The State of eBay

[STL1944]

Originally Posted by Topnotchsy

eBay has gotten worse in silly ways.

Others have mentioned a number of them:
- Items sit for years. No cost for listing means no incentive to lower prices or remove things that you have up and are not in a rush to sell
- Ruined search - I have no idea what is actually going on when you search particular words, but it certainly is not pulling up items with those words. They removed the askerisk option years ago which was a massive help and it has gotten worse and worse
- They started allowing people to send offers to others who viewed the item, even if the item is not watched. Another example of pushing items in front of people that they likely don't want.

All that said, it is still a platform that occasionally turns up gems. A large percentage of my collection comes from eBay over the years. In the last few months (which has been a very good stretch by eBay standards for the last few years, I've won around 10 auctions, each of which was a reasonably difficult item to find. (I do have a number of collecting focuses, so there are more options out there for me.)

This may be well known (apologies if it is), but regarding eBay search, I have -had some- success using " " in my search.

For example I just searched: 1953 Bowman Psa 8 (using auction listings). The results were from 1953 Bowman cards, but none of the first five listings were PSA 5

If I search: 1953 Bowman "PSA 5", both the listings are PSA 5.

Of course, this doesn't always work and sometimes I literally have to search: "1953" "Bowman" "PSA 5" to get what I want to see.