penguins_dont_fly is a Volunteer Community Mentor
@zamo-zuanwrote:
[[I've also provided much information on how you could pinpoint if you are being affected by these bugs. There's very few things on sellers hub which indicate it but if your lucky you can notice it there. But if you request a business readout from the Sellers Health team, there's some statistic errors on there that 100% confirm if you are affected by the bug. Once the statistic errors are repaired, your stores impressions go back to normal.]]
I just spent an hour on the phone with CS ... first, the US based CS had no clue what "Seller Health" was ... and then after putting me on hold for a while ... it turns out that that team is only available to Anchor and Enterprise store subscribers. Us lowly Premium Store sellers do not have access to that team or those reports. Consequently we cannot get anny errors that might me there corrected 😞
The CS could see that my impressions were down almost 60% from last year at this time, told me that there are no errors or anything wrong with my listings ... but could not in any way tell me if there were "stale" listings, the impressions/#of listings bug that you speak of or anything else helpful at all 😞
My seasonal uptick should have started in August ... there has been no sign of it yet this year 😞
@penguins_dont_fly wrote:@zamo-zuanwrote:
[[I've also provided much information on how you could pinpoint if you are being affected by these bugs. There's very few things on sellers hub which indicate it but if your lucky you can notice it there. But if you request a business readout from the Sellers Health team, there's some statistic errors on there that 100% confirm if you are affected by the bug. Once the statistic errors are repaired, your stores impressions go back to normal.]]
I just spent an hour on the phone with CS ... first, the US based CS had no clue what "Seller Health" was ... and then after putting me on hold for a while ... it turns out that that team is only available to Anchor and Enterprise store subscribers. Us lowly Premium Store sellers do not have access to that team or those reports. Consequently we cannot get anny errors that might me there corrected 😞
The CS could see that my impressions were down almost 60% from last year at this time, told me that there are no errors or anything wrong with my listings ... but could not in any way tell me if there were "stale" listings, the impressions/#of listings bug that you speak of or anything else helpful at all 😞
My seasonal uptick should have started in August ... there has been no sign of it yet this year 😞
Ouch. I was not aware Sellers Health team only assists anchor subscriptions.
To be 100% honest, even if you had hard evidence that there was an error, its extremely likely eBay would not have done anything to fix it anyway. CSR's may have tried, but they were not able to resolve my situation at all, and dealing them was more frustration than anything.
The only thing that truly fixed it for us, was time. A few eBay updates later , and things went back to normal.
It would be nice to have some confirmation of what is going on, though.
I'm not sure why they were not able to tell you if any stale or stagnant listings. This sounds to me like the support you have is extremely sub-par compared to the anchor CSR's.
It's extremely easy to look up these things. A stale listing is over 30 days unsold. A stagnant listing is over 90 days unsold. If you go to Sellers Hub > Growth > Listing Improvements > Underperforming listings, and sort by days unsold, you can see how many you have.
Now, stale is an extremely minor penalty. You don't have to worry about stale very much. Stagnant, is definitely something to keep an eye on though.
It does not seem like you are still dropping. That is good at least. It's at the very least stable. But I do see it's consistently less than last year.
For now, it would be good to close & "sell similar" any stagnant listings you find. A regular relist preserves the old SEO data, selling similar should start anew. But please be careful, some sellers have had bugs with sell similar lately. Make sure it does not tweak any other data on your listings.
Aside from that, one thing I've noticed with increased weight since July is "Free Returns", although I understand this might not be realistic in your category. It -does- seem to actually improve visibility a bit nowdays though (it did not seem to until mid-late June). Also, it's almost going to be a requirement if you don't want increased FVF from SNAD (you do see a significant drop in SNAD when switching to it). So it might be worth assessing if this is viable for your business.
Past this, I would need to see your listings to get an idea if there's any suggestions I could give you. Feel free to send me a PM if you would like to send privately and I can check them out!
Good luck!
@zamo-zuan wrote:
I'm not sure why they were not able to tell you if any stale or stagnant listings. This sounds to me like the support you have is extremely sub-par compared to the anchor CSR's.
It's extremely easy to look up these things. A stale listing is over 30 days unsold. A stagnant listing is over 90 days unsold. If you go to Sellers Hub > Growth > Listing Improvements > Underperforming listings, and sort by days unsold, you can see how many you have.
Now, stale is an extremely minor penalty. You don't have to worry about stale very much. Stagnant, is definitely something to keep an eye on though.
I have been working to get all of my listings to be as "fresh" as possible using end/sell similar for the past 6 months.
My items are "long tail", so my original goal was to have everything to be no more than 6 months old.
Since the reports from eBay Open started to come on about stale/stagnant listings, I have revised that schedule to 3 months.
Currently, none of my listings has a start date greater than June 1....so I am pushing 120 days on some listings.
Last Friday (Sep 14) I removed free shipping from my listings and lowered all of my pricing accordingly.
Yesterday (Sep 21) I added Best Offer on almost 200 items with a SKU that indicated that they were my oldest items (purchase date, not necessarily listed date).
I have not had a sale in 10 days.
No messages, no offers, nothing.
In 5 years, the only 10 day hiatus I have had has been when my store was on vacation.
I have had concurrent zero sales days of 2-5 days during June and July in past years ... But never in September. I should be in my busy season by now .... it just isn't happening and I don't know why 😞
@karmy2005 wrote:
I have the anchor store and I too experienced a 60% decline in impressions from a year ago, but that hasn't affected my sales. My sales are higher this year as opposed to a year ago.
Your first screenshot is 3 months, Jul-Sep 2017 ... But your second screenshot is only for 1 month, Aug-Sep 2018 ?
And if the second screenshot is average of the prior 2 months, your impressions and views are UP from the previous year? 1.1M x 3 = 3.3M in 2018 vs 2.4M in 2017
