eBay have put up an reminder that as of July they are removing all limitations on the number of duplicate auction style listings you can run concurrently on the site. Until now there was a limit of 15 identical auction-style listings.
However until you receive a bid. Once a listing has an initial bid it is no longer considered a duplicate and eBay will start displaying your next duplicate auction. Each time a listing receives an initial bid eBay will make another of your auction listings visible.
eBay say that this is to improve the buyer experience and they’re right. There’s nothing worse than finding the first page of listings are for the same item from the same seller. It’s fair enough if it’s a popular product and all your listings receive bids. However if it’s for a mundane products such as CD-RW, many sellers used to spam search results with duplicates in an attempt for greater visibility. That shouldn’t now happen as the duplicates will be hidden.
What we don’t know is exactly how eBay classify duplicates, for instance is 10 CD-RW and 20 CD-RW close enough to be considered a duplicate? Only experimentation with your own listings will reveal what you can get away with and what eBay’s algorithms will hide. Just make sure you’re not paying out a ton of money for auction style listings that no one ever sees.
2 Responses
eBay do the same for buy it now china sale. eBay is just a joke now.
Search is boogered up today. Spotted this item on home page “Andy Bell cd I Don’t Like cd 4 track promo cd Torsten The Bareback Saint tracks” went to item (before you say, yes i know, it’s a fake) anyway it’s there live. Clicked on see other sellers items and nothing! So i put title verbatim in search box and nothing, not showing in search. So apparently this seller has no items live on ebay and yet they have cds listed on the ebay home page.