eBay took away browsing by region, but you can still do it (sort of).
Jul 28 '04
The Bottom Line Against Stupidity (and Greed) the Gods Themselves are Powerless...
eBay hardly needs an introduction, but for those who have just returned to civilization, accompanied by the good man Friday, it is the largest in the world online auction site (as well as one of the few large, profitable Internet-only companies that survived that did not dot-bomb.)
There are two primary approaches to looking for items on eBay - browsing and searching. These are very similar to their general WWW equivalents. As an example of browsing, an eBay user may follow, from the eBay home page, the link to Computers and Networking category, and from there a link to, say, CRT Monitors. Searching is equally straightforward: you enter terms you are interested in, typically once you have browsed to a category, and get back a page or pages of results.
eBay used to have the ability to browse and search by major U.S. metropolitan regions. One could either start by picking a region, and then browsing to the category of interest, or specify the region when searching. I should note here that even though 40 or 50 major metro areas were used by eBay, buyers and sellers outside them could still use the closest one. For example, since there is no separate region for Fargo/Moorhead, North Dakota, people from that area used the closest one, Minneapolis-St. Paul.
As of some time this summer, eBay decided to remove the ability to browse and search by regions, and replace it with the feature that allows users to search (not browse) by distance from a zipcode.
On the surface, this may seem an improvement. After all, regions were fairly coarse categories. Even within a region, a buyer may have to drive 1 mile or a hundred mile to pick up the purchase. Knowing exactly how far a listed item is may help buyers decide how much to bid, by taking into the account the time and hassle it would take to pick up their purchases.
However, many people, including myself, used eBay to browse new items in a specific region, not search for something in particular (I am always on the lookout for appliances, fixtures etc. for rental properties.) This ability is now taken away. True, you can search for items within a distance of a zipcode and then sort the results by that distance. But this way you lose the ability to sort by anything else, like time ending or price.
To add insult to injury, eBay made 250 miles the smallest radius of a search. There are very few items I am willing to drive to 250 miles, and I doubt I am in a minority.
For an example of ire this change in eBay's user interface caused, the following discussion thread - Bring Back Regional Searches!!!! is an interesting read:
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jsp?forum=80&thread=410174731&start=-1&msRange=40
There is a way (hack, workaround, kludge, call it whatever you want) to emulate Browsing By Region (TM), and be able to sort by criteria other than distance in the "regional" view. I describe it below.
1. Go to the category you are interested. Say, CRT monitors. This will give you several thousand results.
2. Search for *, sorting the results by distance to your zip code. Specify 250 miles as your search radius.
3. You will get a page or several pages of results yet. Now the trick is to change the 250 mile distance to something reasonable that does define a region for you, say, 5, 10, or 50 miles.
4. To do that, click on the Address/Location entry of your browser. The URL specifying the search results page is likely to be very long, hundrends of characters. Move the cursor to the right until you see a (well obfuscated) string sadistanceZ250QQ. This is where search distance in miles is specified. Change 250 to whatever is a reasonable distance, and hit Enter to reload the page. You should see truly local searches for your zip code. Now you can sort by time ending, price, etc.
An example of a search giving me all CRT monitors within 50 miles of a zip code close to downtown Minneapolis is below. I have manually changed the search distance from 250 to 50 miles. Note how long the URL is, it must be all on one line when you paste it into the browser's address bar. I split it into lines to comply with the Epinions HTML filter.
http://search.ebay.com/_Standard-
CRT_W0QQsofocusZbsQQsatitleZ*QQsacategoryZ27179Q26catrefQ3DC
6QQsaslopZ1QQsolocationSelectorZ1QQsalocatedincountryZ1QQsol
ocationSelectorZ1QQsaavailabletocountryZ1QQsacqtyopZgeQQsopo
stalZ55414QQsadistanceZ50QQsosortpropertyZ11Q26sosortorderQ3
D1QQsocolumnlayoutZ3QQsorecordsperpageZ50QQsocomparecolumnla
youtZ1QQfromZR7QQnojsprZy
Note: the above workaround works for IE 6 and Firefox browsers.
Apparently, eBay uses a simple obfuscation of the URL: Z replaces the equal sign (=) after the name of the parameter, and QQ replaces the & separator between parameters. This makes me wonder: why would eBay go to some lengths so that a majority of users cannot modify HTTP POST parameters directly? One reason may be to protect their server software from bad data inadvertently specified by users (this is not a way to protect against malicious tamperers, of course.) Another, less noble reason may be that eBay wants to discourage local trading. Yes, I suppose many unethical sellers may try to cheat eBay by canceling the auction and selling directly to the buyer who found the item locally through eBay. But, are auction listing fees not paid in advance? (I never sold anything on eBay so I don't know).
Judging by the heavy-handedness with which eBay removed the regional browsing and searching even before it implemented a functional distance search, precipitating a stream of complaints, and the fact that currently the minimum distance one can specify is 250 miles, it appears that eBay wants to discourage direct communications between local buyers and sellers even if it does get paid for listings. Why, I have no idea (to quote verbatima, perhaps because eBay is ee-vil?)
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Epinions.com ID:
asafono
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Location: St. Paul, Minnesota
Reviews written: 39
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About Me:
I have no principles; all I've got is nerves - Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
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