hazeldomain:

eBay and “offering choices”

Let me know if this has ever happened to you.

You run an ebay search for, say, “Halloween Leggings” and you get a result that looks like this.

It shows up nice and high in the list of results because $2.40 is pretty cheap for leggings.

And then this happens.

You’re trying every combination of color and size, and the price keeps coming back as $9.57. What the hell? Where are the cheap ones?

And then you find this. Buried down at the bottom, there’s this. A completely unrelated item for a much lower price.

This takes many forms. For clothing, it’s usually a pair of shorts or panties. For electronics, it’s often a $5 USB cable.

And it is making the sort-by option on eBay unusable.

Fortunately there might be something we can do about it.

Ebay isn’t super-transparent about how listings can be reported. You’d think this should be reported under “search and browse manipulation” but it’s not. It’s here.

It is impossible for one person to report thousands of eBay vendors but if this happens enough, the sellers might get tired of having their listings removed, and knock it off.