@snowbirdmn74 wrote:
* Changing perspective to finally focus on SEO can meaningfully turn eBay.
I actually found that interesting. Ebay used to have a really great program called EPN (Ebay Partner Network) which had independent contractors design websites for the sole purpose of directing sales to ebay. These contractors would earn money for every person they brought to ebay. If the buyer was new to ebay, they would earn a higher percentage. And if the bidder actually won their item, an even higher percentage was earned. Each bidder that went through one of these sites entered ebay with that contractors cookie so ebay knew who to pay.
Some of these contractors made a really great living off of ebay this way....until ebay started changing things around. First they decided that they would only pay if the bidder actually won the auction(which kind of makes sense). But then they decided to only give them twenty four hours to bid. Once the twenty four hours was up, the cookie timed out and the contractor was out of luck and no longer got a percentage of the sale. So lets say an auction is running for five days. Someone is looking for a special "lure" or "fishing pole" (as an example) to buy. They google what they are looking for, find a couple of these sites advertising exactly what they are looking for and click on one of the ebay ads. It takes them directly to ebay and as soon as they enter, their cookie is activated. Yay for the independent contractor!
Problem is, most people don't buy or bid on something right away. If the auction is going for several days, they'll often put it in their watch list and wait until the end of the auction to bid. Which is exactly what ebay counted on.....as most of these people doing EPN started fiinding it harder and harder to make a living and, in some cases, their earnings dropped to only a quarter (or less) of what they had previously been earning. They put in a ton of work but weren't getting paid.
To top it off, Google was/is constantly changing their SEO requirements. So many adds on your site, so many words, so many key search words, etc. etc. And they constantly change the formula, but refuse to reveal what that formula is. So one day a contractor might have had his site at the top of Google and the next it might be on page three. And anything not on page one is practically worthless. And the work involved trying to figure out the new formula and restoring all of your websites to the top of the search engine can be enormous.
So, in short....once Ebay (and Google) started changing this system (that seemed to previously be working really well), many of these contractors quit, shut down their sites and wallked away. These changes started about two years ago.....
there is still an active program, but just a mere shadow of what it was.
So I just found it interesting that Ebay is now working with Google on this and wondering if they're giving any thought to restoring a program that seemed to work really well for both ebay, sellers and the independent website developers.
And that's all I know about any of this, so I won't be back.
But it does seem to me that this is when the sales started to decline.
So.
If Ebay can somehow fix this, maybe there's a chance the sales will increase again....
and the whining will decrease.
marc, I was going with the "everything old, is new again" mood.
