If their search pulls up the ten titles they already have, but 15 of your other titles would have suited them – the buyer doesn’t see them, and you miss out.

According to Griff (ebay.com old school employee) it is YOUR responsibility to route buyers through to your other auctions:
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=2000571220&tstart=0&mod=1211325974501

QUOTE:
Hello Linda,

If you have 20 identical postcards, only one of them will display in a list of returned search results.

If you have 20 postcards that share a keyword like “Los Angeles Postcard” (and they are not identical, that is, they have other keywords that differentiate them from each other) and there are other sellers with postcards with “Los Angeles Postcard” as keywords and a buyer searches for

Los Angeles Postcard

Only ten items per seller will be be displayed.

If no other seller has Los Angeles Postcard in their title (that is only yours are returned) then all 20 will be displayed.

Seller can drive traffic from the listings that appear in a search to their other listings or eBay Store.

The purpose of this new feature is to make search easier for buyers and to provide fairness in exposure to all sellers.

Regards,

Griff
END QUOTE

If you read the rest of that thread, Griff makes it clear that this is deemed to be fair, that YOU must drive the buyer through to your other auctions even if they don’t see the auctions of yours that they want to click on.

Effectively this has been done to accommodate sellers of the nature of Buy.com who can list more than half a million items at a time, with greatly discounted listing fees – while sellers of unique items have to either slow down their sales to ten items a week, or pay full price for a search that effectively selects a random ten of your items for any buyer. As Sue said above “Overall these changes should benefit both buyers and sellers.” but that is on the proviso that the buyers and sellers aren’t interested in collections of old or unique-ish type items – then it fragements the marketplace to the advantage of nobody.

Kevin

Plus the new policy is drafted very wide so they could get you for just about anything if they wanted to. surely though if you just scrambled your prices they would be deemed “not identical” and you would be returned to 10 in search which is more than enough for most people.

There are numerous variations, for instance, on the Star Trek DVD back catalogue, different series, Special Editions, standard editions etc. I could offer all (excess of 50 different titles), but if a buyer put in ‘Star Trek DVD’ it would only bring up 10 from me, even though each title is different.

This is going to require the buyer to be not so ‘lazy’ in their search parameters, and be much more specific. Trouble is, buyers won’t know this.

Collectors and Browsers Please Note:: Ebay has announced that search is changing “starting early June” to limit the search result to only ten items per seller. This may affect buyers and sellers of early items that are listed in runs when collections or archives are being listed piecemeal. It is not clear whether this will affect the category results as well (the policy refers to “browse and search” ). There will apparently be a link at the bottom of search pages that will allow you to see all results, but Ebay has announced you will not be allowed to set this as your default search. I will be listing about 20 Zeiss Ikon items today, so please Click Here if you would like to see all of my auctions in the order they are finishing.

Actually it cruels people breaking up collections of scarce old collectibles. If I list say 20 1900 real photo postcards of San Fancisco (or Yorkshire) from an original collection, I have no way of knowing whether the buyer will see the ones they don’t own, or only the ones that they already have. I can list smaller quantities and lose international shipping advantage (this kills my ability to viably sell stereoviews on the American site, as I heavily subsidise the postage and sold in larger runs to attract competition and multiple purchases). Ebay says that you need to syphon the buyer through to your other auctions, but if the buyer doesn’t see the item they want, you won’t get them to click on the first auction in the first place. As for collectors, from this point they only see a percentage of what they actually want to see, and will miss items they do want. This will remove active competition from scarce collectibles unless you stagger your listings or list substantially less items when breaking up genuine collections. It reduces the abilty to subsidise postage, and you have no way of knowing which items any buyer has actually seen.

One other solution is to add a subtitle saying you have “more items listed, please see my other auctions”, and hope that some people click through. Thus what Ebay loses from offering free gallery (with all the additional fees) they make up with subtitles on every auction when listing commercially viable runs. How cool!

Tell me again how this benefits both me and my buyers.

Kevin (who studied the ramifications of this fiasco in detail when it was announced in May)

When this video gets out, they may not be making ANY more rules, period!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DJWNP9LKEA

Don’t like to click on unknown links, just go to youtube and type in “paypal counterfeit”, without the quotes and it is the first video there.