eBay: Typos and Search Problems

[mandy]

eBay is charging sellers for typos. Last week, we reported that some sellers continue to complain that their eBay listings do not appear in search results, or do so in a sporadic and unexplained manner. One user found out after weeks of frustration why his items had failed to appear: he misspelled the word "ship."

Sam Mindel had entered in his shipping terms in a listing-tool template, and instead of typing the word ship, he typed "shit." Rather than rejecting Sam's listings with the typo, the eBay system allowed them, but failed to index them because the misspelled word sets off a profanity filter. And by not indexing Sam's listings, they did not show up in search results. However, they did show up in Sam's list of items for sale in his My eBay account, meaning he might never have discovered that his listings were not searchable or browsable by buyers...

full article: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m02/i26/s01

Related article:

Sam Mindel has 5,000 items sitting in a warehouse in Los Angeles, but something is keeping him from listing them on eBay: Mindel said no one can find his eBay listings. He joined other sellers who have been complaining since May 2006 that something is seriously wrong with eBay's search feature.

The only way to see any of Mindel's listings is by knowing the item number - something potential buyers would not have access to when shopping the site. Searching by keywords - and even searching by Mindel's eBay User ID - shows zero results...

full article: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m02/i23/s02