Apparently as of tonight, if you use an advanced search string for finding Lithuanian stamps or postal history items, you will get an error message: “Unfortunately, we only have room for around 100 characters, so we had to shorten your search.” Then the search does not return any results.
Really? eBay has been a favorite destination for rare items or bargain hunters for years. They really seem to be shooting themselves in the foot.
When eBay removed the wildcard search, I rewrote all my searches changing date ranges from -199* to (-1990, -1991, -1992, -1993, …) trying to remove from search results any modern stamps issued after 1990.
If you used to find what you are looking for, now you will have to browse literally hundreds of pages to find it. Now you will have to browse through a bunch of junk listings.
Let us know what you think.
John says
June 6, 2013 at 7:40 pmeBay is now using typical market strategies. They don’t want you to get to what you’re looking for immediately. They want you to look at 100 pages because in theory, the more items you look at you may get an impulse buy before getting to the item you’re looking for. Which happens a lot. It’s very annoying and it might not be the best strategy for stamps, but in most other categories, it works very well.
Audrius Brazdeikis says
June 6, 2013 at 8:09 pmLooks like eBay is backing off (temporarily?) on the restrictive search. Although many eBay customer service reps also confirmed that the change is permanent.