Home Racing World

When I go to ebay in 1/32 slot cars and type (for instance) NSR all I want to see come back are cars and parts made by NSR. The same goes for Scalextric, Fly, Carrera, Ninco and all the others. But many sellers put in their item description every one of the major brands. Now when I just type Mustang or Camaro or Ford GT I expect to see cars from everybody that makes one. Why can't ebay require sellers to not be so loose with their descriptions. Setting up a search is all about weeding out all undesired elements and these sellers do this so their item will show up in most searches.

Rant over!

Bob -
I can relate to your frustrations!
One thing you can do, is us the "-" function to filter out items with those other words in the title.

As an example, if you search for "Carrera" in slot cars - it currently shows 2,835 items
If you change your search to "Carrera -Scalextric" - it shows 2,706 items
There is the potential that it will filter legitimate Carrera items in the process that have the Scalextric in the title, but it WILL eliminate all of the Scalextric titled items with "Carrera" added to the title. :)

One thing to note, the "-" sign can not have a space between it and the word you want to eliminate.
In other words, it must be -Scalextric and NOT - Scalextric

Hope that helps cut a little frustration. :)

Oh - and one more thing - you can put together a whole string of "-" items like:
NSR -slot.it -Fly -Ninco
(although I find that typically if you have one of them it eliminates 99% of the "offending" listings as they typically will list the item as something like "Slot.it SICA24a Audi R18 TDI #1 Monza Test 2011 Slot Car 1/32 CA24a nsr carrera")

While I am not a fan of the procedure, I quite understand why they do it. Not everyone that is likely to search for slot cars on eBay would know all the brands. They might not know what NSR is, but depending on where they come from they might know Ninco or Scalextric or SCX.

If your had never heard of NSR would you know what they make?

There is also the fact Scalextric is ubiquitous in UK. The brand name is used to refer to all slot cars. So the Scalextric name is going to be attached to 99% of slot car listings.

Fully share your pain Bob. Unfortunately lots of ebay sales come from "casual" or accidental finds. I know Ive done it. Been looking for product X and found product Y and said to myself, hey that aint half bad for that price. I'll buy it. Hence everyone attaches the word scalextric to their description as scalextric = slotcars to most casual non slotting people.

Having said that Ive bought some real bargins from people that have not listed things correctly because they didnt know what they had. I bought a hard to find out of print book which had been listed under auto parts rather than books & magazines. So it can work both ways for you.

Not only do I agree with you, I'll add another annoyance to go with it.

I'm sick of seeing "vintage" or "rare" as a description of something from 6 months ago. If it was 6 years, it still wouldn't be right.

I concur with you Bob; in my experience the ads that include the long string of "other" brand names are not typically "slot car" people....I mean you can read an ad and know that the person that wrote it is not "in" the hobby. I also stay away from any item that is "Rare", "Collectors item", "LQQK", etc. I cannot picture any of our HRW cohorts posting an ad like that. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the dollar is the end all/be all to everything.
Ok, I'm done now :angry-soapbox:

This practice also annoys me, but I can say I did do it on a couple of listings when I first started selling a few things on E-bay. In the sellers rules it does say you should not list multiple manufacturers in a listing, along with other miss leading words or pharses to get your listing to appear in more searches.
But I saw other sellers doing it and did try it, until E-bay closed my listing and made me relist it correctly. So E-bay will crack down on this when they catch it. Then you will not see it as much and then everyone will start doing it again.
Randy

Bob, out of interest what NSR-Scalextric-Ninco-SCX-Pioneer-MRRC-Scaleauto-Slotit were you after? I may have what youre after, unless its rare (one week old), then you may have to pay a premium for it. :D

You're a cruel, cynical, bad man, Fabio. [note the three adjective chide- I charge extra for that]

Right back at ya. :D :lol: :banana-dance:

Does anyone remember the ebay days when you were charged a small fee for listing? If your item didn't sell, it cost you. Now that's gone and we have too many listings for over priced items .

I long for the the days when all you needed was 100M of hard drive and 128k of memory. Yes I know Im a sentamentalist, those days will never come back......

Hey, don't trash my "Trash 80" :)

Maybe I could change the forum, make it an all black screen...but orange or green letters? Hmmmmmm