Ebay drops sport specific subcategories for trading cards?!?!

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

I tend to use "Note Specified" wherever that is an available option and the actual specific is irrelevant to the item, as that or some variation is typically one of the standard options.

Or if you have a lot of listings, it might be interesting to see if you could use your store name for the same fill-in-the-blank specific often enough that eBay populates it as one of the standard options? (It could just as easily get all those listings booted though, so if you try it, don't blame me if that happens).

I think all of this is an attempt to force sellers to input information that can be used for off-eBay searches (google shopping, for instance) and data analysis, the idea being that everything that can be purchased fits into a standard catalog if only that catalog is large enough. There is a big disconnect though between how collectors search for "collectibles" from how someone looking for a "product" might search. Baseball card collectors who have spent well over a century differentiating pieces of cardboard by the most minute details and arranging them into ever-finer categories and sub-categories, creating a Standard Catalog into which nearly all of these cards will fall neatly (if only the specific information is entered) will go onto a site like eBay and spend hours upon hours focused on looking for items to buy that are miscategorized or mislabeled, completely foregoing all of the item specifics that (theoretically) would have led to a quick and easy search for exactly what they were looking for.

This is kind of behavior is baffling to non-collectors.

Basically, they're continuing their Amazonification of the platform, while missing the point that people normally go to Ebay for completely different reasons then they go to Amazon for.

They aspire to be Amazon, without the infrastructure of Amazon...............so a completely inferior version of.

Wait until you see a single listing for "1986 Donruss Jose Canseco" with a stock image, and followed by the phrase "274 other sellers also have this product", buried in the bottom right hand corner of the page. Probably won't even see the non-anchor sellers on the mobile version.