.

 Five of my Spode Italian listings are within the £100 to £225 price range - so I resorted under HIGHEST PRICE. None of my 5 listings within this price range appeared anywhere in the list.

I was given lots of EBay babble by Customer Services about algorithms and the mysterious ways in which they sort listings. My response is that when we instruct the algorithm to give us nearest first or highest price first then that is what we should get – there is no excuse about the way in which algorithms work which would give us any other outcome.

I await the investigation being carried out by EBay on this particular problem.

Has anyone else had this problem? If not, then check your listings now.

[shonnaspretties]

Maybe start a new thread that isn't solved & there has to be something going on with the search for so many sellers to be seeing such a large decrease in sales. Many come along and try to explain it away but so many people have years of statistical data and should be doing somewhere around (XX%) of business right now and just aren't. It's extremely frustrating!

[barrys_chainsaw_shop]

I too was checking some listings recently and could not see them in the search results.  The search did have the banner at the top that stated some of the search results had been omitted and I was using a 'Lowest Price" first filter.  These were all fixed price items with calculated shipping.  What I found was that if I changed them to Free Shipping, they showed up in the search, even though the cost was the same (I added the shipping cost to the item price).  This was very repeatable.  I have a hunch that the Cassini engine that drives the searches may give preference to Free Shipping items since that is what eBay wants us all to use.  Or looking at it the other way, you are potentially penalized if you don't use Free Shipping.