Hi new to Ebid refugee from EB

[yourfastenerfriend]

HI may I ask a few questions about Ebid policy and enforcement. I guess there will be many on here who are escaping from EB abusive treatment of small sellers (and not so small)
My first serious issue is Duplicate listings. I sell vintage nuts and bolts aimed at the restoration market - bikes cars machinery etc. In EB the power sellers in this category are able to fiddle the system and produce hundreds of listing for their nuts and bolts shop. Multiply this by 20 or more power sellers and you have 1000's of listings swamping the search engine for buyers. So a small guy like me never gets any visibility - waste of time listing my stuff. There is no possible justification for allowing this abuse and its against EB policy but there are deaf to criticism as we know. So I check on Ebid for nuts and bolts and HERE WE GO AGAIN - 1 power seller with 18 listings of a similar metric bolt. This could easily without prejudice be rolled into 1 shop listing (for the various sizes, lengths and packets). Easy for the buyer - look in this nut and bolt shop, fair on other sellers and the search engine isn't swamped. Clearly I dont want to waste a lot of time listing here if its going to end up like EB. FYI EB has a very complicated rating system for sellers in its Cassini search engine which is supposed to optimise best value listings for the buyer but seller complaints of EB abuse are legion and totally ignored. All they want is their FVF

So - question What does Ebid do to control listing abuse of this kind

If you want to see how out of control it gets try searching for LED lamps on EB, hundreds of pages of 50 lists ea all based in the PRC, same sources different IDs and all this even after you have checked UK ONLY. What use is that to a buyer who wants a genuine uk based dealer (oh btw IMHO these products are all rejects from the main production with a lifespan of a few months, not 50,000hrs as claimed. Dont ever expect to get your money back and if you leave a negative rating for genuine reasons, they know where you live. Roll on EB

[astral276]

eBid do not allow duplicate listings by the same seller. How effectively they police that when the automated enforcement systems fail, even when incidents are reported to them, is often not as good as it could be.

Currently eBid do not have variations on listings. That means that similar items (e.g. M6 Steel Nut and M8 Steel Nut) have to be listed as seperate listings. Listing variations are slated to be implemented in the near future; eBid did say this month but they are running out of time to hit that target.

[cvarr]

Good Morning Astral,
I was going to say the same thing you just did. I wasnt sure though if ebid did indeed get the variations going yet as I have not listed in the past few weeks here - maybe next month they can get it implemented.

[yourfastenerfriend]

Hi, No variations is a serious restriction.
Could you check this site out

http://www.ebid.net/uk/perl/main.cgi...=&type=keyword

You will immediately spot identical listings with different prices in spite of what you said above

pls note I am not singling out this seller for discipline, simply quoting as an example and how it can go terribly wrong for seller and buyer alike. Seems like the variation issue needs sorting asap

I am going to close this thread and open another one on what I propose as a work around

[yourfastenerfriend]

pls see next question on kitchen table

[astral276]

Good Morning Astral,
I was going to say the same thing you just did. I wasnt sure though if ebid did indeed get the variations going yet as I have not listed in the past few weeks here - maybe next month they can get it implemented.

Good day to you, fair lady.

No implementation of variations yet announced or in evidence so far. Even when they do arrive I get the impression it will not be a full blown implementation - merely a first stage. It will be interesting to see what does appear.

[MPS16]

Hi, No variations is a serious restriction.
Could you check this site out

http://www.ebid.net/uk/perl/main.cgi...=&type=keyword

You will immediately spot identical listings with different prices in spite of what you said above.......

They are not identical listings.

If you read the complete titles you will see that the variations in price for any given length and thread size of bolts is

due to the different types of washer and nut combinations.

[cvarr]

ebid just announced in the recent newsletter that variations are still giving them a struggle. More waiting in store for us.

[TiasTreasures]

I think this requires major changes to the database to accomodate the additional information for each listing. I've done that . . . it requires a lot of work, a lot of pieces of code need to be changed, and when it's done, it requires a lot of testing. I'd be patient rather than nag them to get it up ASAP.