Better eBay searching with search dropdowns

One of the biggest challenges with using eBay is deciding how to setup your search. With over 20,000 categories and millions of sellers, an un-targeted search will return lots of listings that just aren’t relevant to what you’re looking for. 

We thought about what would make things really simple and came up our newest feature: search dropdowns!

With search dropdowns, when you are browsing a category or seller page, you’ll have the option to constrain your search to that sub-category or seller. In the example above, I can chose to search across all eBay categories for “lamps”, or just the Antiques > Periods & Styles > Art Deco sub-category.  The two searches return very different results:

Image: Search for “lamps” across eBay

Image: Search for “lamps” in the Antiques > Periods & Styles > Art Deco sub-category

Searching a specific seller’s inventory is just as easy as a category search. Some sellers list thousands of items, making it difficult to manually scroll through everything.  Now, on a seller page you’ll have to option to search only that sellers inventory:

Image: Searching on a seller’s page

We hope the new category search dropdowns are useful.  As always, we’d love to hear your feedback and comments!

- Matt & Eugene