eBay Search needs to get smarter

7/02/2010 at 13:49

needle in haystackA few weeks back I was looking for the complete boxed set of all seven seasons of The West Wing on eBay. As you would, I searched for “West Wing DVDs complete” – and turned up hundreds. The problem was that rather than being what I wanted, they were the complete season 1, the complete season 2, and so on.

Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought to myself, if Best Match was clever enough to see that I hadn’t specified a season, even though tWW has seven, and to figure out that what I’m *probably* looking for, then, is the complete complete set, rather than any one season, and show me those first.

And then, coincidentally, Adam Nash wrote a post about the same thing. If you don’t know Adam, he used to work for eBay, and he is exceptionally smart, so when his colleague Ikai unfavourably compared the prices of Deep Space 9 DVD sets available on eBay and Amazon, he set out to figure out why eBay looked like such a bad deal.

Here’s what he found (republished with permission).

When I searched on eBay, I found literally dozens of items priced below $300 [Amazon's shipped price was $313], many of which were from top sellers, and many of which that offered returns. In fact, I saw items as low as $130, but I tried to find the lowest priced item that matched the quality of service Ikai would expect from an Amazon third party seller.

Of course, I’ve been on eBay since 1998, and I spent years working on structured data and search products at eBay, so I have a hunch why I found the items and he didn’t.

He typed the wrong query. My guess is that he typed something like this “Star Trek DS9 season 1-7″ in the DVD category. Makes sense, right? Unfortunately, this only returns two items, the cheapest of which is $299.

Despite years of investment, the eBay search engine still doesn’t understand that “DS9 = Deep Space Nine”, and that “1-7″ is a range, and that “season” is an attribute that DVD sets for television series can have.

Now, what I did do? Simple:

1. I typed the query “deep space (nine, 9)”
2. I selected the category for DVD
3. I selected “Buy It Now” for listing type
4. I sorted from highest price to lowest

Let’s review the tricks I used:

1. The () notation is how the eBay search engine does OR. So I was able to find listings with both “nine” and “9″ in them. To be fancy, I could have used “DS9″ in there too, but it wasn’t necessary.
2. Filter to DVD category to clean out other clutter.
3. I figured Ikai didn’t want to bid on an auction
4. Sorting from high to low is a counter-intuitive trick, but if you assume that the collection will be more expensive than individual DVDs, it makes sense. I use this all the time with high priced items, since quality tends to float to the top.

I then scanned down the list to find the cheapest collection sold by a credible seller (someone with high feedback and % satisfaction). And then I tweeted it to Ikai.

Would anyone else know how to do this? Would anyone else want to do this?

I do it, largely because I still love eBay, and because I actually know how to do it. Plus, I really appreciate saving money on items like this, so the $115 is worth a few minutes.

But all I know is that if eBay can’t leverage its intrinsic price advantage with buyers like Ikai, then it has a serious problem. They can never beat Amazon or traditional retailer e-commerce sites on trust and convenience. They can, however, beat them on price and selection.

But customers have to be able to find those advantages to value them.