mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
Hi everyone! This month’s chat will be an open forum for you to ask questions to the Community Team. Get your questions ready so we can have an informative and fun filled chat on December 14th at 1PM PST!
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Edit: Thanks for joining us for the Monthly Chat with your Community Team.
The chat thread will remain open until 2 PM PT at which point we'll close it from additional responses. After that time, we'll continue to work on responding to any queries that might still be unanswered.
To post your question, click Reply in the lower right corner of this post, type your question, and hit submit between 1-2 PM Pacific Time. The format of our chat mirrors the format of our Community Discussion Boards, where each post will appear in the thread chronologically. The Community Team will review each question as it comes in, and will quote the original question in our reply. This quote and the reply will appear later in the thread, so just keep scrolling down to see our answers.
As a reminder, we want to be able to get to as many members as possible during the allotted hour, so we have a few things to ask of you:
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Missed the chat? Send your questions to the podcast by calling 888-723-4630 or email us at podcast@ebay.com and maybe your questions will make it on the air! Or listen to past episodes while you wait for next month!”
Elizabeth,
Since it is a minority of sellers and in turn listings on Ebay that utilize PL, it isn't impossible to have sales without them. The vast majority of sellers do it every day.
That isn't to say that in some categories, PL are very effective and important.
@nuclearomen wrote:
Hi,
Let’s talk about sales and especially PLS (Promoted Listings Standard) – which we all know that ebay has made it near impossible to sell without using PLs but and especially since November sales even using PLs are way down. Fact is PLS isn’t performing as it should be, no matter the rates elected. Have had issues with PLS campaigns for awhile now also, again, since Nov where create campaign and they get stuck “froze” on “scheduled” status and never goes to “active” status. End Create New 4-5x same thing til finally get one that works. Or create new goes “active” status but hrs can pass and no impressions/clicks generate – End and Create New til get one that works.
Then there is the stats – the stats on Promoted Campaign Summary page don’t match the stats on the Overview page in Seller Hub – the Impressions, CTR, Views etc… are all different, this has been for months! On Overview tells me my impressions are down, on Campaign Summary tells me they are up, same with CTR etc… Nothing matches as should.
Whatever ebay has been doing with changes to PLS and algorithms has greatly botched sales beyond normal. Sales happen now rarely on PL listings where prior most all sales were on PL listings. Impressions on campaign are higher then have been past year, yet sales are 80% less – that make ZERO sense.
Pushing sellers to use PLAs (Advanced) is one reason many suspect the lack of performance for PLS, but this isn’t going to help Ebay as PLA’s are not designed for small sellers with one off or few quantity of particular items. Those sellers, whom make up the majority of sellers can’t afford to pay PPC fees, especially when sales are done to nothing.
All this isn’t just me, it’s been reported on the boards by tons of sellers for months now with no response from ebay at all. It has nothing to do with economy, covid, or any other story ebay tries to give sellers – this is 100% ebay and the way things are being handled between all the unnecessary site changes, glitches, experimentations, poor decisions, and lack of support to fix and correct all things ebay has done to make the site and selling so much worse. Called and put in tickets for Tech Support to look at my PL and explained the issues 2-3x now and NOTHING – they never did anything, the issues speak of with creating campaigns are still happening.
Sales went from multiple a day everyday, for 3 yrs to 1 a day, to very recently one every 3-5 days and it’s not economy, in my business everyone outside ebay is reporting record sales and they keep getting better and I know some large sellers here in different categories who have reported the same.
Ebay talks about supporting small sellers, but in reality all they are doing is hurting the small seller over and over and just keep doing things that makes it worse. Holiday season should be biggest selling times for most if not all sellers but it’s not, not here on this platform. Instead of doing actual real promoting of the platform they launch a social media campaign like 2 weeks ago that is far too late and too little from competitor venues like Amazon or Mercari for instance. Have the same commercial running for Ebay Motors a year now (mostly on radio) but have nothing for the rest of the platform. Spend a ton of capital to have some party for sneakers with “exclusive” members that likely only helped those sellers who agreed to give ebay shoes to hang from the celling – does ZERO for the rest of ebays sellers. Tell us what is the plan of Ebay to bring more traffic and increase sales revenue – which is way down for the company (and hope your answer isn’t more social media “campaigns” but real, proven methods, like TV commercials). There are plenty of posts from sellers who been here 20 yrs that have all stated never seen it this bad before.
All this is just to bring these issues that have been issues for awhile now and flooded on the community thread after thread with no real interaction from ebay about. It’s community chat so better to bring such things up here where employees directly seeing it from sellers. Things went bad at the end of Wang, but I see it worse then Wang, the people in the positions of making decisions for platform and site are not living up to the jobs they were hired to do (IMO of course).
Hey @nuclearomen. These are some great points. We'll send this over to the proper team to provide some insight and will follow up if we hear back.
Elizabeth,
@valueaddedresource wrote:
Hi elizabeth@ebay - I saw the announcement yesterday about the Holiday Hustle sweepstakes but it's exclusive only to Facebook.
It seems a bit odd to direct users who are posting on eBay's own forums to a 3rd party social media/competing marketplace site for this, plus not everyone has a Facebook account or wishes to engage there.
Will eBay be running any kind of similar sweepstakes here for community members to participate in?
Hey @valueaddedresource we are not aware of any additional sweepstakes planned at this time, but we'll be glad to pass that along as a suggestion to our promotions team!
Kyle,
@clarkphilatelics wrote:
Did eBay consult with stamp dealer associations, the American Philatelic Society, sellers, or frequent buyers before implemented mandatory Item Specifics in the Stamps category? What would it take to review their effectiveness and appropriateness? How much effort would have been required to standardize definitions with the larger philatelic marketplace, especially the Scott catalog for US eBay? Why is there no catalog number Item Specific? Why do filters like Denomination or Color have a limited set of values? I was once advised by eBay to change the Color Item Specific of a red orange stamp to “orange” for better visibility. Who would search for a stamp color not in a catalog? Why is “Certification”, a coin term for “Certificate”, required when only a tiny fraction of stamps have a certificate?
Hey @clarkphilatelics! Thanks for bringing this to the chat. We'll get this passed along to the listings team.
Elizabeth,
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kyle@ebay
Hello Elizabeth,
My question/suggestion is regarding the Bid History page. I often get customers asking to cancel their bids, and do not understand why controls for bidding aren't on the bid history page. As it is now, you have to dig through help to locate the bid cancellation controls. It's not a huge thing, but definitely an annoyance and counterproductive to an efficient workflow. Please address my suggestion (example below) to the proper channel.
Cheers and Merry Christmas!
Hil
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Edit: A reply to your question can be found here.
- last edited on by
elizabeth@ebay
Last month, @Anonymous noticed what appeared to be a new kind of ad being tested on their listings. It looks like this new ad types will promote competitor stores in a very high placement above the fold area and there were concerns this may be confusing for buyers who may believe that link would take them to the store page to see other items for the seller whose listing they are on.
adsteam@ebay was tagged asking for additional information, but never responded.
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Ebay-WHAT-Are-You-Thinking/m-p/33374738#M2118334
Can you provide any information about what this new ad type is and if it's Cost Per Click or some other model? If not, can you please ask the ads team to check in on that thread and share any information they have about it?
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Edit: A reply to your post can be found here.
