Problem with United States SUBCATEGORY
I am presently only a buyer here so do not know exactly how the listing process works. However I thought I would share an issue I came across yesterday afternoon. I was browsing in the Category United States > Subcategory United States because I was only interested in stamps directly from the US...not possessions, CSA, etc. I ended up finding a stamp that interested me so I went to that seller's page and discovered that he had literally thousands of US Stamps that should have shown in the US Subcategory but were not there (only 5 showed in the US Subcategory.) While his stamps in the possessions were showing in the proper subcategory, the US stamps only showed up if you were searching in the main US category, not if you search in the US SUB-category. I am assuming that is because the dealer primarily listed those stamps in the Main US Category and did not pick a sub-category for them. Assuming this to be the case, I wonder how many other dealers inadvertently do the same thing and therefore fail to expose their listings to those (like me) who search in the US SUB-category? Since US is a subcategory of the US Category, perhaps the selling system should require that a subcategory be chosen for all US listings? (Unless there is a different cause for the problem with this particular seller. FYI, I sent a note to the seller letting him know of this issue involving his stamps.) Thoughts? Others' experiences? Ken
Comments
Sellers can select the main category to list items in, such as "United States", but they're not responsible for selecting the sub-categories. It's done automatically based on a variety of factors. The main one is the "Country" field, which Sellers can optionally provide. However, if they do not provide this information, we automatically select the appropriate sub-category based on a variety of information available. In general, this works 99.99% of the time, but there could be issues with a specific Seller's listings based on how they created their listings, and what information they provided.
If you can let us know which Seller's items you're referring to, we can review this further, and ensure the items are available where you would expect them to be.