Throttling-what to do about it

[cb-boards]

Let me preface this by saying I understand that there is not universal acceptance that eBay throttles their sellers; I respect the opinion of those people who feel they do not and hope that they will do me the courtesy of respecting mine and to please not turn this post into a debate about whether or not eBay throttles sellers, to what extent they do, how or why they would do such etc.   I do not mean for this to come off as rude, I just would like this thread to stay on point and be an ongoing discussion amongst sellers who believe eBay does throttle us with tips on how to best deal and position ourselves in such an environment.

With that being said, I have a particular listing that up until 2 weeks ago, over the prior 3 months I had sold a whopping total of 5 of these items.  About 2 weeks ago I managed to sell 3 in a 2 day period to different buyers.  Over the course of the next 2 weeks I sold 19...about 4x the amount in two weeks then I had sold in the prior 3 months!!!  This is not an exogenous event, I have seen these types of patterns so many times that I can not possibly think it is an exogenous coincidence. 

 It seems very obvious to me that if you want sales, you need visibility for your listings.  In order to get visibility for your listings you need sales. A classic chicken vs. eg scenario.   eBay buries the listings of items that don't sell and give enhanced visibility to those that do.  I usually do a few things to circumvent this sort of throttling.  (This example above is one of the instances where I did nothing to the listing as an attempt to  illustrate my point about eBay throttling. )  But I usually:

1) When an item that doesn't have any sales within a 2-3 week period, I will usually cancel the listing.  Instead of "re-listing" I will "sell similar."  This way it appears as a new listing.

2) If my sales for a particular item that I have many of are slow, I will run a sale for a 3-4 day period droping the price to pretty much break even after I factor in my shipping, fees etc.  While I normally don't like to work for free this way, sometimes dropping the price will drastically will ignite sells over a short time and over the next 4 days I may sell 5 or 6.  While it is true that I may not have made any profits, however I:

A) reduce inventory 

B)  Now have several sales that might help generate more product visibility...so if I originally had it priced at $30 when it wasn't selling and lowered the price to breakeven at $18, now it might start to sell a little more regularly at $24 now that I have a little bit of a track record. 

I'd love to hear from other sellers who believe eBay throttles on what they do to deal with it.  Again, for those that don't believe in eBay throttling I respect your opinion but I ask that you please not discuss that here.  I would be happy to discuss this issue if you would like to start a new post.  I would like this thread to stay on topic and be a forum for sellers on how to best position our listings to cope with throttling.  It would be quite difficult to add value to this topic if one doesn't believe in eBay throttling to begin with.  So again, I hope my desire to stay on point will be respected.    

[stonevintage]

I understand what you're saying. Although, you'd think that best match is focusing on keywords in title - that can't be true.

That is their grand secret.  I can't tell you what happened the last time I tried to get clarification on this topic. They say there'll be more trouble if I do.  There have been too many times when the only way to access any seller's particular listing is to click on their view all listings option. A good example might be Blu's wetsuit business.  While some of his items are well placed, others are buried.

I doubt he is using wildly different keywords - all his listings that I viewed have very similar title descriptions.   I can see Ebay's wide range of opportunity in the best match as you mentioned. This especially with the promo program and redirect attempts. 

I think JQP is much more educated than in the past with online shopping. We, as buyers check many searches to obtain item/product information and finally best price/value. This includes multiple seller sites. 

With all the sites engaging in the "shell game" with what they decide to show buyers its getting insane.  Perhaps the venue that returns to showing results for what the buyer actually wants and no redirects - would come out on top.  Can you imagine typing in three or four words for what you want to buy and getting results that are a good match - instead of 90% garbage?

[goodluckselling]

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@aruyt75 wrote:

So, my question is, does anyone know how "best match" is determined?  Is it supposed to be by keywords, or number of sales, or something else?  One would assume if you sort by "lowest price" or "newly listed", the results would truely be sorted as such, regardless of number sales, popularity of a seller, etc.  But "best match" is where I can see a whole lot of wiggle room for ebay.  And conveniently, it appears to be the default search sort order.  If buyers never bother to change that, then your item may end up being buried.  But again, one would hope if you have the lowest price, when you sort by that, yours should be the number 1 listing, regardless of any other factors.

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It includes many of the things you mentioned.  First you need to understand that once you filter by lowest price or newest listing, etc, you are out of the best match default sort and now are viewing a requested sort order.

Best match is not lowest price or highest price, although those factors play a role, it is not formulated that way.

Best match takes into account many standard things like

• How well is the listing created SEO (keywords, pictures, item specifics, titles, description)
• The category sellers use to show in search.  Many times different sellers use different categories for the exact same item.  eBay has a default category for nearly ever item so use the one eBay has as a default.
• The seller standard ratings
• Past histories for both buyer and seller in this category

Those are some of the standard things we all know about and there are others as well, but the meat of the formula for best match is in how well you the seller engages the buyer.  If you can engage the buyers your listing will be near the top most all the time. 

Engaging the buyer are things like

• Buyers opening your listing from a search result to review it
• Buyers putting this item on a watched list
• Buyers asking questions
• Buyers making purchases from this active listing
• Buyers sharing in coming links to this active listing
• Buyers leaving positive feedback from a purchase made from this active listing

These are examples of a buyer engaging with an active listing.

When you see the same listing always at the top of a search result you do often it is because those sellers are engaging the buyers and that is a good signal for eBay to make sure more buyers have the opportunity to see this listing.

Price is not a major player directly with best match.  Price has its own search option.  But let me say this about price and best match.  Although price is a small part into the formula for best match, if an active listing has lowest price and creates buyer engagement like purchases from the listing then price is playing a role (as it almost always does) but only through buyer engagement not part of the formula.

Let me say that eBay also gives new listings a bump in search at the beginning so they can be shown next to highly performing listing but as the new listing goes through the same buyer engagement formula if they are not engaging buyers they will start to fall and other new listings will come to the top and go through the same process and this happens over and over and then you see the same listings always at the top and that is because they are engaging buyers so they start to rise again and again against new listings.

So GTC listing with lots of inventory will probably garner a longer history of buyer engagement attributes because GTC listing do not end and relisted items start over in these attributes.  If you do not have quantities of your listing, I probably would not use GTC because your buyer engagement history follows your GTC listing.  Instead use Sell Similar so you can start fresh and get a new listing bump , albeit might be very short lived in a very popular category because of all the new listings happening simultaneously.

Find the best selling listing that you see repeatedly at the top of your frequent searches and research them. 

• Open them up and see what they are doing that you are not
• Find wording that is better than yours
• look at the pictures, return policies, shipping charges
• Look at the item specifics and see if any can work for your listing
• Look at the feedback for this exact item, and see what the buyers like about this listing

There are lots of different ways to do this and make your listings look a lot like the very successful listings that are generating buyer engagement. 

Do not discount outside marketing to generate traffic to your store or listings.  These are great examples of buyer engagement when eBay can track a view coming in from an outside source.  It also lands the potential buyer right in front of your items exclusively versus a search result.

I hope that helps

Good Luck Selling!

[morah_33]

Sorry for the long post. But I think I have some important findings on here.

The TLDR version is: I feel that it's eBay's algorithm that is screwing a lot of people. Ebay seems to want cheap prices with good performance, and they want your listing titles to be as close to what the customer types as possible (both with the actual keywords, and the order in which the customer types it).

Long version:

Last year around this time, I was selling over 50 items a day and my stats show that I was getting 40,000+ impressions per day. Then suddenly in mid 2017, my impressions dropped down to 4,000 a day, resulting in 10-15 sales per day. The change happened across a few weeks. That alone tells me that I didn't do anything on my end to cause it to happen, and I did not see any new competitors begin offering the same items as me. I'm currently at under 5 sales per day with an average of 1,700 impressions per day. Why this happened, I don't know and it's very frustrating. It has affected my life negatively because eBay has been my main source of income.

Here are a few things I found when trying to figure all of this out:

1. The primary issue is that the algorithm seems a bit more picky with search terms - Testing one of my items now, let's say it was a Michael Jordan T-shirt. My title says "Michael Jordan Large Dunking T-Shirt".

• The most important part: Ebay looks at keywords in the title first, as closely to the search term the customer uses as possible. When typing "Michael Jordan t-shirt", I come up as #1. When typing "Jordan t-shirt", the items without the word "Michael" place above me, and I get pushed down to the 30th slot.
• After displaying the most relevant listings first, it looks for keywords in the variations AND item specifics. It completely ignores the description. I tested "Michael Jordan dunking t-shirt" and I came up as #1. The next guy did not have the word "dunking" in his title, but he had a variation in his listing that had the word "dunking" in there. I then tested "Michael Jordan cool dunking t-shirt" (because I have the word "cool" in my description), and my listing did not show up at all. I tried adding "cool" in the type of fit in the item specifics, and that did not help. However, when I chose "fitted" and then searched "Michael Jordan dunking fitted t-shirt", I was back at #1. This tells me that using eBay's default item specifics play a big part.
• The order in which the customer types their search matters. When searching "Michael Jordan Large T-shirt", I come up as #1. When I search "Michael Jordan T-Shirt - Large", I get pushed down to #45!  This opened my eyes more than anything. It looks like because of the fact that I had "Large" before "T-shirt" on my original title, that helped my ranking when the customer searched "Large T-shirt".
• If you and a competitor have an idential item but your competitor keyword spams (example: Black T-shirt XS S L  XL 2XL 3XL), while you only have the sizes in your variations; and then a customer searches for "Black XL T-Shirt", the competitor seems to always place above you. I have a feeling that the only factors that can place you above him is if his seller performance is suffering.
• Being Top Rated seems to trumps price and feedback percentage. Using an identical title as a competitor, I place below him. His item is $5 more expensive than mine, he has 98% feedback while I have 99.3%. But he also has double the sales of that item than I do. I don't know if that also matters.

1. I feel that price is secondary, but plays a big part - I currently have a sale running (50% off - trying to stay Above Standard for next month). After 1 day, I noticed that all of my listings began showing up on page 1 (most were previously on page 2 or 3). The sale is still running so I'm not sure what will happen when it ends. I'm sure other factors play a part but it's clear the price is a big one. When I tested my rankings before I put this sale up, a competitor with about 1,000 positive feedback, but with a price 50% more expensive than mine always showed up at the top of page 1. I have over 20,000 positive feedbacks at an identical percentage so you would think I'd place above him but that wasn't the case. However, he keyword spammed while I did not. When I put in the same exact title as he did, I ranked above him. As mentioned in point 1, the keywords definitely seem to play the biggest part.

3. Chinese sellers with the most offered variations, and with the cheapest prices seem to be flooding most of the search results - I think that because they have the ability to sell so cheap, their huge price difference plays a major part and hides everyone elses listings. 

I hope this helps. If anyone has any other findings I'd love to know.

[cb-boards]

Great info here! Will try to take some of the analysis you have come up with and apply it to my listings. Thanks for the post!

[stonevintage]

That all makes sense, until you go to the solds and test the theory. There, you will see a wide variety of keyword placement order.

The basics used to be Boolean search method for keyword order.  I truthfully cannot imagine what method they are using when seeing the sold results. 

[stonevintage]

The Listing Conditions quoted from here are interesting.

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2018/3/1520815724.html

To drive a positive user experience, a listing may not appear in some search and browse results regardless of the sort order chosen by the buyer

[southern*sweet*tea]

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@stonevintage wrote:

The Listing Conditions quoted from here are interesting.

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2018/3/1520815724.html

To drive a positive user experience, a listing may not appear in some search and browse results regardless of the sort order chosen by the buyer

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That's been in the UA for a long time. If you Google, you'll see that many sites use the same verbiage.  Amz has, or had unless they've moved/hidden it, something similar.

[stonevintage]

Yes. I remember when it came out and the responses here.  Just posted as a reminder for some and what be news for others.  Point is, they have it and I strongly believe they use it.  It was placed in the user agreement for a reason.  The term "throttle" brings emotions out.  The term "user agreement".. not so much.   

[cashmere99]

I liked ur viewpoint, & agree eBay secretly throttles listings ; however, ur rants r riddled w/run-on sentences & big words. Keep it simple, u sound like a bad lawyer or an over-educated slacker.  U didn’t have any misspellings or poor grammar, but if u proof-read ur work, it wouldn’t b so exhausting 2 read. 

[texashauntedhousecollectibles]

Thank you. You just explained why sales go flat. and by the way, I do the same thing you do on items that don't sell. I must laugh, however, when Ebay tells me to lower the price to BELOW WHAT I PURCHASED IT FOR.

[icecoldtn]

So u list item way cheap basically give it away free.

[moms**art**window**]

i can tell ya this items that i have that i know are pretty decent and getting lots of views go to bottom of best match pretty quick and other items that aren't getting views go to top i think this is how what you are talking about comes about.in other words items more likely to sell are put back where they shouldn't be,it's aggravating

[lone_star_guitars]

It does seem like that sometimes, but sales is cyclical. What sells today, won't sell tommorrow, but it will sell again next week. It's the nature of business.

Create effective listings. Stay on top of your listings. eBay is not a static marketplace. All good sellers are trying to one-up everyone else. That's the nature of capitalism.

The more listing that you have, the more money you will make, providing that you've created an effective listing.

Also, 90% of problems that sellers have can be solved with an accurate inventory count.

Most sincerely,

Lone_Star_Guitars

[kh-leslie]

Hello Everyone,

Due to the age of the thread, it has been closed to further replies.  Please feel free to start a new thread if you wish to continue to discuss this topic.

Thanks for understanding!