eBay

traut-gmx · ‎03-14-2018

Hi all,

what's your experience with listings that contain variations?

I feel that this is one of the most abused and thus useless choices that sellers have.

The typical malpractice is: Create a listing with variations to select from. Have some more expensive choices, but do include at least ONE item which is much cheaper, although it's somethin perfectly different than named within the title - e.g. a small piece of accessory.

This does manipulate the search, to show this auction with a very low price, although the item which people are looking for is much more expensive.

Even worse, ebay does not show the full range of prices, but many times the lowest price ONLY.
And ebay does not offer any option NOT to show listings with variations.

In former times, the rules where more strict that variations may list items of comparable characteristics only, but not perfectly different items:

ebay sell: listing variations What wouldn't be considered a multi-variation listing?

Nowadays I to not find these limits any more:

ebay sell: Creating listings with variations The prices of your items can vary...

Because of this frequent abuse, I'd welcome a poll:

[ ] 1. ebay must not permit variation listings with very different characteristics

[ ] 2. ebay should create an option to exclude variation listings

[ ] 3. variation listings must have the SAME price for each item. A price range of ±10% could be tolerable

(is there any other choice to create a poll nowadays, instead of using the reply button?)

Thanks for an active participation within this poll!

traut-gmx · ‎03-16-2018

@luxe_beauty_4_lesswrote:
I'm fine with a restriction on price variance. Say, 15% variance from the median price of the MV listing. Anything greater than 15% (arbitrary number) is not allowed. I'm not sure what the arbitrary number needs to be, but some variance should be allowed. That, of course, is just my opinion based on the way I use MV listings.

That's reasonable for single items only, of course.

If you do have 1/10/100 as variations, a limit of 10% would be useless. However, it would be reasonable too to split those variant listings to different auctions.

traut-gmx · ‎03-23-2018

@Anonymouswrote:
Hi @dhbookds, when reporting a listing of a seller's, this also will contribute to a review of their account behavior. We encourage reporting any concerns you run across, but also proactively review the site for concerns and take appropriate action.

The items I reported are still online. So what's the use to report them? My question is still open how to report them - which category, which description.

And that's just five of thousands within this category.

Reporting feels absolutely useless to me...

traut-gmx · ‎03-30-2018

I'm aware that I do not have any right for an answer - but the current status is:

- no reply from ebay

- no action for reported abuse, articles still online

That's a very disappointing outcome. Makes me feel that ebay just does not care - exactly what I was afraid of before...

traut-gmx · ‎02-22-2020

From what I've seen by now, ebay did not bother about that kind of abuse, but even weakened their own guidelines. While you could report search manipulation abuse before - although it never changed anything - the current guidelines such as https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-policies/search-browse-manipulation-policy?id=4243 https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/listings/creating-managing-listings/creating-listings-variations?i... do not strictly forbid any more to merge offers with completely different characteristics. No, instead the sort-by-price choice many times does not even show a price range, but the lowest price only. Probably this kind of abuse is within ebay's own interest - thus manipulating annoyed customers to buy at a higher price because it's impossible by now to find the lowest price. So ebay's provision will be higher, too. The solutions would be so simple * either just do permit a single price for all variation items or * do sort and show variations by HIGHEST instead of lowest price Abuse would stop almost immediately. Shame on you, ebay, that you do nothing about this search manipulation abuse.

kh-stanley1 · ‎02-22-2020

Hello Everyone,

Due to the age of the thread, it has been closed to further replies. Please feel free to start a new thread HERE if you wish to continue to discuss this topic.

Thanks for understanding!