[waitwhat]

Aliexpress listings can have multiple different items, and the price displayed in the search results will be that of the first of those (in your case, probably just an antenna) rather than the actual item you searched for or even the item image shown on the results page.

[Neywiny]

Not just the first, seems like the cheapest. I did a quick search and one result listed the second object's price, which was some permanent adapter board. But it's hard to fix such a thing. For example what if you really did want to buy another antenna for the device? Ok so maybe you require the listed price be the maximum. But what about like a raspberry pi kit where maybe you don't want the case or high capacity sd card or RAM, which could bring down the cost dramatically.

[dspillett]

> But it's hard to fix such a thing.

Especially when there is strong incentive to work around any such fix. Individual sellers do it deliberately often to make their listings appear more attractive, if this is "fixed" they'll find another way to be deceptive about the price that appears in searches, bitch & moan, or (much less likely) actually leave in favour of another marketplace, or some mix of the above. It is one of the reasons I simply ignore such places (others including delivery times and reliability: will I actually get the right thing that I think I'm ordering, or anything at all?) - yes, there might be genuine bargains to be had, but if you count the time and effort to find them amongst the deliberately deceptive listings, and the other concerns, I've found that I'm better off not bothering.

It isn't just on marketplace type sites like AliExpress, Amazon, and such, it is also often done on individual sales pages in order to game shopping search engines like google's, though it is more common, to the point of being ubiquitous, on Ali and their ilk.

One answer is that the individual products should be there own listing in the search so if I'm searching for the whole thing it is easy to see the price of that, same if I just want an individual part or add-on. If showing the lowest price, make sure any image is of that list price item not the more expensive one most likely being searched for. But that requires the sellers to properly file the listing details, and good luck enforcing that when they have competitive incentive not to.

There is also the issue of very similar items: the same thing in different materials/colours/etc (things like 3D printer filament) where the price might vary. In that case perhaps an answer is to display a range on the search results ("from £x to £y") though that becomes a new problem to solve when the user selects to order by price.