Git yer rare pattern coins cheap on eBay ... whoops ... they're actually plumbing.

I've never sold on eBay, but bought a fair bit. When an item is listed for sale how does it get put in a category? I've assumed the seller designates the category. However, lately there have been some items in coin listings that weren't coins, but the pics and description might lead a dumb automated system to categorize them as such.

For example, I've seen plumbing escutcheons with words like "nickel" and "pattern" in the title listed in a coin category. The pictures did look somewhat like hollow-center pattern coins. See link. Plumbing escutcheons are the round metal or plastic disks used to make a wall penetration by a pipe look nice. Hard to imagine a person who wrote the description wrongly categorizing them as coins, but it's possible the person who actually posted them didn't write the description and knew little about coins or plumbing. Also, possible an automated system did the classification.

Cal

Link: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Brushed-Ni...546401&hash=item25dbde24d8:g:-y8AAOSwKM1afjbx

 

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MS-70 PL !

 

They do, but the system will auto select a category when you make the listing. If you don't double check it it can be easy for something to end up in some random category that the system decided was correct