eBay

genumax · ‎05-06-2018

So I put up a listing for an item and it started selling well right out of the gate. Great! 5 weeks later I had sold 42 of the item. Then NOTHING for 2 weeks. So I check the listing and it looks fine. Still has 10 watchers - but none of them are buying.

So I decide to check the competition to see if my price has been undercut and I do an ebay search on 3 of the keywords from my listing's title. The search results come back with 30 items but mine is NOT among them. Hmmmmm

So I copy my complete listing title and paste it into the search bar and Lowe-and-Behold, exactly one item is returned by the search. I click on it and another seller has copied my listing. They copied my photo (and added there seller name as a watermark), they copied my description text EXACTLY, verbiage, font, pointsize, layout. A perfect copy and paste job. Then they raised the price by $2 and posted it.

Now I realize that copying is rampant among eBay sellers, especially the newbies. But can anyone explain why the presence of THEIR copied listing should prevent MY original listing from appearing in eBay search results? I mean "COME ON!" **bleep**, over.

I called customer service and "Joey" didn't have a clue. He said he would send a message to tech support. I asked if there was anyone I could talk to in tech support since I have 30 years of database, application, and website development experience. I wanted to get a feel if anyone inside ebay's tech support actually has a clue what is going on with the search engine. "Joey" couldn't hook me up but he did call back and pass me off to "Jessica" from the Trust & Safety department. She read me some text from a script about the algorhithm which I'm sure she had no real knowledge of what-so-ever. I spent a lot of good years designing, coding, and testing algorhithms and what she was saying made no sense.

Basically my listing doesn't show because someone copied it. How much sense does that make? I tried 3 different browsers and even a proxy browser. Same result. I tried ebay Canada and ebay Germany. Same result. I'm starting to think eBay does not own it's own search engine, that they have rather contracted it from outside and perhaps do not have control of it.

Anybody know about this?

genumax · ‎05-06-2018

Forgot to mention that "Jessica" told me to stay on the line and she would get me connected to tech support. After a full hour of listening to the recorded "please hold and someone will be with you shortly" message the battery on my cellphone gave out. Hmmmm

Seems eBay has a real problem here. It could also be that they have introduced some proprietary modifications into the search engine to massively favor those sellers that THEY want to see succeed. If the modifications were clumsily done they may have a bug fest there now that they can't recover from. In my software career I fixed a number of systems that were in that state. Depending on how long the morons have been allowed to play by 'management' it can require a tremendous effort to set things right, perhaps even a total re-write. Been there, seen it, fixed it, not pretty.