Careless or Care Less listings
I have recently been looking at some of the British Commonwealth stamp categories. Some BC categories are split into pre- and post- independence. A cut off date is incorporated in the title of the category coinciding with the date of independence. Stamps issued after independence should be listed in a seperate category which is found in the appropriate geographical region (for example St Lucia up to 1979 is in British Commonwealth and St Lucia 1980 onwards is in South and Central America). It can be argued that the post-independence issues should be listed in the British Commonwealth section under their own subcategory but eBid has followed a number of other auction sites in listing post-independence issues in the appropriate geographical setting.
Whatever your position on this, stamps should be listed in the correct category (not to do so is a listing offence on eBid). I was looking for pre-independence issues for a number of countries and was annoyed to have to scroll through quantities of post-independence issues listed in the wrong category. To take St Lucia as an example again. There were 977 items listed in St Lucia (up to 1979). Of these 977 items, 142 were issues after 1977. In contrast there only 19 items listed in St Lucia (1980 onward). It is possible the the odd listing was incorrectly listed by mistake but it was obvious the a number of large sellers have deliberately listed items in the wrong category, presumably because they disagreed with the split. This is the situation in all British Commonwealth countries where the categories are split with a cut off date.
IMO, it is time this problem was sorted out for the sake of buyers who, like me, must be fed up with scrolling through quantities of irrelevant items not to mention the numbers of identical items listed against eBid rules by the subterfuge of adding a reference number or similar device to get round the duplicate listing rule.
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