Anyone having problems with the searches in ebay today? I noticed one of my listings didn't appear, tried again then some items appeared and others didn't. It seems like the search function is screwer up.

The new look is already mandated, for US customers anyway. It is the most horrible thing I have ever witnessed.

JasonZavoda wrote:
Where do they get these page designs? Whose freaking cousin is being paid to do this work. It pisses me off but there is 0 to be done about it.

i agree. i took about 3 months off ebay and now i am struggling to find anything - its just stupid

JasonZavoda wrote:
Where do they get these page designs? Whose freaking cousin is being paid to do this work. It pisses me off but there is 0 to be done about it.

A while back, when they were making the first of the current round of needless, seemingly random, changes to their site, I responded to a request for comments on the new design. I took the time to put together what I thought were a fairly well-considered set of comments. I didn't even get an automated reply. And, of course, none of my input was acted upon.  

but then eBay makes no money out of the buyer whatsoever.

That is not true. Via PayPal, they make lots of money off buyers, through final purchase fees. Without buyers to drive up the prices they get from sellers, they make nothing, except from sellers listing -- but, if no one is there to buy it, sellers stop listing, and eBay makes, literally, nothing at all. I don't know if they charge a percentage on listing based on final sale (I think they do not) but without buyers, eBay has no market:

In a consumer-driven environment which eBay facilitates, it is incumbent on the seller / retailer to make people want to buy their product as opposed to somewhere else -- if I can't find what I'm looking for, I might assume they don't have it and not return, even for future possible sales, because, after all, if they don't have this, why would they have something else? It's only when it is "mandatory" (like a grocery store) that I'll return -- eBay is lucky in one thing: there really aren't other places like it, and its "goods" change daily... but, they need to be obtainable or it doesn't matter if you're selling something someone wants. If demand doesn't know you have a supply... supply is irrelevant, to be blunt.

But, maybe I'm oversimplifying?

I am pretty sure the last time this topic came up, all that could be agreed upon is that cake is good.  



That being said, the buyer is the one funding ebay.  The seller pays a small listing fee and that is it.  The buyer pays the seller and ebay and paypal.  Oversimplified example, think of an item that sells for $20.  $1 goes to Paypal, $2 goes to Ebay and $17 goes to the seller.  The seller never made $20.  They made $17.  And nothing came out of the seller's pocket at the end of the auction.



Think of the real estate market (at least in the US).  A seller puts up a house for $100,000 and hires an agent to promote it.  A buyer also has an agent.  At the time of sale, the buyer drops 100K.  The seller gets $94,000, seller's agent gets $3,000 and buyer's agent gets $3,000.  The seller made $94,000 from the $100,000 listing.  He didn't have to cough up $3,000 to have the agent assist him if the house didn't sell so he was out $0.  If he wanted to make more than $94,000, he would have increased the ask price and not settled for less.  Same thing with Ebay.  

(Original home owner = Ebay Seller.  Home buyer = Ebay Buyer.  Seller's Agent = Ebay.  Buyer's Agent = Paypal)



Final sales price doesn't represent what seller made.  Without the buyer, ebay makes a few cents on listing fees.  Not until the buyer sends money does the pie start getting divided.

I've been keeping fairly accurate records for the past two rears.
eBay take a straight 22% between listing fees, final valuation fees, monthly shop rental and PayPal fees.

That 22% comes straight out of profit and it isn't something that is 'passed on' to the buyer.

Sellers are also not allowed to defend themselves against feedback extortion, and eBay are allowed to make adhoc judgements on the buyer's behalf without evidence and remove funds from the seller without ever requiring the buyer to return goods, and regardless of any PayPal decision to the contrary.

Until eBay decide to level the playing feild and require all members to provide validated proof of age, address and intelligence level, there will always be a bias in the system.

I just think that if a buyer can't find something and can't be bothered putting in a little extra time to hunt for what is really worth buying, then all the more bargains for those of us who can.

The system used for searching now filters product based on the quality of the seller experience (as reported by other buyers), the qualtity of revenue generated by the seller, and the previous results those keywords have returned that have resulted in searchers watching or bidding upon. The bigger the seller you are, the more often your product will appear in search results, and small time sellers will still feature, but will be either be placed farther down the list (say page 7) or filtered out as not likely to generate revenue.

For best results, I have found that you can run the filtered search with prioritisation, and then reorder the findings by date after the search results are in. That way you pick up all the flagged search items and most of the unprioritized matches also, and when you hit the date order, you get them into order of importance (ending soonest) and not according to how eBay thinks you're gonna want to buy them.

Unfortunately, if you change the priority before you do the run the search, you'll lose a chunk of both the flagged items and the general unflagged items also, as the old style keyword search filter is f"cked and only searches keywords prelisted by eBay's screening filters and not the original title and description database.

At least that's what I've been able to glean from UK seller telephone support (none of which are overly technically literate and some of which seem to not even be actually literate). Maybe I just happen to phone when they have their care in the community days.