New eBay Search Concerns

If you use eBay regularly, you may have found yourself “selected” to test eBay’s “new search experience”. In my opinion, the experience wasn’t a particularly positive one.

The problems with this new type of search are apparent immediately - it doesn’t help you find what you are looking for at all. Like a local government office, new layers of beauracracy have been added seemingly for the sake of doing so.

Instead of displaying items in the traditional sense, i.e. items ending soonest at the top of the screen, they are now displayed as a “best match” before the user manually adjusts the display option to show them differently.

More disturbingly, this new way of displaying items shows little regard for sellers who pay extra to have their items as featured listings. I currently pay around £25 to ensure my website businesses for sale are listed on the first page for the duration of the listing. With this displays method, my listings will not appear on the first page until a matter of hours before the auction is due to end. What is the point in paying extra if your listings are not going to stand out from the rest of the dross?

At the moment, this is still only a test and hopefully eBay will not incorporate it fully. However, 10% of eBay users are seeing the listings in this fashion which means I can only sell effectively to 90% of the customers and there is no chance of receiving a 10% discount for this inconvenience.

Fortunately, it is possible to opt out of the search test if you are one of the chose to participate, but it is not obvious on how to do so and I suspect the average eBay user will not be aware of how to do so.

eBay seem intent on making lives as difficult as possible for sellers which makes using AffiliateDragon.com to drive traffic to my listings an even bigger priority now.