Practically Classics Forum

Hi all, just wondered if anyone else was annoyed by the recent deleting by Eb*y of the "classic car parts" category. I found out when I was trying to put a part for sale onto the category and couldn't find it. When I made an enquiry to Eb*ay they said the category was deleted ! We need to get a lot of people to complain / enquire why, so that they might rethink this decision. I'm guessing they did it because too many items wre not getting bid on and therefore not bringing in enough final valuation fees. It's a real pain now to look for stuff as you have to wade thru loads of modern stuff to find the parts for classics.

The backlash has already started

Classic car parts?

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and similar threads on Retro Rides, Pistonheads, Mini World, blah

Yup, it's damned annoying. I just got back from my hols intending to list loads of parts only to find the category has vanished.
No point wasting our breath trying to get eBay to change their mind though, they'll have done this because we don't fit into their master plan so won't be listening to our complaints.
IMO, they're trying to phase out auction items entirely. Compare the number of BINs with Auction results from typical searches and you'll see that they're succeeding in most areas. Those areas that resist get the chop, simple.
Why phase out auctions? Because they slow down sales and hit their profits. If you want to buy a widget and see one listed as a BIN for £10 and another at auction for 99p with a week to go, you're unlikely to choose the BIN immediately. In a week's time you may not want one any more so eBay will have lost a sale, or you may get lucky and be the only bidder for 99p so their profits will hurt. Multiply this over the millions of items listed and the effect becomes massive.

I don't want ro re-ignite the perennial debate, but I think it's because it's not always clear into which category parts fall. Most of my eBay activity is buying, and I generally find that I have to look at the general car parts category as well as the classic, so I don't really find its disappearance a problem, in fact it makes life easier because I only have to search one instead of two. I accept that owners of older machinery may have a different view, though, and as a minority group they are getting a rough deal.

Possibly yet another own goal for eBay but if you search the parts category by make of car for which parts are required, the end result is largely the same.
There was a similar outcry when eBay changed the layout of a listing page a couple of years ago but we soon got used to the new style.
I loathe the idea that eBay has us by the short hairs, but realistically, there's still no effective alternative as CQout has pretty much fizzled out.

Searching by make of car might work if you have something rare, but try looking for parts for a Rover 2000 and you'll soon see why it's a major problem. You can't rely on sellers listing 'P6' for example, so end up looking at pages of stuff for year 2000 Rover 75s or worse. On another forum, sellers are complaining that sales since the change have been disastrous.

Searching by make or whatever would work much better if people didn't insist on relisting the same items 1000 times with every combination of make & model tacked onto the description!

I refuse to sell on evilbay now, they don't give a hoot about sellers, and have been stitched up more than once on there despite their boasts that it's totally safe.

I will use it to buy, and is, well was a handy place to find both parts and cars, but that appears to be getting harder and harder. I can see it will only be a matter of time before they hack off everybody with extortionate fees, lack of customer service, and hitleresque removal of adverts that don't tie the line, some for even having one word they don't like.

It's just a pity there isn't a decent alternative around, eBid is all good and well, but until people start listing on it, not an awful lot of choice at the moment.

We will do something on this in the next issue. If there is any way to get rid of multiple identical listings for wiper blades, multi coloured hi tension leads and the like... I would be one happy editor.

For me, an equally worrying trend is the proliferation of listings - all the same but listed under every maker from AC to Zaporozhetz - for those wretched tin pellets that "enable any car to run on unleaded fuel."

Remove that nonsense from every eBay category and there'd be around a quarter of the quantity of listings to scan through before finding that elusive part and that would be a result.