There’s been many a complaint of late that eBay are focussing on fixed price items to the detriment of finding the idiosyncratic thing that you didn’t even know you were looking for. That’s why David Brackin said yesterday that he’s “disappointed to see such a focus on categorisation emerging again” from eBay. What many would like to see from eBay is more intelligent search which can find what we’re looking for, not just what can be catalogued.
eBay are however working on many ideas, and some of these are new ways to search and to enable buyers to stumble across the interesting and unusual. The first of these is eBay Niche Markets Finder but we’ll look at some of the other experimental tools eBay are working on over the next few days.
Niche Markets Finder
The Niche Markets Finder uncovers little known items that sell extremely well but may be in short supply on eBay. The identified niche items suggest opportunities to sellers or can be used by buyers to promote or discover interesting products.
It operates across several categories including Toys, Collectibles, Antiques, Pottery and Home & Garden. Items displayed by the Niche Markets Finder are previously sold listings on eBay. Clicking on the picture of the sold item takes you to similar sold items on eBay. However clicking the “See only active listings” at the top of the completed listings page takes you to similar items which are still live on eBay.
The Niche Markets Finder also shows representative keywords for the product, The maximum and average selling prices, number of users who searched for the item, and the quantity available and sold on eBay.
Currently this tool is aimed more for seller research than for buyers and is only available on eBay.com. However it does demonstrate how eBay can use past selling history to surface the more unique and interesting items on the site – All they need do now is find a way to surface similar items in search results so that those buyers who would be interested in them find and buy them.
7 Responses
Why oh why oh why.
Just turn the old search back on.
All the buyer is interested in is buying, all the seller is interested in is selling.
Current search is far too much of what ebay thinks you are looking for or pointing you towards a seller they think you should be buying from.
so scraping a living from collectables we gave this a try and up jumps Tortoiseshell card case,
amazing! you try listing that on ebay uk and green peace are climbing down your chinmey and chaining themselves to your push bike
eBay’s understanding of niche needs some work
I sell vintage postcards (1890’s onwards) and Victorian paper ephemera. So, I selected ‘collectibles’ and tried some Edwardian postcard related search terms. ‘Raphael Kirchner’, one of the most sought after early 1900’s postcard illustrators got me zero results. Similarly, Louis Wain.gave zero results I tried several others with the same outcome. Finally I entered the word ‘postcard’ and got a ‘result’, It directed me to a Hentai porn video game.
Why don’t we just get rid of all the categories and all the search, and just have one long browse list. Perhaps that would satisfy some of the commentators here?
Oh, and whilst we’re at it, don’t forget to smash up those damned mechanised looms too for good measure…
It *is* an eBay.com research project… not a finished tool on the site proper. Look at it as more an insight into how eBay are looking to surface interesting items on the site rather than any bugs/shortcomings in the utility 😉