Best Match is wreaking havoc on the Art listings on eBay. On the Art & Artists Discussion Board on eBay, we have been discussing how to deal with it. Here's the article we've be talking about, which explains how Best Match is programmed:
http://www.auctioninsights.info/decoding-ebays-best-match.html
Among all the things that eBay uses to determine their so-called Best Buyer Experience is a list of determining factors among them:
The bulk of the patent application describes the relationship between search terms, the text in the auction title and how relevance and desirability are determined. The Best Match patent does describe other factors that can influence search result rankings including (but not limited to):
pictures available
seller ratings
price range
geographic proximity of searcher to seller
shipping prices
time left in an auction
number of bids
Buy it Now
This should ring an alarm bell for Auctiva users. Since most of us get all the images we want hosted through Auctiva, in order to move up in the queue, we would have to host at least one picture, (or more!) through eBay's Image Hosting service. Otherwise, the eBay programming would list us in Best Match as having no pictures available.
I have NEVER used eBay's Sell Your Item form.
Does anyone have any ideas as to how to get eBay to recognize our pictures. I am thinking that we will be required to use at least one eBay hosted image, and paste the url into our auction html, in place of one of our Auctiva hosted images.
Or is eBay just trying to kill Auctiva?!