eBay

oneglassman · ‎05-22-2022

I wish someone from Ebay could answer me oneglassman for the Total system crash of views, & sales, I have always maintained a TRS and a store for 7 years. My sales were GREAT until Ebay started with this new updated system. I had some 25 to 30 High-end Fenton Art Glass sales until 5-17-2022, I was having great sales just about every day prior to 5-17-2022 now this mess has happened. NO SALES from 5-17-2022 to 5-22-2022. Now I can't send buyers an offer, I normally send 25 to 30 per day, I have sent 7 in the last 6 days.

What is going on with the Ebay I have known for many years? It's not the economy, inflation and gas prices, it is inside the Ebay system. My listings are up to date with Item speciation, great photos and Beautiful Fenton Art Glass. Something has got to give. Thanks Roger-oneglassman

dentalrprtek2012 · ‎07-26-2022

CHEERLEADER

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎07-26-2022

These threads are a staple of this Board. I'll just say what I usually say. LOL The economy? ebay? Some other cause?

The answers to those questions aren't really important, because they are the wrong questions.

The question is:

My sales are unsatisfactory. What steps can I take to improve them?

gurlcat · ‎07-26-2022

21 sales for how much money each though? If he's like the rest of us who are being throttled, we may be selling "as many" items as before, but for way less because we're slashing prices out of desperation.

gurlcat · ‎07-26-2022

You say that like fretting about ebay is ALL we're doing, like we're NOT taking every step we can think of to get our views and sales back up. And you can't imagine how painful it is to see people still saying it's your own fault.

siamjane8 · ‎07-26-2022

While i do agree with your sentiment- and its a great attitude to have....unless what you can do to improve sales is out of your control..... thats what the gist of these threads are about- the issues with ebay that are preventing sales. We can do nothing about that except bring it to light and hope ebay decides to align themselves with our goals- selling more. Right now ebays goals are not to improve sales but to improve their take regardless of sales... that is why we are seeing fee increases and promoted listings instead of search algorithm improvements and advertising and improvements to the platform to stabilize it.

This year has been a folly of programming and site changes that to the exact date and time released have screwed up sales.... at this point i do not even understand how the cheerleaders are still denying it. Ebay admitted in print that our sales would be effected while the changes took place- i think they just did not realize the long term effects as the varying systems had to "relearn" how to evaluate the new data.

But what do i know? apparently the scientific rules of cause and effect do not apply in this case.

gurlcat · ‎07-26-2022

What sucks is I've been through this same scenario before, where only SOME sellers were being affected by an Ebay listing visibility glitch, and everyone else called us whiners trying to sell junk that nobody wanted. Same in every detail, like overnight plummet in views, decade-plus highly successful veteran sellers being talked down to by relative newbies, Ebay (partly) acknowledging the problem, saying they had fixed it but they hadn't, etc. The only thing better about it then was it was just clothing listings, and it was about Item Specifics that were completed erasing themselves repeatedly and causing the listings to fall in search results. But just the fact that it didn't affect ALL clothing sellers made it hard to prove, because there were some doing fine as ever.

And that was only 3 years ago, October-December of 2019. Then in January they must have done something to actually fix it because all our listings stopped losing their I.S. data.

So I can only hope the same happens again. But what makes this time even more frustrating is, there is not (yet) anything to identify what makes the effected sellers different from the unaffected ones, like in 2019 when it was a clear category thing. Nor is there a clear mechanism for what's happened to us now. People's best guess seems to be the thing they did with not showing bot views anymore. But I don't believe that, because I remember the bot views already stopped weeks if not months before a bunch of started seeing low view counts, AND items didn't get all that many bot views before anyway, so subtracting them can't possibly account for the drastically lower view counts we are seeing.

juliet4727 · ‎07-26-2022

I feel better with Bot Views...it's a mental thing for me😃

inhawaii · ‎07-26-2022

@juliet4727 wrote:
I feel better with Bot Views...it's a mental thing for me😃

Just add 327 to whatever your views are now

Feel better? ;-).

Papa Was A Rolling Stone - The Temptations

gurlcat · ‎07-26-2022

I don't understand the urge to be mean like this, even to people who are regularly active members here, not newbies cursing about stuff like returns being unfair and whatever. Why not just enjoy the fact that what we're experiencing isn't happening to you? And if you think we're mistaking what we're seeing, why not simply ignore posts about it? It's like yall are enjoying our suffering or something. My kid and I are literally facing eviction in 5 days.

soh.maryl · ‎08-03-2022

How do you know "It's not the economy, inflation and gas prices . . ."

Speaking for only myself (but there are probably others in the same boat), I have cut down tremendously on buying non-necessities. I don't drive much, but when the price soared to over $5/gal, I scrupulously tried to drive even less. There were some little luxuries I allowed myself, but no more.

BTW: All of your Fenton pieces are lovely and I wish you the very best of luck in selling them.

gurlcat · ‎08-04-2022

@soh.maryl wrote:
How do you know "It's not the economy, inflation and gas prices . . ."
Speaking for only myself (but there are probably others in the same boat), I have cut down tremendously on buying non-necessities. I don't drive much, but when the price soared to over $5/gal, I scrupulously tried to drive even less. There were some little luxuries I allowed myself, but no more.
BTW: All of your Fenton pieces are lovely and I wish you the very best of luck in selling them.

Because of the suddenness, the fact that most of us can tell you an exact date when our sales plunged. -Not the same date for all of us, but all the ones I've seen were in May or June. And maybe more importantly, you can SEE that date reflected in a view count that also plunged on the same day, in other words, the day Ebay started showing our listings to far fewer people, for whatever reason (glitch? on purpose? we don't know).

Now of course it would be absurd to think that people tightening their wallets due to inflation would have NO effect on sales; of course it would. Even without the visibility throttling, I would expect my July 2022 sales to be at least somewhat lower than my July 2021 sales, considering the inflation has been growing in all products and services for the past several months, and I don't sell anything people absolutely must buy. I will even set aside what I remember from 2008, sales data that showed businesses selling low-cost items or services of "indulgence" (fancy coffee, sweets, manicures, etc) doing better than before the recession, because people still felt like they deserved 'something nice' even if they couldn't afford bigger nice things (you yourself mention that you still allow yourself little luxuries). Assuming that social phenomena is occurring again now, maybe I should expect some women who'd normally be buying new, fine jewelry to switch their jewelry-'fix'-getting to more affordable vintage costume jewelry (what I sell). But I would also expect some who were buying vintage costume jewelry to switch from Ebay to whatever they can find at local garage sales, or just not buy any jewelry at all for a while.

So as you can see, I have no beef with accepting the troublesome economy as a component of my ever-dropping 90-day total sales figure, but not all of it, not even most of it. And I sure as heck don't accept it as the reason for the drop in views starting abruptly on May 12 (see graph below), because another social phenomenon, one that is as old as time, seen in every recession, depression, and runaway inflation period, is the fact that even FLAT BROKE people still enjoy window shopping. But for some unknown reason, ebay started putting curtains over some of us sellers' windows this late spring/early summer, and nothing we try to do to reopen them seems to work.

neverenoughbooks65 · ‎08-16-2022

My business was doing well, and since they made the viewing changes, it is dying. Apparently those bots were buying books from me, and I want them back! 😭

siamjane8 · ‎08-17-2022

Us too. Month over month sales growth for years. More listings equaled more gross sales. Over the last couple of years that has ground to a halt with every ebay update. The search has become so manipulated that it does not matter what you have or who is looking for it- ebay is in charge of what is shown regardless of relevance of search. This last update has completely taken us into a regression of sales- worse its ever been.

At this point its almost as if ebay is suppressing the actual good relevant search results to jam more promoted listing in our faces and apply pressure to the rest of us to pay more in PL.

Just show people what they ACTUALLY search for and sales will improve! Sellers will sell more and then list more. Buyers will find more and buy more. Sellers will then source and list more. Buyers will see more product and come back. ITS A GIANT CIRCLE that starts with ebay fixing the platform so we can buy and sell.

miyasamaco · ‎08-17-2022

You said it: there seems to be a dedicated chorus of people on here with the job of telling sellers that they are not experiencing what they are experiencing. My best time on eBay was during the Great Recession. The fools in charge just can't seem to help themselves in finding new ways to screw things up. I was not making numbers like I did years ago, but my sales were very steady on both selling accounts... Now, zilch for weeks!

wrm827 · ‎08-18-2022

The thing that gets me is these listings that have zero views after 1, 2, 3, 4 days or more. I've had one listing that went almost 2 weeks without views before gathering a few views and finally selling. It seems every time I list a number of items at least one or a few will have zero views for at least a few days. I have one I listed 5 days ago and no views still. And it's a very collectible item in good condition and reasonably priced. Or like one I listed a day ago has a watcher but no views. That's happened a few times since this whole bot views change. If you were interested enough to watch it wouldn't you want to view the item more in depth than just viewing a thumbnail and a title.