eBay Sold Items: Best Offer Selling Price
Posted:
22-Feb-2013 | Revised:
20-May-2013
We just added a tiny new feature to WatchCount.com that we think a small number of our visitors will appreciate.
This is relevant to already-completed eBay listings that sold via Best Offer instead of the original BIN asking price, within the prior
couple few weeks.
If you're curious what its final selling price was, just use our
Item Lookup feature by pasting the several-digit eBay listing number into the
'Keywords' box on our homepage then clicking the "Show Me...!" button. You'll then see basic item details, now including the final Best Offer sold-for price.
Just Launched: Most Popular eBay Searches
We're excited to launch a new search tool here on WatchCount.com:
Most Popular eBay Searches! With it, you can see search terms most frequently used by other shoppers on eBay, in most any category or subcategory. This handy eBay keyword tool also does the same for search phrases you enter yourself, spanning across all eBay categories, returning similar and related terms used by live eBayers cruising around the marketplace.
You'll see that we make it easy to browse through subcategories, re-run searches based on newly found terms, and also easily jump over to our
Most Watched search tool (or eBay) for interesting finds.
The development of this tool comes right on the heels of eBay's
retiring of their heralded eBay Pulse pages. We wanted to offer a replacement for the same tool that was featured on Pulse for so many years, and we feel we did a pretty good job of it (actually, we've got a few bells and whistles that Pulse didn't have).
We hope you enjoy this
new search functionality we've just brewed on the site and, as always, we welcome your
feedback and suggestions.
eBay Removes Wildcard Searching
Earlier this month (05-Nov-2012, to be exact), eBay removed the ability to search their marketplaces using an asterisk within search terms. This wildcard functionality, as it's called, allowed a search for
dress*, for example, to return results that included
dress,
dresser,
dresses, etc.
eBay has stated that the asterisk character will no longer be supported, whether on-eBay or off-eBay. Thus, this change also affects their entire third-party developers platform, including WatchCount.com search queries and related services, and is unfortunately out of our control.
Search phrases that include a wildcard will now simply drop the asterisk and proceed without it. eBay still plans to process search queries with intelligent recognition to attempt to interpret the intent of the user and return relevant results. But know that if you use an asterisk, you may no longer receive results the way you're used to.
There's been a lot of discussion about this revolutionary change, some of which can be found in eBay's
Search forum. eBay has said that as part of their search engine evolution, they needed to replace that functionality with a different internal algorithm for processing/interpreting and rewriting search requests by users.
As we said earlier, this affects search products on WatchCount.com, such as our
No Bids, Auctions Ending Soon search tool.
Our flagship
Most Watched search tool: it seems that wildcards
may still work there for the time being, but we're not entirely sure. Play around with it and see what you think!
eBay Retires Pulse Pages
It seems eBay has dropped support for its Pulse pages, effective a few weeks ago. While to our knowledge eBay made no public announcement, a number of bloggers and observers took notice of the change, whereby the Pulse pages for eBay's major international sites disappeared, replaced with an automatic redirect to the eBay home page.
Pulse had been around for at least a decade, probably more. It's likely that eBay's removal of it was part of an "out with the old, in with the new" strategy that's currently underway on the site, evident by their high-publicity announcements of their new logo, homepage, and overall shopping experience advances.
Many feel that eBay Pulse maintained a kind of gravity for a certain "underground" audience of eBayers – a mix of buyers, sellers, and other enthusiasts, stretching back to the early years of eBay. The Pulse pages highlighted popular search phrases, most watched items, and popular eBay Stores, giving users a kind of glimpse of what was hot on eBay from a handful of angles.
For nearly half a decade now, WatchCount.com has been happily offering
eBay Most Watched Items/Auctions search functionality that we liked to think was something akin to "Pulse on a turbo boost", as we're able to show more detailed ranking information with more depth and search features than what Pulse touched upon.
We hope and expect to continue offering these eBay Most Watched search services (as well as other features on the site), hopefully for years to come, and invite eBayers who were once regulars to Pulse to come explore all that WatchCount.com has to offer for eBay shoppers, sellers, and others.
Larger Photos for Most Watched Items
We've just boosted the photo image sizes for listings appearing on our
Most Watched items pages. Pictures are now about 50% larger!
We think this change is a little easier on the eyeballs, and we hope you too enjoy more eye-catching moments as you browse the listings on our website.
Please reach out to us with any comments or suggestions you may have on this update (or anything else on our site). There's a
Contact Us link in the 'About' menu on every page...
Thanks for using WatchCount.com!
WP Plugin: Milestone – Topping 4,000 Downloads
The
WatchCount.com WordPress Plugin just hit another milestone today, surpassing its 4,000
th download. (Rockin'!) This is a total count since our free plugin launched over 2 years ago.
The WCCWPPI (as we call it) is hosted at, and tracked independently by, WordPress.org. You can see their download graph and counter for our plugin on the official
WordPress Plugin Directory website.
If you use our WordPress plugin, we'd like to extend a
big thank you for contributing to the master download tally, and we hope you're enjoying using the WCCWPPI to showcase your favorite eBay items within your blog.
