@stockjedi wrote:
Agreed I have multiple seller accounts been here 20 years and 12 years of selling automotive parts full time. Our sales have been down to almost ZERO for the past couple of months compare to the usual 800-$2k a day. A lot of people will say well its you or your listings etc..let me tell you something: it's not. As a eBay pro I know all the tricks and then some been through the ringer with these incompetent executives for many years. You don't have $1k a day in sales every day for years and while adding products, promoted listings, free shipping etc and all of a sudden it halts to $50 a day sorry it's not a coincidence. Sales everywhere else on our own websites are steady and growing except on eBay where it's going down on a daily basis. This place is just done unless you're a Chinese seller dumping a million items at $0.99.
Yep.
Obviously any successful seller isn't going to make any presumptions and see for themselves what is going on.
The whole claims that it's "competition" isn't even using a real life, logical form of supply and demand. Those at the top of the category got the most supply and best prices. Meaning it's expected to be performing better than the competitors. Very few in the category can compete with the prices of top manufacturers and partners.
When the number of total listings in a category is going down, the market itself is up, and top sellers are dropping across the board, the problems are obvious. And since listings are down, it is most certainly NOT that there's "more competition".
And then popular sellers can notice new sellers that literally copy our listings, are not TRS, have prices 20% higher, worse shipping, worse returns, worse feedback... yet get higher visibility in the category than items that are #1 Sales Rank (according to eBay) with 5+ years and 800+ sales?
It's obvious what is going on, and it's out of the control of sellers, which is the problem.
Especially when the crux of the argument supporting competition claims it's "prices that are not competitive"... if this were the case there would be only a few sellers in the category performing well. In truth, you can clearly see this isn't the case. New sellers that DON'T have competitive prices are some of the few sellers that are actually growing in the current climate! The whole "prices" argument doesn't even consider the Promoted Listings feature and how it boosts visibility for those who pay more. If it were about prices, then Promoted Listings wouldn't work at all.
Yet 1/3 - 1/2 of our sales per day come from Promoted Listings, despite our organic search placement being among the best in the category. And this amount of visibility (with paying promotion bucks) being less than we had when search was 100% organic. How is that explained in terms of "supply and demand"? It's not. The argument is bunk.
It might be hard to see if you don't have many daily sales, but serious sellers can see (and do record) the statistics. You can see the exact point that eBay will see your store is doing too well for the day and shut down your sales. Follow it for a couple weeks and you can literally predict what is going to happen with a high percentage of accuracy.
This isn't supply and demand. This isn't a search system designed around increasing your exposure. It's designed around limiting exposure.
