eBay followed searches

Andreas

Ikon Class
Joined
Apr 20, 2011
Well. When you think eBay couldn't introduce any more stupid initiatives to drive away remaining customers... in the last days all of my followed/saved searches has gone from a specific category (vinyl) to all categories. Meaning that I get an email each time something is put on eBay with those words in the title: CDs, books, clothing, etc. This basically makes the followed searches function totally useless.

I just deleted a bunch of searches because of this. I've rarely been using eBay as of late, and this certainly won't be increasing my business there either. Has anyone else experienced this?
 
They seem to fiddle at these searches constantly. I have a UK folk LP (Sam Parry) in my searches for ages, never w/ much return. Yesterday I got a note with 96 hits incl. loads of Fred Perry Shirts! They just got rid of the category-segmentation. Other searches weren't affected. Same thing has happened earlier.

Recently I tried to list something for the 1st time in ages. Going through the shipping-price-process drove me mental. They have a range of fixed rates for just about everything now but nothing was even close to the actual cost of the large book I tried to list. You wish you could just say: "shipping = X$", but that's of course too simple. You wonder how they survived this long...
 
Outages, fee increases, tons of relisted junk to sift through if you're a buyer, no wonder the FB groups and other outlets are taking business away.
 
Searches have never worked for me. The outrages of eBay are too numerous and complex to elaborate. But include the unreasonable practice of matching your bid to the reserve price, rather than the 2nd highest bidder, and allowing obvious sham bidding, to name a couple. I've almost given up on eBay as well. Don't know how I'll go when it'll be time for me to sell my collection :(
 
I tried recently to bid on some promo garage photos, but the seller had (un)knowingly committed himself to some sort of external shipping pool (?) that wanted $54 for one photograph to Norway. Once listed he could not get out of it. They sold for a pittance to some lucky sod. 1 bid on each. Argh!
 
I have a search in Music for a Finnish artist (and I use the word loosely in his case) named Paska. This morning I got an email with over 2 dozen listings for parkas.

When I looked at the search through the website, I had only one hit that was for an opera singer named Pasakalis (name cut off at Paska in title), but at least it was in music.

It's very appropriate that Paska is Finnish for shit, and I can't think of a better descriptive word for how eBay is run these days.
 
Which Paska record are you looking for? I might make it easier for you :) Even saw him live back in (scratching head) '92 or '93 when the Finnish underground/Bad Vugum scene was pretty popular in Oslo, Norway (Dr.Gunni live being a particularly cool experience. And yes, he was from Iceland of course, but on Bad Vugum, if I remember correctly...)
 
Which Paska record are you looking for? I might make it easier for you :) Even saw him live back in (scratching head) '92 or '93 when the Finnish underground/Bad Vugum scene was pretty popular in Oslo, Norway (Dr.Gunni live being a particularly cool experience. And yes, he was from Iceland of course, but on Bad Vugum, if I remember correctly...)

I have 4 EPs. According tp his Wiki article, there's a 5th called "Janus Lick My Anus" from 2005. Need that. Also, the CD "Women Are From Venus, Men Are From Anus".
I think there's also a vinyl LP referred to as his children's record that has 50 or so songs on it.

Much appreciation for any you can turn me on to. The man is a genius.

I had the pleasure of getting this one directly from him when he performed a couple of gigs in NYC years ago.
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I've found over the past few days that ebay Australia searches are producing bizarre results. It seems to be a case of when the search I enter doesn't bring up any results it switches to an alternative search that goes across all categories, producing multiple rubbish results. Even when I click the link to revert to the original search it keeps bringing up the alternate one. Seems like ebay have broken their search system.
 
I've found over the past few days that ebay Australia searches are producing bizarre results. It seems to be a case of when the search I enter doesn't bring up any results it switches to an alternative search that goes across all categories, producing multiple rubbish results. Even when I click the link to revert to the original search it keeps bringing up the alternate one. Seems like ebay have broken their search system.
That's the way it's been in the States for a few years now.
 
I've been spared so far but today my mailbox was full of eBay spam. I have not had the time to test the "refine your search" option they give. Which probably means you have to redo the whole search again. If still possible. Pain in the *ss!
 
There should be some third party software that does this better? I also hate all the unneeded emails ebay sends every time I buy something, and there's no option to prevent those emails.
 
there's reason enough to hate just about anything about ebay. the only thing that makes this feeling bearable while we're all still using that site is the hope a rising hate-level increases the likelihood of something else taking over. Let's just hope it wont be facebook groups, as much as it looks like this right now.

Whatever happened to the fantastic (yet quite ambitious) project of a G45 database w/ marketplace features?
 
There should be some third party software that does this better? I also hate all the unneeded emails ebay sends every time I buy something, and there's no option to prevent those emails.

There's a third part software called Prospector. I've never used the free version but with the paid version ( I have the $19.95 version) I can have up to 10,000 search calls a day.
There's lots of filters for blocking keywords, sellers, countries, fixed price vs auctions, price, etc. Every time you run the program it only pulls up the results since your last search. Highly recommended.

http://www.moxieproxy.com/index.htm