@dhbookds wrote:
like others, I can find your listings........... as far as why give item #'s............more than once sellers have come here with your complaints, named the item.......and none of us could find it.......... because the seller misspelled the item either in the title or in the info given to us..........
OP,
And just to amplify on what was psoted above ...
Your complaint is fairly regular one here. But when we ask for the specifics - the search criteria and the item number expected - 99% of the time the seller is mistaken or it can be explained by a known quirk of the eBay search algorithm.
- Sometimes there is a typo in the listing title.
- Sometimes ther is a typo in the search terms.
- Sometimes eBay limits the results to a specific category (the frustrating 'category switch')
- Sometimes the listing has not been indexed yet
- Sometimes it is due to the indexing delay
- Sometimes it is due to edits by the seller (eahc o which causes another indexing delay)
- Sometimes an part number conflicts with an item number
- Sometimes the 'friend' who could not the item was just plain wrong, or made a typo and it too embarrassed to admit it
As for eBay user agreement saying they may hide your items, that is true. There are a number of occasions where they do this, but I do not beleive is done for nefarious purposes. IMHO the wording is there to provide cover for a few well-known reasons (and little known reasons) that listings are ommitted.
- Duplicate listings - there are cases where a seller is permitted to create duplicate listings, but only one of those duplicates will be show in the search results.
- Large search results - eBay does not show more than 10,000 - 20,000 results for any given search. So if a search returns 1 million listings, 99% of those listing will never be shown to the buyer because it won't let you scroll past the 10,000th listing.
- Category switching - if the search terms are a close match to a category name, sometimes eBay will switch the results to only show items in the that category.
- Caching - I am a software engineer who builds web applications, and a big part of my job is deciding when a result can be cached for a short period of time to improve performance and reduce the load on the back end.
Even if there there are cases where eBay is hiding listings from some buyers and not others, the assumption that this is nefarious or fraudulent would be mere speculation. Let me give a purely hypothetical example:
One of the complains on this board is from sellers who wish that they could prevent 'bad' buyers from coming back and buying from them again. I can imagine a scenario where eBay uses buyer history to decide whether to hide an item from a buyer in order to protect the seller.
Imagine a buyer of vinyl records who has is much more likely to records that are listed in Very Good condition, but rarely returns records in Near Mint or New condition. What if eBay had a system that recognized this buyer's behavior, and tailored the search results to steer the buyer toward items that he would be less likely to return?
Again, this is hypothetical and I am not saying eBay that eBay is doing this. But if they were, IMHO this would not be a nefarious or fraudulent or evil reason - it would be done it an attempt to make the marketplace better and reduce returns.
