eBay Mess

[nolemmings]

As a buyer, I'm concerned with any tactic that chases sellers away. Otherwise though, I am pretty much unaffected, as I very seldom search by subcategory anyway (and believe it or not, in addition to some specific sets and players, I'm also a type collector).

As noted, a search with wildcards (asterisks) works tremendously. In addition to the searches by decade (at least for graded cards), type in 193* Goudey and you'll get the whole panoply of sets by that company for the decade, and perhaps even a stray companion piece. And once in Sportscards, type e9* and you'll hit a bunch of the caramel sets. I have a mild interest in several sets from 1928--the ice cream sets, r315, w502, exhibits, etc. I type in 1928 and I get 200 or so hits, only about 15% of which are useful, but it really doesn't take that much time or effort to gaze past the irrelevant stuff, especially if you change your settings to view 100 items per page. Same if you type in Gehrig--there might be mostly listings for non-cards and things of no interest to you, but it doesn't take long to get used to quickly scanning the thumbnails and separating the wheat from the chaff.