UK postcards - item description

[mainlypostcards]

hate to say it marianne but..... I do where possible.... I class them as keywords

You mean you put postcard in the title - nothing wrong with that; doesn't distort the actual search results; same applies for additional words such as animated, vgc, art card, ub, etc etc. All perfectly valid words to add to the title.

[bykimbo]

In that case we should put postcard; or again the full name of the county rather then an abbreviation - part of the problem I suppose is the number of characters allowed in the title field.

P.S. I hate shopping and window shopping. Maybe I am too down to earth and just put the title or author of the book I want. Bought a simple household item today; just typed the name of the item in the search, without even bothering to go into the correct catergory and just picked one of the results that came up!

I do have the advantage that "book" doesn't take up much room, of course. I'm with you, not a keen shopper at all... but when I've got my selling head on I try to think about how other people shop, not just me. I just wish I succeeded more reliably.

[somersethedge]

yes marianne thats what I ment.... if I have enough room I put place/county/postcard and our code in the title... the first 3 are keywords and the code for ease our end... if we dont have enough room then "postcard" becomes "card" or is left out compleatly... I try to put as many keywords in as poss.... some keywords are more important than others, so I do have to "play around" with them sometimes.... I.E (for obvious reasons ) the word "tuck" is more important than postcard.

[bykimbo]

Of course, postcards used to be know as "PCs"... but I guess that one's been hijacked rather.

[somersethedge]

in Maples case they still are but then she has been a dealer for 30 years

[mainlypostcards]

PC is still regularly used, as is RPPC, but if it's our continental cousins selling we also find cp, ak and other abbreviations.

[ClockPostcards]

A lot of the time it's done accidentally on purpose to get visitors like yourselves who are searching for a particular field to drop in on the off chance that they can tempt you into buying or bidding. It's often a case of you have to look just in case there's something on offer that you want. Very annoying but necessary.
It would be impossible for Ebid to look at every auction to make sure it was listed correctly. Or would it? They could pick a small section every week and look to see if this is happening and ban the offender for a month from selling. Having thought of that, would those sellers then go elsewhere?

[deltadelta48]

Searchability of title is #1 concern in a listing. All postcards should say "postcard" in the title or in a search for Milwaukee postcards, yours will not come up. Neither will titles with Milw, Milwau, or Milwauke some up in a Milwaukee search.

Searches do not pick up partial names, that is why the shire listings and searches are inconsistent. Even makes a difference if you leave a S off. i.e. postcard versus postcards.

So technically, I think, if you want a bigger search result, you should include both 'postcard" and "postcards" in title. But you certainly can not leave it off altogether and think a search for seaside postcard is going to bring yours up.

Or I could be wrong on the sensitivity of the ebid searches. Some search engines can be more sophisticated and will ask, "do you mean Milwaukee" but most do not and leaving off important words or letters limits who sees your auction. Just the same as spelling it "postcads".

[nhoneymonster]

Why do postcard sellers regularly put Buckingham, Cambridge, Oxford, etc in their item description, when they really mean Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, etc.? I just picked these 3 counties, but it also applies to numerous others. It is extremely annoying to any collector of postcards of "county towns" when doing a town search to come up with more results for the rest of the county then for the actual town.

You only need to look at my about me page to know that I live in Buckingham - I collect postcards of Buckingham (amongst other cards) and about once a fortnight I do a search to see if anything new has been listed. However, this is not a Buckingham exlusive problem; I've seen the same phenomena with almost all -shire counties.
Last night I performed a search for Buckingham in the Buckinghamshire postcard category on another site. The result: 42 hits; 11 of Buckingham Palace, 10 of Buckingham, 2 had "near Buckingham" in the title which is fair enough - the rest should have had Buckinghamshire rather then Buckingham in the title.

Tonight I did the same search in the same category here. The result: 37 hits, but only 15 of them had Buckingham mentioned correctly; the rest should again have read Buckinghamshire.

Sellers: if you really want to put the county in the description, either put the full name or shorten it to Bucks, Cambs, whatever, but don't just remove the shire bit as it could be a real nuisance and could even lose you business, if a buyer got annoyed enough about it!

I try and be as accurate as possible with things like that, if a place is in Buckinghamshire for example it might be nowhere near Buckingham!