eBay

oldedale · ‎10-29-2022

We see same symptoms repeated for last 5 quarterly updates... After every eBay quarterly update, Sales stop. Steady daily sales for 2 months, then eBay adjusts search or add features, Sales stop or decrease by -50%. Traffic decreases from date onward. Example, traffic at 40K daily impressions for 3 weeks, eBay does the quarterly update, traffic drops to 20K daily or even less 10k. Why does this occur?

siamjane8 · ‎10-30-2022

we have noticed the exact same thing!!! cant figure out why but whatever they do disrupts the entire site and kills sales. the company runs tests and variations of itself live to see what works best but then the other non working segment is always in play also.

updates are always bad for sales here. they rely too heavily on their flawed AI so with every big change-it takes months for it to figure out what's going on! its actually very reckless and irresponsible of ebay to operate this way

oldedale · ‎11-01-2022

Still experiencing this huge drop in traffic and sales. Not many comments. No explanation from eBay staff.

solidguitar1961 · ‎11-01-2022

Is that why I totally bombed out in September ?

oldedale · ‎12-22-2022

Sales down 53.9% for 2022. A 50% decrease compared to previous year. 17 year TRS. We ended our store subscription effective 1/1/23. Reason? - EBAY manipulation of search results. Big drop last year after ITEM SPECIFIC search, jump through hoops to simulate sales, eBay does the "BOT" removal in April/May, sales drop again. Traffic at lowest levels in 17 years. Cost to do business increased 20%, fees, shipping increases, added PL fees. Time and inventory investment spent on eBay not producing any profits. Results of category removals last year. Our Lalique glass and Roseville pottery now lumped with 100,000 cheap imported $1 items (decorative vases category). Overwhelms search results. Specialized searches to narrow results, when buyers search for Roseville pottery for example....search results show t-shirts with roses on them, and a small percentage of Roseville pottery, all promoted.

siamjane8 · ‎12-26-2022

Same here. with each "improvement", views and traffic and sales decrease. Admittedly some of that could be caused by our lack of new listings ( i believe ebay algorithms factor in store activity when decided what gets seen). Unfortunately the new unified listing tool severely limited out ability to list in an efficient manner and we just stopped listing here for several months and moved our new inventory to other platforms. To be fair, the reason that we chose to have our business on ebay is because ebay is the best fit for what we sell- used and antique hard to find items and oddities and vintage car parts.

Since they have improved the listing tool to more closely function like the classic tool- we have been able to resume listing here....but allot of work is still needed- the listing tool is still slower to list with and is frustrating to use because it does not a all reflect what a desktop user expects and demands- efficiency and simplicity without the extra wasted clicks needed to use a mobile app on a desktop.

I share your thoughts about the category and search changes! Searching on ebay is a CHORE to find what you want and 95% of the time results in you having to leave ebay and use another search engine to find ebay listings! It is bizarre that they think people want to be bombarded with irrelevant promoted listings instead of the shortest path to the actual item searched for.

Hoping 2023 gets someone at ebay who actually understands online retail and search frustration. Nobody wants pay to play promoted listings in their search results......

Ebay: "lets make the search so ineffective that sales go down....create a panic among sellers and then offer them the solution at a fee"------short term fix for ebay but creates a larger long term problem for ebay as the goals of ebay and of the seller and of the buyers are no longer same. Ebay wants add revenue instead of sales because that is easy free profit.