eBay Fraud Scams exposed

eBay sellers better learn how do do a Grey Hat or Black Hat SEO, and really quick.

If you are an honest seller with great feedback, stellar DSR’s, etc.. you are now getting out gamed by those sellers taking advantages of programming deficit in the code that runs the (in)famous Best Match, now a default search result sort on eBay.

Scot Wingo of eBay strategies blog described how to game the eBay best match to your advantage.

In a nutshell, eBay’s best match scores popular keywords in the titles of the Auction listing and simply adds on s score without penalizing for spamming the Best Match search algo with repeated terms.

So now, the poor eBay buyers will see titles such as

5 5 5 5 5 New New New Nintendo Wii Console 2 2 2 2

and similar nonsense titles as eBay has forced it’s sellers to play this silly game just to stay on top of the Best Match search results on eBay.

Now if you are an eBay seller, there is a tool that will help you to come up with a similar nonsense auction title which according to eBay brains is better for eBay finding and thus will rank you higher on eBay search results.

http://labs.ebay.com/raghavgupta/demoto/to

Let’s say that you wanted to sell an
nintendo vii console
so put your auction title into the first text box labeled Your Item Title
and test against seach that is most frequent : wii
eBay then gives you suggestions which other words to add to the title
here is a link to the modified Auction title per eBay’s suggestions

See by adding the word NEW few times you have just increased your findability score on the new eBay Best Match.

It’s unfortunate that eBay thinks that repeating the word NEW three or 4 times gives a better value to customer experience on eBay. But since that is a case now, I suppose even if you are a honest seller you have no choice but to play these eBay games till eBay fixes what is officially yet another improvement.