Sick of Ruten/Yahoo auction misleading keywords

Taiwan Living in Taiwan
1

Ok I’m getting sick of keyword abuse and misleading advertisements.

I have been looking for a cheap guitar hard case, and when I search for guitar case, I find a million listings of ukelele cases, gig bags, gig bags that cost more than hard cases (how does that happen?), and everything in between.

On ebay I could search for something and get all the items I am looking for (mostly), because ebay will cancel your listing if you manipulate keywords or put up items they even slightly suspect of not being as described or counterfeit.

But search for “fender stratocaster” and you’ll get a million listings of guitars that are NOT fender, but some fake Fender clones, even non Fender shapes, and a few listings in between would be actual Fenders. Because people write in their listing “some guitar comes with case (not Fender, Gibson, PRS, Ibanez, etc.)” and so if you search “fender” you get all of those listings where people dick around with keywords to get extra exposure. Why Taiwanese auction sites do nothing about it is anyone’s guess.

2

It’s the same with computer parts. Especially CPUs. They always list old ones to ‘lower the price’ and then mention the one you want in the description for a higher price.

3

I’ve been searching ruten less and less now because of this. It’s a waste of time and energy.

4

except I don’t always have a choice.

You can search for guitar cases on ebay and pay 200 dollars shipping for a 30 dollar case.

with large items you’re stuck using ruten or yahoo.

Taobao is actually better organized believe it or not!! And better availability for the kind of stuff I want too (and unlike Taiwanese sellers they don’t mark up the exact same items)

5

Several CPUs actually have the same specs but they are branded differently because they are intended for either commercial or private use and sometimes have different features like supporting more memory. Sometimes the sellers list them as the same as another model. But some also pack the title with as many popular keywords as possible.

Category spam is another problem. You might be looking in a category specifically for one thing and find 1/3 of the products are barely related accessories that have their own category. You can see some sellers have multiple listings for the same product. There are even unrelated, less popular items in popular categories.

It’s all an annoyance, but you can kind of get through it quick just by looking at the images. But Ruten should be more diligent about clearing things up.

6

Ebay has policies against this. Keyword spam and your item is removed instantly. Use the wrong category and same thing.

Since Ruten is part of ebay (supposedly) they’d do more about this.

For example, I find cello, violin, viola cases under “guitar accessories”, when searching for guitar cases under “guitar accessories” I find guitars that come with case.

Machine tool stuff is the most frustrating, so much so I’d rather order it from Taobao (you have to wait a bit, but the final price ends up being about 20% cheaper), and Taobao doesn’t do stupid stuff like that. Basically what happens is I get a result/page like this:

https://find.ruten.com.tw/s/?q=铣刀

The search string is “end mills” and as you can see, there’s maybe a few listings for end mills but almost all are Dremel tools… and other times you have listings like this:

https://goods.ruten.com.tw/item/show?21202103915286

How much is it??

Whereas Taobao you get this:

https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.9.77f7402fW2Dn9J&id=530485863911&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&abbucket=7&skuId=4372900686004

Everything is listed correctly and you just choose the size you want, no need to send emails and wait for a response.

Taiwanese auction sites needs to police category spams and keyword abuse more… it’s frustrating trying to find something, come up to a page with a price of 99,999,999NTD and you have to email for quote, and of course the quote comes back with way higher price than you think it ought to be (like paying too much for USED end mills). Even shipping for taobao isn’t too bad, they have shipping agents that Taobao sends all overseas order to (like myUS) and they charge the shipping from there. Did it a couple of times, bought stuff from Taobao and it gets delivered to a convenience store (for a rather steep shipping discount too).

7

Taobao is great, hence their local competitors tried to block them as much as possible.

8

Well instead of blocking maybe they need to be competitive and offer good services…

9

I was looking for a banjo the other day and I kept finding ukulele stuff. I don’t know what the deal is with ukuleles.
Have you tried shopee.tw? The same sellers seem to use that and the other two, but they may have a stricter kw policy.

10

There are a few companies promoting ukeleles like crazy.

I don’t even do ukeleles because to me it’s not even worth the trouble. Those things are designed to be cheap/disposable instruments and it takes no less effort to make than a guitar, in fact it’s harder because it’s smaller, more fragile, but the most you could possibly get for it is about 20,000 NT.

11

I still don’t understand how this works. Why do sellers use egregiously high prices - don’t buyers normally seek for bargains (i.e., lowest prices) so these high priced items would not appear on the first or early pages of a search? Are they priced like that because search algorithms show them under certain circumstances – and what are those circumstances so I can avoid them?

12

Basically they want you to call for price… it’s a sales tactic to make it harder for you to refuse.

13

Some of them are because they don’t want you to buy at this moment. Either because the item is not in stock, there’s a problem that they’re tending to or other reasons.

The ads I find frustrating are the ones for $1 that want you to message for the actual price because they want to be at the top of the listing when you sort by price.

Ruten removes misleading ads though if you report them.

I’ve had one guy try to sell a laptop keyboard for $1030 and then state it was $1700 after purchase.

Ruten removed it.

Then I had another guy wanting to mail it to my house instead of sending it to 711.

I just refused and he gave in. My security guys are stupid.

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14

That’s what I always assumed to be the explanation as well.

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15

I think the $1 ones are the ones that want you to message and ask.

16

Possibly. Some of those are also where the seller lists multiple related items on a single page, say, some batteries alongside cheap plastic cases for them, or phones and phone cases. Shopee then displays those as a range, such that they appear earlier in search results when ordered by price.

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17

I know Ebay will remove listings if you use deceptive description in order to appear in search results. However Ruten doesn’t do that.

For example, one would list a guitar as the following:

41 inch acoustic guitar not Martin Taylor Gibson Takemine

Ebay would remove such a listing because it is neither any of those brands, however listings like this is common in Ruten.

18

Yes they do. I’ve emailed Ruten several times about ads and they’ve removed every one.

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19

Ruten won’t remove it unless you report it.

Ebay however will automatically remove those kind of listings without you having to report it (they probably have algorithms that detect these kind of listings).

20

Ok. So report it.

Because Ruten is not ebay. Ruten is Taiwanese Kijiji/Gumtree