Finding The Lowest Price on eBay

Windows7forever on 15/10/2016 - 16:16

…is much more difficult that it used to be.
Most ebay sellers are using multiple item formats with price ranges.

e.g. searching for a 64gb micro sd card gives over 2000 results
- filter by price lowest to highest gives a range of $1 - $x
- click on a few of the lower dollar listings (under $10) only to realise it is an sd card adapter for this price or a lower capacity card e.g. 8gb or 16gb.
- click on about 20 more listings arbitrarily hoping for the best and find out they are also using the same trickery.
- give up and buy from a preferred or 'best match'seller
- or the alternative is it waste 30 - 60 minutes of your life clicking on a vast number of listings, scrolling through and reading them before eventually "snagging the elusive bargain"

In summary, not at all transparent and difficult for buyers to find the lowest prices. Most Chinese mass sellers with identical products are using this strategy.

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Comments

  • mskeggs on 15/10/2016 - 16:49
    +8

    This annoys me too. The only solution I can offer is to ignore listings that have "more options" as these are the sellers offering and adapter for $1 as an option when buying costlier items.
    These sellers rarely offer the best price and their bait and switch tactic should not be rewarded.
    Usually the first listing without the "more options" turns out to be the price leader. The frustrating thing, as you have noted, is this listing might be sixty results in, not at the start.

    • loulou1 on 15/10/2016 - 18:18
      +1

      Is there a way to exclude 'more options' listings from search results please?

  • foxmulder on 15/10/2016 - 17:40

    I personally doesn't use this multiple items listing type anymore. It is harder to update inventory. I still have 3-4 old listings uses this type the soonest I have time I'll update them to individual listing.

    A lot of seller uses this type of listing as was encouraged by eBay. The listing get better exposures in search as search will always take the lowest price of the product in the listing and the more sell the better rank in best match.

    Originally seller uses this listing types most on colour or size variety but some sellers goes more wider variety for example armband for different type of iPhone put together in one listing.

    The bad news is what op already experienced - search result is not what you want.

  • trustnoone on 15/10/2016 - 19:54
    +1

    hay mate, personally I like to use the minus symbol (if it still works) to remove things so searching for "micro SD card -adapter" will search for the card without the word adapter. This can be problematic if you were looking for a SD card WITH an adapter though but very useful for me usually for other things.

    Sometimes its also better to go from most expensive to least. I know that sounds backwards but usually you will do a lot less searching and go through a lot less pages before you hit the lowest price of what you're looking for as typically what you're looking for is the pricey item (if it wasn't you probably wouldn't need a bargain) so you can just keep hitting next till you find the least priciest pricy item, if that makes sense :p.

    Other then that, I agree with what you're saying, its hard to get around it when the reason sellers do it is purely to grab your search and increase the chance of their item being seen.

    • Windows7forever on 16/10/2016 - 06:05

      Great tips. This does help narrow it down. Thanks.

  • peterpeterpumpkin on 15/10/2016 - 22:05
    +1

    eBay dropped the ball.

    It would take me a lifetime to report all the dodgy product variants as well.

  • mitcheo on 15/10/2016 - 23:33

    Its ridiculous

  • Pred8r on 16/10/2016 - 03:18

    I use geo-ship.com.
    It combines results from all ebay sites, get a couple of hundred results and sort by total.
    Shipping calculator is hit and miss.

    Its worked well for my last few tool,toy and kitchenware purchases saving ~10% on average compared to whatever I found on the local ebay, even when including international sources.

    Another option is picclick.com, which is great for window shopping, but not as nice to use on the whole.

    ymmv but fwiw its free.

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