More on Best Match

In my last post, I mentioned discrepancies in eBay's "best match" search. Today I was able to check the "best match" standing of a couple of listings from a seller who has had a low recent sell-through rate. Both listings were for collectible vintage Nancy Drew books, and both listings were fixed-price.

One of the listings was the #1 item on the "ending soonest" search and was set to close three minutes later. I quickly ran a "best match" search. I was unable to find the item in the top 1,000 results in "best match" before I ran out of time.

I next chose another listing from the same seller which was set to close 20 minutes later. This gave me a bit more time. This item had a "best match" ranking of between 2,200 and 2,400. How would anyone find it with "best match" search?

I wondered whether 30-day fixed-price listings fall down towards the bottom of the "best match" search results when they get closer to completion. I tried to test my theory, but I was not able to find a listing from the same seller which was new. I did find one that was listed four days ago. This listing had a "best match" rank of between 1,600 and 1,800, which was bad but better than the items that were close to completion.

It is now no mystery to me why this seller has had low sales.

I next checked a fixed-price listing from another seller and found that a listing that closes tomorrow has a ranking of approximately 2,200 in "best match" search. This was a different seller but the same result. Interesting...

My four auctions close in two days. I decided to go ahead and look for them in the "best match" search results. I was quite surprised to find that all four listings were ranked at about 300 in the "best match" search. I feel that this is quite high for listings that still have two days to go, and especially for someone like me who was not wanted by eBay one year ago. I assumed that eBay favored sellers who use eBay more. Since I no longer sell much on eBay, I thought my listings would be buried, but this is not the case. This proves that eBay is favoring auctions over fixed-price listings in search, just as they have stated.

The ranking of my items cannot be because of anything I have done. I have only sold two items in the last two months, so I do not have previous sales to give me a boost. I am not a top-rated seller. Since these lots contain multiple books, I used the shipping calculator to set my shipping at above $4.00. It does not look like I am getting penalized for having higher shipping, which I sort of expected. The placement of the listings has to be because of the auction format.

Personally, I would be peeved if I were listing a bunch of fixed-price listings and eBay were hiding them from everyone. No wonder so many of them are not selling.