Hopefully this is temporary but I doubt it. There may also be other changes I haven't noticed. If it all goes away later today I'll be quite happy.
ebay has for unknown reasons now disallowed so-called "top level" category browsing for many major categories, including Coins & Paper Money. At the same time, the classic "list view" has been removed as well, forcing you to use Gallery View.
This change also affects Saved Searches, many of which now redirect to the
ebay home page, ruining most of the ones I had saved with their specific settings.
For the past several years, my default search has been the entire Coins & Paper Money category, list view, with the filters for Auction Only, US Only and Ending Soonest all chosen. This was my saved search, but the ability do do this has been removed. No explanation or rationale behind such a drastic change has been given by
ebay.
With the changes, the highest categories that can be browsed in such a manner are now Coins: US, Coins: World, Coins: Ancient, Exonumia, Paper Money, etc. making something that used to be searchable in one search now require anywhere from 1-5 saved searches or more.
In addition, once you HAVE set up your new searches, the old behavior of clicking "search" at the top of the page to start at the beginning of your listings has also been removed (it now redirects to the home page) and you have to reload from a Favorites browser link to "refresh" your search. (Hitting F5 or Browser Refresh reloads the current page only.)
In other words, if there are 20 pages of listings sorted by Ending Soon and you want to start back at page 1 from page 20, you can't just click Search with an empty text box anymore at the top of the page; you have to reload the saved search from your favorites link.
Among the other "ninja" changes to C&PM listings:
- New search filter and seller field "Modified" added, allowing sellers to specify whether or not a coin has been "modified" (strangely, the useless "Condition: New/Used" filter remains...)
- Two new page headers added to each page: "Shop by Category" and "Shop by Certification"
- The "grade" field for sellers now separates the two-letter abbreviation from the numerical grade. (eg. Old: "MS65", new: "MS 65")
- "Ending Soonest" renamed to "Ending Soon"
- "Fewest bids" and "Most bids" re-added to Sort options (the only change I'm happy about)
Strangely enough, they still can't be bothered to allow you to exclude so-called "live auctions" from your auction listings. I have never seen these "live auctions" actually used, but they hang around to clutter up listings.
Posted 08/31/2018 8:24 pm
