Just wondering ----a question about Search

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

I wasn't feeling too well yesterday, so wasn't as attentive as I usually would be, but one thing I noticed at ebay Open was this: It seemed we were being told that ebay is less reliant on "Search" than it used to be....and is probably working to reduce reliance on Search even further.

I really wonder at this point, how many sales are being made from what I'll call "Search Classic" ( the Search Results Page), and how many are being made from the items stuffed into listing pages, how many from new features such as  "Shop The Look", how many from social media links and search engine placements, etc?

I'm certainly not saying Search Classic is going away, nor am I saying that it makes up only a small percentage of conversions....just that I wonder if that percentage has been declining. ebay has been making changes to Search Classic for quite a while now, including of course, the presence of promoted listings, and the algo is frankly more opaque than ever, with ebay "personalizing" Classic Search to such an extent that Buyer A and Buyer B might be shown very different things, even when using the exact same search term. 

Unfortunately, I don't see much on ebay's open agenda to suggest that ebay is going to provide any real tips on how sellers can navigate all this...just the standard "best practices" (good photos, use IS, etc)

Features such as "Shop The Look" are less "search" and more "browse". I have long said that part of the success of early ebay was that it was easy to browse. In the early days, with relatively few listings, I could get up, have a cup of coffee and literally scroll through ALL the newly listed items in a given category before I finished my coffee.  Things like "Shop the Look" are designed for scrolling and impulse buys. As ebay moves more and more into this sort of thing, I strongly suspect great photos---not just good photos---will become much more important. Yet the Shop The Look choices will still be made by bots looking for listing data that matches what the bot wants to see....which means IS will remain very important. 

It would be nice if ebay would do a deep dive into these changes, and what they mean for sellers and seller strategy. 

[toomuchstuffagain35]

If they're moving to 'browsing' (impulse buys), it's a crying shame they deleted so many sub categories (like Christmas ornies etc) that buyers used to do exactly that.

[toomuchstuffagain35]

---

@redlinear wrote:

eBay cannot make the basic/classic search function work as it used to.  You know, where you type in words and it finds listings with those words in the title.  
They are beyond that. 
They have Too much invested to go back to what most would agree is an Accurate Search Function.
In order to do that, eBay would have to do away with Promoted Listings and other gimmicks designed to keep us guessing, and keep us paying more thinking it might help.

---

IOW, they'd have to stop manipulating search.

[redlinear]

This weeks folly found.
Just walked by a RZR 800 Transmission Case.  Wondered why it was still here?
Ran a simple search.     (RZR 800 Transmission Case)
There it was, number three out of 20 results. 
So, to see just how bad $high I really was, I did what I think most anybody would do if they were looking to buy one...I sorted Low$ to High$

It disappeared. 
I know it's not "hidden" because eBay doesn't hide your listings. 
Just not sure where they didn't hide it to though.

[retired4fun2013]

It is if you speak Latin.

[retired4fun2013]

It annoys me to no end that eBay drives people away from my listing by dumping in all those other "similar" listings before anyone can even get to my item, resulting in possibly never getting to my item. That, to me, shows a great deal of disrespect for the sellers. I'm not paying for my store to list an item, only to have eBay try and drive away my potential customers by displaying all those other sellers' items before they can get to mine.

[retired4fun2013]

Just to be clear, the developers aren't the actual programmers, the ones who actually make the change in the code. Programmers do the grunt work of whatever they have been told to do by those developers who are higher up in the food chain, speaking as a former 17-year mainframe computer programmer's perspective.

[retired4fun2013]

LOL

Hmmm. I just can't put in LOL. I have to put in 10 or more characters, so here they are. LOL

[winterpalace25]

To me, this is the biggest problem and very insulting to sellers. You state it very clearly.  I wish we could express this to the Board of Directors.

[gurlcat]

---

@retired4fun2013 wrote:

It annoys me to no end that eBay drives people away from my listing by dumping in all those other "similar" listings before anyone can even get to my item, resulting in possibly never getting to my item. That, to me, shows a great deal of disrespect for the sellers. I'm not paying for my store to list an item, only to have eBay try and drive away my potential customers by displaying all those other sellers' items before they can get to mine.

---

I'm kind of surprised eBay hasn't offered a 'clean listing' option for an extra charge.  I wonder how many sellers would take it.