EBay era and sport categories removed - wtf?
 

Has anyone else noticed that today eBay apparently got rid of the era and sport filters for searches? So now you can’t create a saved search just for prewar baseball cards, for example. It’s just a generic “sports cards” category.

That’s stupid and terrible. Why would they do that??

I noticed it while I was trying to update some prices on items I have listed. It said category is not valid.

I also noticed that eBay "refinement" earlier today when checking my saved searches. Instead of seeing just 1909-11 T206 cards, I was also presented with thousands upon thousands of modern cards.

I don't mind Topps 206; however, I don't have time to look at thousands of them...every day.

How about this annoyance that started appearing in every one of my saved searches today, eliminating a huge number of hits...

Attachment 457658

Ummm, no eBay, I don't give one crap what your dumbass algorithms say, I set up my searches to see what I want to see. Dipsh_ts!!

I've also been prompted by eBay to add item specifics to a large number of my listings. For instance, "Graded" has a yes/no drop-down. They're going to require sellers to populate that field soon. Luckily, there's a bulk edit feature. Otherwise, I would have spent hours and hours updating listings individually.

So, it appears eBay is refining things...again. Should be interesting to see what short-term impact (if any) this has on auctions. I'm sure there will be a period of time during which relatively fewer people find items on which they would have ordinarily been interested in bidding.

It appears to now be impossible to even do something as simple as look for boxing cards. Great.

EDIT: looks like it’s just the mobile app that can’t filter by sport now.

EDIT 2: filter by sport, then have to filter by grader, then have to filter by set, single etc., then get 0 results for ungraded boxing singles. So have to search by every set and hope sellers list their items correctly (half those in the boxing category do not seem to know what they have).

What a terrible decision.

Today’s eBay “improvement” is a pain. The wide ranging era filters are gone. Those were great and I would think they would add those back soon. I noticed that they have added back a few year range filters for more recent cards - five filters for the years 1994 to current. To me, those are useless. To others, they are gold (and silver...and purple..and refracting rainbows, etc.). I didn’t see those filters earlier today, so maybe they are working their way backwards to the good years.

You can manually check the individual boxes for each year of card that you wish to view. This worked to filter out the new, shiny stuff, but it is still not showing very many newly listed items.

Stay tuned...