I am so sick of sellers manipulating listings to make stuff look cheaper. Case in point.
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/SanDisk-SSD-PLUS-120GB-240GB-480G…
SanDisk SSD PLUS 120GB 240GB 480GB 7mm Internal Solid State Drive 2.5'
$54.99 is for a frigging enclosure. It's misleading and frigging annoying.
Noticing it on Aliexpress too where it displays an image of the product but that's not the price.
Bring back the good old days /end rant
I don't do that. The point is it is misleading and takes time to sift through the BS.
The issue is if you want to buy a 240gb SSD and you sort by cheapest, the ad for a caddy shows up ordered by its price, not the price of the SSD in the same listing.
The way it should work is you simply set the minimum price to $2 to filter out the BS $1 cables & cases when looking for a phone.
The problem is all the $1-$1500 listings vanish ('cause $1 < $2, duh); what should happen is they still appear in the results but sorted correctly once the < $2 items are ignored.
This is the correct behavior, if you try to hide your prices behind an enclosure price then you miss out on my business
@JBOT: Well no yeah maybe.
The bloke you want to kick in the testicles is here: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/183035862716.
Since 1kg rolls of PLA start at around $20 these days, setting my lower limit to that should take out his BS $15 fidget spinner leaving his overpriced $37 rolls, they get sorted down to page 30 and thus never seen.
The problem is some people do it right, another seller may have a listing with items from $1 sample packs to $50 multi-roll packs; hiding his listing ($1 < $20 limit) isn't fair. Of course the seller can split their listings, but why should they?
Now think of something like nuts & bolts. You get different thicknesses (M2, M3, M4, etc), lengths (6mm, 8mm, 10mm, etc) and they come in different pack sizes (never mind material, grade or finish), easily resulting in over a thousand combinations.
If I'm looking for a large pack I want to filter out the 'hobby-size' listings by setting a minimum price, but eBay will currently take out everyone. So now I need to look at every listing… (or go to AliExpress whose search used to do this before they broke it but kinda still works).
eBays search is broken for multi-item listings.
there is a drop down to show each capacity or just an enclosure.
That would require that buyers read. They seldom do.
I hate the listings for multiple items where one is a 99c throwaway thing to get their listing at the top of the lowest price search.
I make a point never to buy from such listings.
I wonder how the ACCC would view this with ebay.
It's not an issue as far as the accc is considered.
Titles are limited to 80 characters. Sellers can only include so much in the title and the rest in the listing. It's the buyer's responsibility to read the listing in its entirety before purchasing.
Completely Agree, it's bs and is misleading! eBay not so much, but same as AE, I searched for a xiaomi umbrella low to high, comes up at $19.99 then when I click in, that one is sold out and the $24.39 one is available..
Oh yeah sold out yet the lowest price remains.
Thanks mskeggs, that wasn't what I understood until you said it.
Though to be honest, eBay wouldn't be eBay if there wasn't dodgy stuff like this going on. The interesting ways some international (and domestic) sellers go about to dodge the system and filters is almost iconic for eBay.
I do feel like its annoying though its been a long time since I bought something based on cheapest price, I'm starting to be a lot more open in price for better ratings and shipping times.
I emailed eBay about this once and the reply seemed genuinely surprised, saying ‘this is against our policy’ etc and asked me for a link… are you serious eBay? It’s all the first pages when sorted by price! I think I was looking for a memory card but they are all 99c adapters.
It's not against their policy as the cheap item (the adapter) is related to the others.
If the cheap one was a box of matches or something then eBay might do something.
I reported a few but then I gave up when it didn't seem to achieve anything.
I wish they had a live flagging system so we could filter out sellers that have reports for this practice. People that make false reports can be banned.
I avoid buying from those on principle.
Same as the make an offer guys that give you a counter offer 20c cheaper than the buy it now price.
Yes! This is annoying me SO much recently, it's made it impossible to find the genuinely cheapest price for certain items. Looking recently for phone/tablet cases I had this issue, it will have the photo of the case, have a cheap price but then when you click through the cheap price will be for something like a screen protector and not the case!
Well you shouldnt just look at a pic and buy it… there is a drop down to show each capacity or just an enclosure. Dont think they did anything wrong tbh as they have multiple pics for each type of item