Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Blocking Sellers from eBay Search Results

The books category on eBay is getting more swamped every day with the garbage listed by eBay's wonderful Diamond Powersellers. The Nancy Drew searches are more impacted than the lesser-known series. I hate having to exclude sellers from my searches, because eBay does not make it easy to do. Gee, I wonder why they would make it difficult?

Diamond Powersellers are those sellers who have shooting star feedback that is in the tens of thousands and have tens of thousands of items listed at any given time. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of items listed. They clutter the searches with all of their garbage which collectors of vintage books do not want to see listed. The type of Nancy Drew books that they list are hundreds of flashlight editions, Girl Detective books, and other new items. If I want to buy any of those books, I will go to Amazon.com where I know I will get my order shipped promptly and with good customer service. I don't want those books on eBay. Get a clue!

I did a Nancy Drew search this last weekend, and the first couple of pages of newly-listed items were cluttered with more garbage from several of the Diamond Powersellers. Even though it is cumbersome, I took some time to edit my Nancy Drew searches and exclude several more sellers. My list of excluded sellers removes approximately 1,000 items from my Nancy Drew searches. Since this might save some of you some time, here is my current list of excluded sellers:

buy,primemediaking,owl-books,ggiezgg,snowlionbooks,
keen_northwest,the-video-bin,sysqsystems,scrowe,
bacobook,h4book,books-fyi,greatbuybooks2,hippo_books,
the_tome_home,crispmovies,craeckerle,powells_bookstore,
universalathenaeum,ub123auctions,fetchadisc,
massbookstore-online


The list can be entered into the form just like that. I believe that I have one small seller in that list, but the rest are Diamond Powersellers. The one small seller was put in the list because he or she had listed dozens of Little Golden Books with Nancy Drew mentioned in all of them for no good reason. I can't stand that type of keyword spamming in which an entire page of results can be irrelevant all because of one seller. I have blocked other small sellers in the past for the same reason, and those sellers eventually lost their registered user status because they had other problems as well. I have no use for those kinds of sellers.

Since some people may not know how to exclude sellers from searches, here are the directions I gave many months ago in this blog:
There is a remedy for this situation. In order to combat this problem, it is necessary to use the saved searches feature from within My eBay. The buyer must first enter a search from eBay's Search page. If the buyer does not already use the Advanced Search, it will be necessary to click on "Advanced Search" right underneath the search selections. From the Advanced Search page, enter the desired search term. Scroll down to where it states "From Sellers." Click on "From specific sellers (enter sellers' user IDs)" and select "exclude" in the drop down box. Now enter the IDs that need to be blocked inside that search box, separated by commas. Click on "Search" and then click on "Save this search." The search will be saved and those sellers' listings will no longer show when the buyer clicks on that search from the Saved Searches page.

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