Just went to look at "My eBay" and was asked to accept new terms of use. Would probably take a lifetime to read all the details, but I did look at a few of the sellers regulations. I love this one: "Accordingly, to drive a positive user experience, a listing may not appear in some search and browse results regardless of the sort order chosen by the buyer". What that pretty much means, (if I am lawyered up enough), is that just because you list an item on eBay doesn't mean they have to show it to anyone, even someone specifically searching for that item. Seems to me, that with each passing year, eBay becomes more and more a snake-pit of nepotism, with a few well connected sellers benefiting while everyone else gets the shaft from them. Which by extension, means most buyers as well.
I'm not losing any sleep over that clause. I think it's just covering them against some technical issues. It's actually quite hard to manage millions of users searching millions of listings simultaneously, with auctions starting and ending at a rate of many per second. In order to present search results quickly enough, you sometimes have to do some approximate searching, and that means that some listings fall through the cracks. In other words, it's likely a choice among "we may inadvertently leave out your listing 1% of the time", "we'll usually get your search results back to you in 30 minutes or less", or "to finance our bigger search-engine compute farm, we're raising our FVF to 30%".
Certainly eBay has numerous motivations for what they do, some of which will align with the interests of the sellers, some will align with the interests of the buyers, some with both, and some with neither. Personally, I think it's easier to be a buyer on eBay now. But, doing deals with people here on CoinTalk is even better. Could be that things like that in their terms are result from lawsuits filed against them. I'm sure they get sued a lot.
They keep promoting "your phone sells, or you get $100," so if there was a glitch, it would likely cost them some cash.
I've heard even coin forum website owners can have brushes with the law as well. Something about 07:30 or so?
Interestingly, one of my searches has now come up with; "Showing most relevant results. See all results" Granted, I can still see all the results, but still .......
eBay is simply not what it used to be and that can solely be blamed on the whiners that constantly complain about their own ignorance whether they are sellers or buyers. Buyers can be difficult but then so can sellers. Buyers can be deceitful but then, so can sellers. Buyers can be just out and out ignorant, but then so can sellers. (I have one seller which is constantly listing his/her 1964 business strike Kennedy's as Rare Accented Hair coins despite my attempts at educating them that they were only proof coins.) It appears to me that eBay is catering to only the big volume sellers anymore as the little guy, which would be you and me, are getting squeezed out as the more folks that file suits against eBay sellers then the more lawyers need to be involved in defining the "rules". Those rules are aimed at folks who can appreciate the benefits of high volume sales.
I agree it is not what it used to be, but for me, it has nothing to do with "whiners". eBay has clearly broken a lot of functionality in the name of progress. Their "improved" versions contain blatant bugs / errors / broken functionality, and these go unfixed for MANY months, and sometimes a year without being fixed. So for me, eBay is only worse than it used to be because I was used to it just working. Now, I expect eBay to NOT work, and fell lucky when it does. (specifically I am talking about searching / saved searches and other advanced features) I still like eBay, I still use eBay. But it ain't what it used to be!
Searches always "lean" towards high volume sellers leaving the little guy in the unknown. Especially for commonly sold items. This validates the point about favoring high volume sellers. Buyers, on the other hand, want to return a PR70DCAM coin because they don't agree with the grade or the slab has some type of flaw on it. That's whiney..........
Maybe I'm mis-interpreting @geekpryde and his complaints, but eBay started in a deep downward spiral when they got rid of wild card search functionality. That is something that has nothing to do with the "high volume sellers" but has everything to do with one's ability to find what they are truly looking for. The built in "intelligent" searches that eBay now supposedly does for you are a joke. Not to mention, I swear sometimes, they change their user interface for watched items and purchases every couple weeks. Just leave it alone already! At least, that's how I interpreted the comments of geekpryde... Yes, I still buy on eBay -- but, I rarely if ever sell there because the cards are so stacked in favor of buyers that I always end up with one whack-job buyer...and eBay has made it next to impossible to avoid buyers with small numbers of feedback or low feedback nowadays also.
Yeah, you perfectly understand what I was saying. I wasn't speaking to eBay favoritism at all. Favoring high-volume sellers seems more like a conspiracy theory to me. Broken eBay functionality is a FACT.
