Search manipulation?

[jonathankirkland]

So a huge online retailer here on Ebay with almost 90k feedbacks is listing items inappropriately in a category they do not belong in.

Can't even message the seller to at least express my discontent for this. And I doubt ebay will do anything about it. But that really should be a punishable offense.

(Example of what seller is doing: Listing a Nintendo game in category for PlayStation, Atari, Xbox and any other gaming system they can think of.)

[worldwideantiques]

I spoke to eBay yesterday, a CSR flat out told me that eBay is manipulating the search results by adding items that are higher sellers in different Search terms. Check out the search term Philippines sword, organized according to price highest first, you'll see chandeliers. I've been contacting eBay for 4 years, I've opened up many Inc numbers and alert numbers, and they all told me that this shouldn't be this way, now they're telling me this is how it is. I want to contact a lawyer before I closed my accounts.

[eburtonlab]

No idea why chandeliers would show up under a search for swords, unless some of the listings at one time included sword under one of the item specifics and now all new listings are also connected by that previous association. Or possibly at some point users searching for swords wound up buying chandeliers, and the search algorithm picked up on that and decided one was a possible substitute for the other.

When eBay provides inappropriate search results, there are often ways of getting around the problem. One possibility would be to put one of your search terms in quotes, like this:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=philippines+%22sword%22&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_odkw...

That should ensure that all the results contain both literal terms with no substitutions. Though you would miss results for things listed as daggers, blades and katanas if the word sword was not included.

If you prefer more results than just swords, you can try limiting your results to a single category, though if such items are routinely listed in multiple categories you may need to perform more than one search to cover them all:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/1/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=philippines+sword

https://www.ebay.com/sch/20081/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=philippines+sword

[gjs_16]

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@jonathankirkland wrote:

So a huge online retailer here on Ebay with almost 90k feedbacks is listing items inappropriately in a category they do not belong in.

(Example of what seller is doing: Listing a Nintendo game in category for PlayStation, Atari, Xbox and any other gaming system they can think of.)

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I see that kind of abuse too...
Worse is when they state in the title "Not Nintendo" or some such thing, which is simply a slick way of keyword manipulation since it will show up in all searches with the word Nintendo in it.

I can however think of at least one megaseller who had their account suspended indefinitely.

Actually I think they may have quit on their own before the final warning, but it would've ended that way either way.  They had tons of negative feedbacks, all sorts of problems, until one day they were gone.

They are not the only ones to just dump all their listings (I see a lot of duplicate listing issues) in all sorts of ways, clobbering up the search results.

Speaking as a buyer I steer clear of such sellers.

I find their practices dishonest and unethical.

I may not be able to stop them, but I don't have to buy from them.

And they're probably wondering why their sales are slow, as they dump another thousand listings in all the wrong places.

[luckythewinner]

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@worldwideantiques wrote:

I spoke to eBay yesterday, a CSR flat out told me that eBay is manipulating the search results by adding items that are higher sellers in different Search terms. Check out the search term Philippines sword, organized according to price highest first, you'll see chandeliers. I've been contacting eBay for 4 years, I've opened up many Inc numbers and alert numbers, and they all told me that this shouldn't be this way, now they're telling me this is how it is. I want to contact a lawyer before I closed my accounts.

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Well, all those chandeliers have an item specific that shows they are manufactured in the Philippines, so that provides a partial reason why they might be matched to Philippines sword.

I'm not sure what other word is matching sword, but eBay has been known to match items based on synonyms - so perhaps those listings have a synonym for "sword" tucked away in there somewhere.

[divwido]

OK, that may be true.  But eBay does not care and since they are the only ones who demand the fix...

[katzrul15]

This thread is from June...........not all that old, but have often wondered