eBay Search

[goingfishinguk]

Morning all, hope you are all well.  Like many others we come to these boards to find solutions to our problems and/or offer insights to eBay and other users - you know the way a forum should work. 

In the last 12 months or so we have been hit as sellers with a lot of obstacles.. service metrics not been looked after as promised = huge loss of sales, new advertising system dynamic = don't pay don't play.  July's tests, EDDs etc etc.

Some of us have managed to limp through those issues and still remain in business, just in my case.  Well lost one company.

The problem is the current issue, by reading the forums seems to be the 'SEARCH FUNCTIONALITY.'  Dozens of reports with evidence show huge numbers of listings not being found so potential buyers can't find our listings, if they can't find our listings then they can't buy our products, simple enough yes?  Remember we are paying good money for these listings to be visible BUT eBay are not giving us value for money.  We are NOT getting what we are paying for.

So my question is to anita@ebay    marco@ebay    or whoever has the power to honestly answer is the current search system here to stay or is it broken and being fixed?  

I personally retired from my 25 year career to do something I love due to mental health reasons and that is selling fishing tackle.  Until this time last year it was a breeze and I was looking forward to enjoying my formative years.  All I did was tweak a few listings now and again and leave my standard promoted listings at say 2% to 5%.  I sold loads, I had loads of suppliers and loads of loyal customers.  Obviously on top of this I was giving eBay many tens of 1000s of £££ in revenue.  It's all but gone.

All the above reasons since this time last year have put a huge strain on my family financially and a huge strain on my mental health.  Sales are down 80 to 90%  My account seems capped at the exact number of sales per day - 25.  I've heard rumours if you are vocal on these boards you get capped.  Is this true anita@ebay?  All I want to do is my job.  All I want to do is have as little stress as possible and interact here with some great characters, post my orders, buy my stock, list my new stuff (which I loved doing) and generally enjoy the eBay experience.  So all I want to know is will this ever be possible or am I wasting my time?  Remember as I've mentioned, I jumped through all the hoops, watched all the videos, hiked up % promotions etc etc, but if my account is crippled or the Search is forever against me those are things I can't change.  So instead of lying awake at night wondering how 'I' can change things I just want to know truthfully without the 'clear your cache, spin round three times, drink a pint of glitter' or whatever else if I'm wasting my time, money and efforts.

So please tell me and the countless others here who have proved beyond doubt the search facility is hiding in some cases in the high 90% of listings is the search working as eBay want it or is it broken and going to be fixed?  (Oh please can you remove the cap on my account, thanks.  I know it's there..)

Kindest regards.

[dwtrading2015]

Stopped using eBay search long time ago. It's oogle google search which manages to throw up eBay results amogst others.  More often than not now, the 'others' get the sale (but not 'Amazon'!).

[theelench]

Very true from my personal experience, I rarely bother trying to browse or even look for one specific item on ebay these days.

I've never found one of my vintage glass items listed on ebay on Google Shopping but every day I can find several uploaded from the other site I sell on.

I think it says it all that my sales on ebay so far this year have been zero (although I do admit I've more or less given up trying after the previous two years dismal performance) but the other site has already sold 14 items, more than ebay managed in either of the previous two years.  Just by taking a bit of care to ensure that my ads. are eligible for uploading to google.

If ebay isn't going to give my ads. visibility unless give ebay 25% of my sales, I'll put them where they will be seen. 

[vintagewatchpart]

I think thats because the Google Shopping listings now count as part of Ebays "Offsite Ads Beta" programme so you have to pay for them to appear there? Even though it is a free feature I believe unless you wanted to sponsor it.

I cannot fathom the rediculousness of this situation that people are no longer using Ebays search function to find items they want because it is so unreliable in prodiving results. If I were a high level executive with Ebay these comments would cause me enormous concern.

[the-nutwood-collection]

Maybe there's a sort of logic behind this.  If buyers are routinely going to Google first, and they find eBay items there, then why spend money on improving the eBay search?  

Think of it this way.  You own a shopping mall and provide a bus service, at your own expense, to bring buyers to the mall.  There's also a free train service to the mall, provided by another operator, and the train service is far more reliable and frequent than the bus.  Why spend money improving the bus service - the buyers can get to the mall by train.  You don't make money from the bus service, it's an expense.

The problem is that the train service goes to lots of malls, not just yours.  Buyers can get on another train, and spend their money elsewhere.  However, as long as sufficient buyers arrive, your bottom line is OK.  If it isn't, then increase the rent on the shops in the mall to make up the shortfall.  Shops that are willing to pay more are provided with an electrical supply and their lights are glowing.  Other shops are accessible only to buyers that come equipped with a torch.

Personally, speaking as an ex-IT person, I think that the search is now such a rat's nest that the cost of fixing it would be prohibitive.

[theelench]

That's a great analogy but, speaking as someone who is barely IT literate, isn't there a flaw?

The search didn't go from excellent to whatever it is now in one leap, it got there one step at a time, with many 'improvements' along the way.  If each 'improvement' reduced sales, wouldn't removing them (in reverse order?) be comparatively cheaper?

The first barrier to sales comes down, sales improve a bit, so use the extra fees generated to take down the next.  Leading to another growth in sales, more fees.  Repeat as often as required?

[dwtrading2015]

You pay for the bus to bring shopers to you so that they spend money in your store which is well sign posted and well stocked.  You get a return for providing a useful service.  Whilst there is a market for those taking the train and prepared to visit multiple shops following false leads elsewhere in the mall, your market is the one stop shop consmer. You invested a lot of money ofver the years making your shop the place to go for quick easy shopping.  It is a major waste to let them be distracted by shinny things elsewhere in the mall using a train ride instead.  Once they have sampled the mall, they may not se the point of returning to your shop.

If Google can find the item, why can't eBay using the exact same search string? The solution is obvious, make the eBay search programers redundent and pay for the gooogle search engine to be used inside eBay's site instead.

[the-nutwood-collection]

 Unfortunately, it's not that easy.  You could go back to the code library and retrieve the version where there was a major change, but it's doubtful whether you could just promote this version into live.

Putting it simply, since the major change, there will probably have been a load of interim releases where the code was updated to fix assorted issues probably unrelated to the major change.  All these will have to be retro-fitted to the earlier version, and the code resubmitted for system, pen and regression and testing.  It’s unlikely to pass first time, so more development work will be needed to fix the issues.  When it passes, it must go through user acceptance testing – which will find more problems.  Also, an exercise like this relies on a high standard of supporting documentation and code comments.  You can’t rely on code compare.

Generally, in my experience, trying to take a short cut usually results in more work than starting from scratch.  On-the-fly edits are OK for a short script that you can read through, but a search is a humungous piece of code.  Searches are the very devil to write – too broad, they bring back irrelevant data, too tight, relevant data is missed.  It’s a very difficult to find a balance, particularly when you have a diverse data set such as eBay has – furthermore, a data set that has been populated by amateurs trying to beat the search and get their listings in front of as many eyes as possible.  Add to this the needs of PL, and you have chaos.

@dwtrading2015  suggests that eBay uses the Google search.  At one time, Google did sell a basic search that could be tailored.  I think it was used on one of the developments I worked on.  However, I haven’t heard anything about it for a while, so maybe it’s not available now.  I seem to remember that it was very costly and took a lot of discovery, documentation and development work to tailor to the app.

[unclestein]

WOW!

That's the most detailed and plausible explanation I have ever seen on these pages, and from an ebay actual coder!

Thank you, please tell us more!

[theelench]

Para. 3 reads like ebay might have tried my suggested solution already and made all the mistakes you mention!!

But thanks for the explanation.

[dwtrading2015]

A search engine doesn't need to be some big overweight monolithic lump of code.  It can be quite short.  The clever bit is how to set up the database so it can be interrogated and how to interpret the users search term.  eBay have clearly followed a path abandoned years ago by others of trying to categorise real world data, it can't be done entirely because different people have different expressions for the same thing.  People even in the neighbouring town might have a different name for the same widget.  The industry term versus the layman term and so on.  The eBay search did once have this. It did mean some dead end results, but from the spread of possible correct guesses by the algorithm the user could quickly click through a closest match and the search would reconfigure itself for better targeted results.  Now it tries to be clever thinking it can second guess what you meant and doesn't give you the initial spread because it is based around a highly structured item specifics constraint as guessed or ignored or misrepresented by the user.

Likewise for interpreting the search words, the algorithm unbelievably attempts to match word for word as if the user knows the exact listing title is.  It should of course use more search words to increase the dynamics of what is returned, like google and every other open search algorithm on the planet does. 

I'd honestly say the eBay algorithm is practically unique in this day and age on how it insists on the user self-categorising to the extent it does and then conducting a search as it does directly on the user listing with no differentiation in in the search matrix.  Even the simplest test evaluation by any single eBay employee, programmer or not, will reveal what a useless tool it is. The results wouldn't even get it a grade 'c' on a CSE design and tech course.

It isn't fit for purpose and it is time for eBay to face it.

[the-nutwood-collection]

Please don't encourage eBay to re-configure the data model.  That’s just scary.

I can understand why they brought in the Item Specifics – superficially, it’s a good idea.  What they failed to consider was that, as you point out, sellers would either use their own world view or would try to game the IS.  Metadata (IS) works well in a captive environment where it can be policed, but eBay isn’t a captive environment, and it isn’t policed.  It probably works well in some categories, maybe P&A, but not in all categories.

I think eBay have made the search just too complicated for many categories.  On Etsy, I can add 13 free text search tags.  It’s my choice – if I key in terms that buyers don’t search for, then my listings won’t be found.  Etsy does offer suggestions, but the choice is mine.  Simple.  It also means that I can write a sensible, eye-catching, title – I don’t have to try to cram as many keywords as possible into the title.

What would improve the search, in my opinion, is to stop ‘Sell Similar’.  This causes an endless churn of the same listing.  I’m searching at the moment and, on my saved search, the same items come up day after day with a slightly different title.  I’m absolutely fed up with seeing them.  They have the same image, so it wouldn’t be difficult to weed them out – but eBay doesn’t.  What makes things worse is that they’re not what I’m searching for – an inflatable body part is not a mannequin – but the title includes ‘mannequin’ so they appear every day.

[wyntersemporium]

Been looking at a website for myself was just going to buy .com only. 

[wyntersemporium]

I think there are caps. I used to get 25-50 orders per day last year.  This year dwindled to on most days to 3-5 orders.

[wyntersemporium]

I find if I can't find the item I want . I then toddle off to the other one beginning with a e and find what I'm after there.

[dwtrading2015]

I like the Etsy tag system too.  It doesn't predetermine any forced sub catagories like eBay.  Most mandatory item specifics are irreleavnt to the item.  Cable length for items with no cabels?  How many items do not have a MPN, or which one of the many numbers on a label are the correct one.  If the catagories would be labelled as a sugestion with everything defaulting to n/a that would help.  n/a isn't even listed on the most absured sub-catagories.  I posted elsewhere last year the search I did for a computer, placing a couple of processor names in the search aiming to get a spread of options and so weigh up price against spec, "mini computer i5 i7 revo"  That should return a few thousand matchs and then I can perhaps narrow it down with some sub cats like HDD or SSD.  Let's try it and see.  Result for my search for a compter, "No exact matches found".

That is mind boggling and demonstrates why the eBay serch is completley useless.  There isn't even the opportnity to filter down sub catagories in the lefthand pane as the only ones are the highest level which are nothing connected to 'computer'.

Yet, same search on Google, and it instantly finds eBay listings within the remit, and also across Amazon and others.  In fact, Aliexpress has some rather interesting results there and the price... just keep it under £135 in case it passes through an EU hub.  Bye bye eBay, hello Ali-E

[vintagewatchpart]

dave@ebay  2 weeks ago in the weekly chat I asked if anything was being looked into with the tech issues being experienced on search. Can you please provide any further update?

• Users no longer utilising the search feature due to unreliable results
• You search for items on Ebay for them to not appear and then google search the same term and it brings up items on Ebay UK itself on Google that were not shown on the Ebay results
• Searching for a specific term involving numbers like model numbers or years churns out loads of unrelated items that are not giving the buyers what they want
• Searching for something then changing the filter from lowest price, to highest price, to best match shows totally different results
• Search results jumping automatically to a category rather than giving the user a chance to change item specifics themselves to further drill down into the categories - means many items omitted from search results
• @mrq-private conducted some excellent research in the post on page 1 of this thread showing evidence of search manipulation and omission of items from results - this is still happening now

This is just a smattering of examples, think we would all appreciate it if this were being looked into.

To suggest that everything is working fine would be a bit insulting, I would think if any of us ran a company with a large website where the search was functioning this poorly would be dedicating a lot of time into resolving the sales-impacting issues asap.

[vintagewatchpart]

Search on Ebay for "Gold Meter"

140,000+ results. My first ten picks are:

60 inches of gold cotton fabric, 2 x Gas meter reading keys, wedding drape fabric, self adhesive tape, gold piping, sheer fabric, a HDMI cable, a watch, another watch and another watch. 

In fact, I went through 3 full pages, 180 items and nothing came up.

Googles turn... search for "Gold Meter" 

Every result, every sponsored shopping item is exactly what I was searching for.

In fact, the 6th result on Google is for Ebay - "Gold testers for sale" - how is it that Ebay can have a gold testers category and have SEO set up for it to appear on Google when you search for a gold meter but searching for that product within Ebay itself.

This is one of potentially millions of search terms throwing up total random stuff. If I were a customer on Ebay and searched for a couple of things like this and had these results - I'd bounce. I'd go elsewhere. Without knowledge you'd assume Ebay just did not have what you wanted.

[unclestein]

Do you have an XRF gun?

[vintagewatchpart]

No, I have a vintage gold meter to sell, about 50 years old, was trying to find another example to find out about them and that happened to be the example I used

[vintagewatchpart]

So its just been confirmed in the weekly chat that there are no technical issues with search and everything is working as it should be.

I guess that means that the issues that are present now that were not present before are intentional given that some change had to have been implemented to make the issue occur?