Indexing & Searching weirdness

[cosmicray]

This concerns listing 232094783780. It is not a new listing. It has been present as BIN for a long time.

eBay is telling me 'This listing hasn't had any sales in the last 16 months. Please consider revising it.'

OK, no problem, I'll check the marketplace conditions and, if necessary, adjust the price. That's when the indexing strangeness first became apparent.

The title is 'LEGO 7411 Orient Expedition Tygurah's Roar'. The title used to be 'LEGO Orient Expedition Tygurah's Roar (7411)', but I've been tinkering with it today trying to diagnose the problem.

If I search for 'LEGO 7411' it does not show in the results.

If I search for '7411 LEGO' it appears in the results.

If I search for 'LEGO Tygurah's Roar' it appears in the results.

It is my opinion that the first set of search terms is what the average buyer might use, but that's just my opinion.

So why the incongruity in the results ?

/s/ perplexed in Florida (and wanting to sell a few of the 7411's)

[nobody*s_perfect · Accepted solution]

The incongruity is due to a phenomenon which eBay calls "implicit category navigation."  Sometimes eBay chooses to not show all the results, but instead they choose just one subcategory to show.  

When you search on Lego 7411, eBay only shows the subcategory "Complete sets". If you want your listing to show up you have to move it to that subcategory, which actually seems more appropriate for your set.  Like you, most potential buyers don't notice that they are being shown just a partial results (23 listings) and that they'd have to click on "All" to see the full results (32 listings).  

[cosmicray]

Is the (default) category something that is being inherited from the eBay catalog entry ? I see where I can specify a secondary category, but not the primary.

[nobody*s_perfect]

Sorry, I don't sell stuff from the catalog, just used vintage.  But generally it's possible to revise the category of an item. Clearly those other 23 sellers got their listing into that category somehow.

If all else fails, you could end your listing, go to one of those 23 that are already in the Sets subcategory, and use the "Sell now" link that's under the Gallery image on the listing page, to bring up a draft listing in the "Complete sets" subcategory.

[cosmicray]

That would appear to be the source of the problem. I have disabled filling the listing with the defaults, which gives me more control (and responsibility).

[coolections]

Buyers complained for years that they do not want 10,000 listings of anything and everything to show up when searching. It made it nearly impossible to narrow it down to what they actually wanted. In your case Ebay set the default to "sets" becasue most buyers want "sets". Yes, if a buyer wants to see every single logo on the net then they would switch to all categories.

[cosmicray]

But the disconnect here is the search was defaulting one way 'Complete Sets & Packs' while the catalog was (apparently) defaulting to 'Bricks & Building Pieces'.

Now, there is a remote possibility that the default that was applied to my listing was for historical reasons (i.e. the catalog category used to be one way, but has been corrected now). In that case, it might have been nice for eBay to alert me to changes in the catalog, that I might need to react to. I'm not 100% comfortable with that stance, but somehow my listing got out of sync, and people were (generally) not seeing it.

[nobody*s_perfect]

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@coolections wrote:

Buyers complained for years that they do not want 10,000 listings of anything ... Ebay set the default to "sets" becasue most buyers want "sets". Yes, if a buyer wants to see every single logo on the net then they would switch to all categories.

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But this wasn't  a case of 10,000 results; the total number of results for this specific Lego numbered set was 32 yet eBay narrowed down the search resgrdless.