How Well does eBay’s Best Match Feature Stack Up?
by Leeia Ladipoh
Published May 29th, 2008
On March 3rd Ebay launched a few new features. One of these was Best Match. Has this addition helped or hurt their business? Let’s take a look and find out.
Now when you log onto eBay and search for an item, instead of getting several thousand items that only match the words you type in, you get millions of items that all have the keywords you typed in - some not having anything to do with the item you are searching for.
Best Match - Changes Made
Along with the best match feature, they also made changes to their feedback system. For the past ten years, you could be honest about your experience on eBay.
You could give a positive, neutral, or negative feedback to a person or business, depending on how well you felt you were treated after a purchase or sale. Now, you can only give positive feedback to anyone you make a purchase from.
That means even if you were to get ripped off, or never get your item, you still have to leave positive feedback.
Search Results Changes
eBay also changed the way search results are displayed. Now, the higher your feedback score, the higher your auction will be displayed when someone searches for products, instead of the way it used to be.
In the past, this feature would display search results from the auction ending the soonest to auctions with more time. Now, if you have a 99% feedback rating, your auctions will be listed higher than someone who has a 95% feedback score.
This has many of eBay’s top sellers thinking of finding a new place to sell their items. The longer a person or business has been a member on eBay the more they have dealt with people and developed a feedback score. Sometimes, no matter how much you try, you just cannot satisfy everyone - so the ones that are not satisfied may leave a negative feedback.
This can impact your score, and put your auctions at the end of the search results.
The Bottom Line - Better or Worse?
With your items at the bottom of the search list, you have to find ways of getting your auctions noticed. You can sell your products for a lower price, but you still have to make a profit.
You would have to get your merchandise way below wholesale to sell below wholesale and make a profit. Also, don’t forget that eBay will get 10-20% just for you selling on their site. Since the changes were made in early March, many eBay sellers have been losing more money than they are making.
With some of their top sellers looking for other places to sell their items, eBay has to be asking themselves if these changes were a wise move, or if they took something that was working well and made unnecessary changes that will cause them to lose business.
