Ffordes Website - Searching and a Gotcha

There have been a few comments recently on the new look and functionality of the Ffordes website. They have always been one of the biggest stockists of used equipment in the UK and many of us have bought from them over the years - I've had no particularly negative experiences (apart from over-optimistic descriptions sometimes) but I find the new search function to be very poor and I doubt its accuracy too.

I used to search the site a couple of times a week with the simple word "Pentax" as my query - but if you try that now you do not get everything Pentax, I'm not sure what it is you do get ! And on top of that if you order your results by "newest arrivals" it gives the impression that nothing has been added recently. Another "feature" seems to be that the same search term can deliver different results depending on where you are on the site when you input your search!!!

If the Searching problem wasn't bad enough there is now a little "gotcha" on items that could potentially be quite costly if you're not aware - when you click on an item it brings up a page with some photos and the description (which is sometimes blank) - there is also a "more info" tab next to "description", which appears grey (sometimes meaning there is nothing to read on other websites) - this tab can actually hold some important information - in the case of a Pentax 35mm F2 SMC lens it tells you "Small chip on the front element Iris a little slow to return", great info but if you've arrived at the page and just looked at the photos and seen no description then you could well end up buying a lens with a couple of surprises

Hope that helps someone avoid getting caught out

I must admit I've given up browsing there when I regularly did previously. It used to be simple to see what they had of interest but now it requires too much effort to make me bother. I had bookmarks for each of their lists so only had to click on each in time to see if anything had turned up of interest.
Maybe they needed the updated site to help with VAT automation or something, but they really need to bring back the way it worked before.

Same with Ebay every time they update it they make it worse

Latest Active/Ended List.... Now hard to find and no longer confirms how many items you are deleting..... just deletes them

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Glad to see we're all on the same page - I've given up trying to find anything on there.

I find this to be very useful link This is just the page I use a lot but you can search on whatever floats your particular boat.