To me the worst thing about the Ebay specs glitch is the claim that it is fixed. How can Ebay or anyone say that, when it is so obviously not true?
I have been carefully monitoring several factors and running what you might call experiments the past few days, and although I can't state with any certainty the precise nature of the persistent problem(s), any assertion that things are running as they should be is laughable.
The issues I am seeing are not even limited to my listings that were extant before the 15th; I have posted 43 new ones since then, WITH the new specs format and WITH awareness of the glitch, filling out more specs than I used to, accordingly. I filled out not only all the ‘Required’ specs but also most (if not all) of the ‘Suggested’ ones, no matter how ridiculously non-applicable they were to the item, just for scientific curiosity. If anything, I am more troubled by the observations I am making of the post-glitch listings than the old ones. Oh and by the way, virtually all of my 297 listings are promoted. I made all the new ones at least 1.9%, and some as high as the trending rate. I'll get back to that in a minute, but here are some more-general observations:
1. I can find no rhyme or reason to this new "Add details" suggestion given on items as seen in Overview. This goes for both pre- and post-glitch listings, and it’s definitely not as simple as having all the ‘Required’ specs completed. Obviously all the clothes/shoes whose sizes disappeared became “Add Details” prompters, but it also shows for about half of my listings which (now) have all the ‘Required’ specs but do not have all the ‘Suggested’ ones. I have played around with adding specs until they stopped prompting ‘Add details,’ and can’t figure out which spec(s) are the stinkers, the ones that MUST be completed. I have even gone through the painstaking procedure of adding one at a time, going back to Overview to check if “A.D.” stopped. And, well, for ‘this’ item it was ‘Style’; for ‘that’ item it was ‘Vintage Y/N’ etc. NO consistent pattern.
2. Does completing all of the software’s perceived “missing” details even make a difference in view counts? No. HARD, SOLID, NO. Like I said, the 43 post-glitch listings I made are especially disturbing to watch. Why? Well, not only were they made with the new specs, not only did I promote all of them (in some cases at a much higher rate than I normally would)……but just the fact that they were NEW listings should have given them the normal initial boost of first-day view counts. But the vast majority are single-digit, and I made most of the new listings on the 16th or 17th. Most of the ones that got 5 or 6 views their first day have not had another view since. Last night I posted 4 new items, and I noticed that they all got an immediate 2 views. I mean IMMEDIATE, like as quick as I could click back to the hub. One of them now has 5 views, and it’s one that I promoted at the full trending ad rate; the other three I promoted at 3.9% but they still have only those first 2 views, and I don’t believe those were actual shoppers, actually viewing the items.
3. What have I actually sold after the 15th? Well just like most people, not a lot, only 13 items. And I can’t even make any solid conclusions about why those items sold. There are some ALMOST “Ah-HA!” observations. Like 3 of them were non-clothing and they were also auctions. 3 others were shirts in a ‘Variations’ listing. But the other 7 were regular ol’ clothing/shoe items including a couple older listings that I know I hadn’t even glitch-fixed yet (didn’t go into ‘Revise item’ and plug in their size or anything). I wish I knew if the buyers were pre-glitch watchers, but now I don’t even know if those items HAD any watchers. And….as if to throw a wrench into the theory that post-glitch listings are extra problematic, one item which sold late last night was one of those 43 new listings. It was a Ralph Lauren mixed wool sweater with a golden retriever on the front, and for whatever reason it was among the few new listings that got decent and steadily-growing view counts. I did label it ‘Vintage’ both in the description and specs menu, but not the title. I don’t remember what promoted rate I set it at.
I am thinking of sending all my post-glitch buyers a very short questionnaire, just asking how they found the item and whether they had it on Watch before buying.
4. Have I done search experiments? Of course. And that is one of the most cruelly perplexing things I see. I bet you’re expecting I’ll say that I couldn’t find my items or had to tinker like crazy with the search terms or refinements to find them, and/or they were buried way down the listings. Nope. As a matter of fact I found most items pretty easily, and usually commensurate with expectations based on things like promoted rate, matching search terms, and/or time listed. I did searches on a browser I rarely use, on the Ebay website, but not logged in.
So……what does it say when views/sales of items are at a drastically slow crawl despite being well-searchable? I don’t know, but it at LEAST begs one question, one that is possibly scarier than the glitch itself: DOES THE GLITCH EVEN HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SLOWER VIEWS/SALES? I know one thing for sure, my sales were already sucking pretty bad for a good couple weeks before Oct. 15th, and I saw TONS of other people saying the same thing, all over the internet. So, what if our previous success levels didn’t come so much from search results as we traditionally think of them, and more from less-direct pathways, such as similar item suggestions on the pages of other sellers’ items, or showing up in totally off-Ebay locations? I’m still too much a newbie to have any wisdom about how any of that works. But I have a degree in Biology so I know how to learn as much as possible starting with whatever knowledge IS already on hand, expanding from there with experiments, and never scrapping any data no matter how irrelevant it seems at the time, because it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
What if our illness has nothing to do with a virus or bacteria? What if it's actually a vitamin deficiency? Or an allergy? Or a poison?
