Getting sick of sellers advertising items for a false price.

[petesean2316]

sellers advertising items at a shown price, then as soon as you choose a colour or size the price shoots up. And theres nothing in the drop down for price advertised. This is false info, good to attract buyers but a waste of buyers time. if they are lying about price are they lying about other things described ?

[jimmyboro]

No....

They generally have....say a PS5 offered for £60

The price says £60, but it's not, it's the price of a controller. The
console is still selling at over £350, but the controller is sold as the
"main" item, this allows them to have a history where they sold a PS5 for
£60.

Or £2 for a soldering iron, turns out the £2 is for. 3 feet of solder (as
an option) and the iron itself as £45.

So yes, it is a scam. Maybe the prices are charged what hey say they re,
but the reality of the situation is the seller implies they have an amazing
deal, when in fact it's not

[actual_uk_seller]

I have a solution that I think would work with honest sellers; sellers should be able to select variations that wouldn't be included in the search result prices so, for example, fabric being sold alongside samples would still show as being e.g. £20-60 per metre and then if/when a buyer selects the sample option in the listing, the price would drop down to 99p or whatever.

This would do nothing to stop the dishonest sellers who are gaming the system, however.

I'm sure I read somewhere that eBay was supposed be addressing listings where there is a massive disparity between the highest and lowest priced item. Maybe it turned out to be more difficult than they thought or their business analysts just said it wasn't viable. If so, I hope their analysts factored in the pushing of buyers to other platforms, if that is what's happening.

[date80211]

Didn't you realise, no solution 'for honest sellers' is, has been or will be needed?
The problem affects only e-Bay itself and sellers ranging from at best, extremely unhelpful to blatantly dishonest.
How 'honest sellers' distract from that?

[date80211]

Please pay more attention, 4_bathrooms.

I mentioned that I started this thread because I do know what I was complaining about, what the scope was meant to be and I hope also, what did and did not follow from that. If I failed to make the intended scope clear, please accept my apology.

Either way, do you believe the scope of Community Topics should be set by their originators, or by just anyone who happens to stumble across them? 

If I ever said anything about fraud, please cite that saying. If not, why not accept that all and any talk of ‘fraud’ in the legal sense is introduced by you, has nothing to do with the original Question and therefore can't come into the Topic? ‘Fraud’ is simply not the point.

Neither you nor anyone else has to agree unconditionally, yet all of us do need to stick to the Posted Topic. If you can’t or won’t then clearly, you are indeed wasting your and my and everyone else’s time and solely from that perspective no; please don’t contribute anything more.

If you want to discuss a different topic such as literal, legal ‘fraud’ that's fine by me so long as you do ita relevant thread, which this is niot.

Your Comment seems to deal purely with straight fraud without saying what place that has here, or to do with sellers merely advertising items for false prices? Would you be happier if I’d said ‘bogus’ or ‘misleading’ or some such, rather than ‘false’?

How do you see it as helpful to restrict your citation of Oxford’s definition of a ‘scam’ to that tiny fragment, unless it was meant to hide the reality? Oops!

FYI first, Oxford’s definition of a scam is much wider than merely ‘a dishonest scheme; a fraud…’ I hope our readers will make their own comparison of your precis to Oxford’s actual definition.

FYI further, when dictionaries - including Oxford - use semi-colons in that fashion, they usually stand for ‘or’.  I hope our readers knew that.That many people would without really thinking about it, consider advertising false prices as ‘fraud’ you can argue about as long as you like but why would you? Has anyone here accused anyone of actual, criminal fraud?

Do you truly not accept that having been mislead into clicking on the listing does, to most people, constitute having been ‘scammed’?

[ukhaberdashery]

4 bathrooms

With a name like that should you really be quoting the oxford dictionary.

[date80211]

Thanks and what could that mean?

As before, if you want to talk about something else, why not start a fresh Thread dealing with that Topic?

Either way, please stop polluting this Thread with Comments about 'fraud' which might be wholly true but still;, have nothing to do with the Topic here.

Why should that be a problem?

[actual_uk_seller]

Earlier in this thread there was a post from a seller of fabric stating that they need to be able to offer samples of the fabric they sell. They could voluntarily improve the buying experience if they had the option I suggested in my previous post.

[nigel_paul_wright7557]

I tend to just skip multi listings now.

I have seen a search result with well over 100 results of same item by same seller !

How to upset buyers !

[just-got-personal]

This happens a lot in my categories...  and it is frustrating to say the least.

It is not an attempt to scam or cheat buyers in my opinion.  It is simply their way of gaming the search engine to get their listings placed above others as the items are usually searched in price order.

I have seen the thread mentioning the £39.99 theory when searching for 'Price, Lowest to Highest' but in a category where the average price is around a tenner then the £40 thing wouldn't come into play!

So if a seller has an MVL with just one of the least popular size/colour options priced at say £5 but every other variant priced at £12 then theit listing will appear higher up the rankings than the bulk of sellers selling at the market value of £10.

Most buyers just buy from the first page or two and £12 isn't to ridiculous a price for a £10 item and they can't be fussed to keep searching to save a possible £2

I won't do it because it annoys me so much when I see others doing it and so I lose out.  I can't win withou becoming a hypocrit myself.

[date80211]

The heirarchy of Posts there was too much for me, for one, to follow.

However, whoever said that for example the gallery photo and price will show for example a Mens Shirt at 10.00 - you are drawn in to the listing and when you first open and look at the sellers listing the price shows 10.00 - then you change the variation to the colour you require and the price changes to 20.00… has the right of it.

[mrq-private]

Here is a blatant example of this most common fraud... which has not only been enabled but tolerated (thus tacitly condoned) by eBay for years now. As others have noted... it's in breech of UK advertising regulation and (I suspect) consumer law. 

THERE ISN'T EVEN A PHYSICAL ITEM FOR SALE HERE, AT THE LOWEST PRICE!!!!

- It's also worth mentioning here that the electrical goods on sale here (having just obtained a sample) are NOT as described or remotely compliant with UK electrical safety regulations; any qualified Electrician (or other kind of electrical engineer) would - to stay legal themselves - have to refuse to install them!  

Do note that I've left the date and time visible here - 14:07 on the 25th of October 2023.   The original post now being well over four years old; eBay can hardly feign innocence.

[date80211]

Really? How is 'simply' their way of gaming anything, including the search engine to get their listings placed above others as the items are usually searched in price order, not 'an attempt to scam or cheat buyers'?

Can you explain a significant differrence?

[jimmyboro]

Good point and idea.  I mean, yes I can look away and find another product, it's just damned annoying when you open the 7th 'bargain' in a row 👍

[just-got-personal]

---

@date80211 wrote:

Really? How is 'simply' their way of gaming anything, including the search engine to get their listings placed above others as the items are usually searched in price order, not 'an attempt to scam or cheat buyers'?

Can you explain a significant differrence?

---

I am as annoyed as anyone else with the flooding of searches with this kind of listing but the search algorithm itself is flawed and encourages this type of playing the system.

The significant difference that I see is that some desperate sellers have seen an underhand way to cheat other sellers rather than actually attempting to cheat buyers. 

I am sure that in 99% of cases buyers see right through it but give up on trying to find the cheapest price and go to another platform.  Hence the need for threads like this one.

It could easily be stopped if eBays programmers just used the highest price in the MVL listing rather than the lowest when deciding where it should appear in a search.

Sellers would then change their listing habbits overnight and list their lowest priced varients separately.  More listing fees for eBay and more accurate search returns for buyers.

[date80211]

Thanks and I for one don't understand how that's helpful.

To me, the problem is and remains e-Bay allowing a poor practice which might have been merely an oversight at the design stage, but still should have been eliminated years ago.

Using the higest instead of the lowest price would very likely kill the abuse dead but would it not also create its own problems… as for instance forcing genuine bargains down the listing?

[techcat99]

I was looking for an adaptor & the lower price was for an unrelated sim pin ejector, in a few listings. (Clickbait top of listings)

The real price is within the drop-down selector!
Only related items should be allowed like video games! 

[mrq-private]

"I was looking for an adaptor & the lower price was for an unrelated sim pin ejector"

That's very very typical... take a look a few posts above at the example I gave. The "£2.88" lowest-price in not even for a physical item of any kind!   ...'Bait and switch' is certainly against advertising regulations, I strongly suspect it may also be against consumer protection law - eBay is fully aware of all this, has been for a long time - yet enables it! 

[actual_uk_seller]

eBay could implement a report button where, when enough independent, verified accounts with enough feedback, from different IP addresses and browser/system identities (so it's definitely not one person using multiple accounts), the lowest price shown bumps up to the next lowest price in the listing. That might have the least impact on using up eBay employee time, in case that's one of the issues preventing this from being addressed.

[actual_uk_seller]

I just thought of another idea! Someone write this down! Another way this could maybe be solved in cases where there is a large difference between the lowest price and the highest price is to look at the median or modal average sold price (that is, the items that people are actually choosing to buy, not the single paperclip option for 89p that is literally never purchased) from that listing and show either of those instead? That could be done completely automatically, without using eBay human resources at all beyond the initial set up!

[mirfieldsteve]

You stop this by "report the item" which is shown on the righthand side under the other related/sponsored items. choose "listing practices/search and brower manipulation/misleading Title". It takes ebay a while to rectify it but it does eventually.