eBay Overstates Selling Prices in Search Results

by: Ming the Merciless

This is intentional, and it's no "glitch." Its purposes are (1) to "encourage" sellers with identical or similar items to either start their items at a higher price making ebay more money (2) a new criminal trick to further cook their books for Wall Street to keep stock prices rising (making management more money on their stock options (3) recruit new or returning sellers by lying to them about sale prices.

Ebafia: the criminal syndicate that reaches new lows daily.  

by: Philip Cohen

I had noticed this myself on occasions but, as in this circumstance the completed item is in the correct order in the list according to it’s actual sold price, when sorted by price, but the price shown is, incorrectly, the original higher asking price, I will, on this occasion, give the eBafia the benefit of the doubt and put it down to simply one more demonstration of their clunky programming skills …

See, I don’t say that everything they do is done with the intention to defraud consumers, only most things that they do … http://bit.ly/N1nTlc

by: bitbybit

I'm with Ming on this one. No benefit of the doubt.

by: Rexford

Doesn't Goodwill try that little questionable marketing tactic too? LOL  You see some outrageous price on an old sewing machine that doesn't work and they post a printout of an eBay listing above it and it IS NOT the completed sale price and it is an item that didn't sell and got no bids. Unethical.

by: iheartjacksparrow

I have to agree with Philip on this one. If the items are in the correct order for the selling price, then it's probably just another eBay glitch or malfunction, which we know is rampant on the site.

by: RCL

Among some developers, one man's glitch is another man's feature. If you can sell it, why fix it?

by: Philip Cohen

@bitbybit,

I still lean towards “clunky programming”, for if they were indeed demonstrating their usual deceptiveness they would have programmed the item to sort in the order of the original price, not the actual sold price, and we would then never have been none the wiser … conversely, you could be right, and still it IS simply one more demonstration of their utterly clunky programming skills …

by: nsc

I still would lay odds that the higher asking price now feeds into the GMV number they report to Wall Street.

Every quarter, another gimmick.

by: Shawn

If this is intentional, it's a bad idea. Encouraging sellers to start at too high a price isn't going to help them sell -- it's only going to lead to soft sales and frustration. As a collector, I often pay a little more for a "must have" item. But no way would I pay hundreds more.

by: Mark

I'm just happy that eBay still shows us completed items.  Since Tera peak provides this service as well, you might see that day this goes to a paid only service.  

by: Ming the Merciless

We've had this "glitch" discussion here in the past, but it's been a while.

True glitches should statistically occur randomly and unpredictably across the platform.

If any given glitch benefits ebay or the seller, then over a period time the laws of probability state the ebay would benefit 50% of the time and the seller would benefit 50% of the time.

Now, ask yourselves: of the hundreds of thousands of glitches if not millions that have occurred on the ebay platform over the years, how many have benefited ebay and how many benefited you and what were they?

Further, how often does ebafia tell the truth about anything?

Glitch not.

by: BackInBlack

I started noticing this a few months ago. First, without clicking through to the actual item listing (from a watch list), one cannot tell if an item actually sold or merely expired. If viewing complete and/or sold listings, if the item had a Best Offer accepted, the 'sold' price shown was the full But It Now price, not the actual negotiated sale price thru best offer.  I'd figured this was some sort of scam, for all the reasons outlined by others above.

by: WatchCount.com

We offer a simple workaround for this situation at WatchCount.com, if the Best Offer was accepted recently, say, within the past 2 weeks or so. To see the actual selling price, just do this:

Visit the WatchCount.com homepage and paste the eBay listing number into the 'Keywords' search box then click the "Show Me...!" button. Amid the Item Lookup details displayed should be the final sold price via Best Offer for that fixed-price item...