Spelling mistakes or How not to sell a postcard

At the time of writing, there are 415 items for sale on Delcampe, mostly postcards, for the French town of Villiers-Sur-Mer, a seaside town which does not exist. Spelling mistakes happen, of course, but surely not usually on this scale.

There are thousands of card out there where the seller seems incapable of transcribing from the card - or more likely just can't be bothered. They're often the same people who just throw everything into 'Unclassified'. At the moment of writing there are 18,678 Unclassified U.K. topo listed. The first two are "The Thames at Streatley" and "The Barbican Sandwich". There are loads of Birmingham - not exactly hard to locate. It's sheer laziness (and a very odd sales technique). What's depressing is that one of the worst offenders has over 118,000 positive feedback, so it doesn't seem to get in the way.

We are on the same page, I am amazed at the poor quality of listing descriptions and the apparent lack of concern (or maybe it is simply the ignorance) of sellers, but as you illustrate, what would a seller with over 118,000 Feedback care. I am a seller elsewhere and have always gone to great pains to make my headings both succinct and totally relevant, avoiding the amazing number of sellers who start headings with the likes of "Postcard" (in the postcard section), "Lovely", "Superb", and other "purple prose" words, even their own reference number rather than what a collector really wants to know, for Topographical it is the prime location.

Including the word "Postcard" or Stamp" in your title increases the likelihood of your item being found by buyers using Google and other search engines. Not everyone is a member of Delcampe or any other selling site and so would find postcards in the postcard section of Delcampe.

I can explain one of the problems described above: the endless amount of postcards in the section "Unclassified". This has nothing to do with sellers being lazy at all. Alot of dealers sell at multiple websites. Especially since eBay started to forget that their sellers are as important as their buyers. There is an option to connect eBay to Delcampe. So all items from eBay are imported into the Delcampe database. They forgot just a small thing.... the categories are not equal. So, everytime an item category is not the same, the item ends up in "Unclassified". If I have to repair all problems (I also lost alot of pictures during this process), than this would cost me weeks and it's not even clear, what will happen with the connected eBay item if I change the item category on Delcampe. I sent out this question, months ago, but it seems that Delcampe has an one-man-helpdesk and too much questions asked. I work at Bendav Postcards over 10 hours a day; so, I don't think I am lazy. But I do have to make choices.

Dave

Thank you to tony41 & bendavpostcards for another take on words included in headings and regarding "Unclassified" items. On the few occasions I have sold postcards, I have included the word "postcard" at the end of the heading - when looking at large quantities of postcards for sale, collectors (or at least I do) want to see the prime location first, not some silly waffle about "lovely", "superb", "rare", etc. and least of all the sellers own reference numbers - all that stuff should be at the end of the description. The fact remains, there are a lot of sellers (of everything) who are clueless when it comes to writing a good heading - and that includes sellers who under-describe what they are selling, giving far too brief a heading description. Listing a postcard as "Without Title" (in any language) is not at all helpful when the postcard actually is of, say, kittens, or giving a bland location without mentioning some salient feature.

Incidentally, the problem of categories not meshing between eBay and Delcampe applies to eBay on its own, there is a serious problem of non-meshing between eBay entries on the North American site and the European one, for instance regarding records (of the music kind) for sale, and of course postcards.