3rd night in a Row No contact. I have a theory part 2

[soccerteeth]

Last night was worse than the other 2.  Not one sale, not one question or even low ball offer.  And yesterdays afternoon grouping of sales was only 3 items. Someone mentioned that people need to sleep.  This is worldwide platform and we have been about 40% international for years. Most of those international orders occur when we are sleeping. 

Weve had an issue on these boards for a long time where there is a group of people who are contrarian to anything said to the detriment of ebay. It doesnt seem to matter what it is.  People have accused some of being trolls or working for ebay.  That usually gets shut down really quick. 

These boards are run by Lithium, Lithium has joined forces with Spredfast and they are now the Khoros company.  If you look at Khoros, they provide social care.  Everything about them is more corporate speak than you could ever dare to read about one company.  Its as if its just a bunch of lawyers with a thesaurus and are constantly making up new uses for words that no longer mean anything.  Anyway, according to what they do, they manage your forums, your social media pages and interact with your customers.  They essentially manage your brand and reinforce what you deem important.  From what i gather there should be some of their employees on here but, youd think they would be visible and speaking out for the Ebay brand.

They say the future of customer engagement is here.  Where the companies positions are managed. Essentially media marking and PR. Theyre employees seem to call what they do Social Care. Why do I write this? Because I think what happens here or is attempting to happen is gas-lighting.  Gas lighting is very dangerous, even in the confines of small discussion boards.  If people are coming here with real issues , even if sometimes were just upset and the issues arent what they seem to us, this appears to be a place where sellers can interact with each other, not be sold a company line as PR.  If there really are definable, quantifiable problems and were being told theyre not problems at all by people being paid to be here. Its extremely detrimental to our businesses and lives.  It can lead people who may be in a bad way into a worse place by not knowing whats going on.  It can lead us to double down and go further into the hole if say the company has no intention on making anything better or fixing long lived issues. Real people with families to take care and some big businesses are making decisions on which way to take their companies based on what were told is happening and what is not.  Not many people seem to be able to see through this.

Im here to make money and i have my end squared up but, If Im being given half the day live and half hidden so ebay can save money on servers, yet not let any of us know because they dont have to due to legal jargon, then they are keeping is purposely in the dark and milking us. If this is absolutely untrue, why does noone reach out ever about whats happening so we know how to plan.  Are some of us not vital parts of this, many of us for decades.  Is something severely broken and ebay doesnt want to credit us for downtime that they are not working on our behalf?

And the real problem is were called partners (we know thats not true) but we have zero idea how to word our listings or if an issue is being fixed.  Noone has talked to us about the problems for years if ever.  So were expendable and of inconsequential value.

Ive been here for 10 years, 3 million dollars sold, 24,000+ sales, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands purchased. This does not make me an expert on ebay but its experience. The cheerleaders tell me its seasonal (I have the information what my season is they dont), they say that many others are doing great, ok Ive seen multiple of complaints explode over the last year than in the last 10. The sky has always been falling, yes but it appears its fallen and were just slow to the punch. All of the Ebay youtube seller channels are pretty fed up with ebay and not really trying to hide it anymore. Some of those are people who loved ebay and even filmed at ebay open.

I say what I sold here not to appear to be an expert but Ive spent every waking hour in some capacity on ebay for the last decade. My partner has too. If Im gardening, Im checking my phone to answer questions, for about 8 of those years I was always checking the buyitnow newly listed to see what I can retail arbitrage (In which case ebay gets the sale fvf and my higher fvf sale as well.  When I went on vacations, i would relax for couple days and then be on my laptop making changes to my store or adding item specifics that didnt make any sense for my store.  I take my laptop to the restroom.  If I were in some capacity on Ebay 16 hours a day. I dont sleep much that would mean I was on here in some capacity for 57,600 hours.  Malcolm Gladwell says 10,000 hours makes you an expert.

We know that corporations need to make profits for their shareholders, we know we come after that. But what about trading making money on me selling my items that noone else has. If the search were simply fixed or the server space was paid for, there would be more sales and happier sellers which equals happier buyers. Prior to Devins run Quarterly numbers were up, there was growth. Its when the cost cutting really began that we all started seeing cuts at one point or another.  We stopped buying on ebay or keeping our funds and principle. 

Another thing that the hedge funds running ebay may not take into account. Unlike some other business, marketplaces like ebay are made up many times of rebels. People who arent as easy to push as say a 9 to 5er . That may be who Devon referred to as the noise. The ones who arent happy training their replacements.

I think many of us have given our all here and ebay has demanded more without giving anything but, actually taking away everything but, our inventories.

I would hope that new leadership would put a few dollars back into ebay and make it the interesting place it once was where you could find stuff and make money. Sell of the other stuff and someone has to turn ebay around. Any change coming down the pipeline now, if ebay says were making something easier, its read as what are they taking? I dont think Ive personally seen one positive change with this company in the last few years. I pay more than ever for so much less and feel like somedays I have PTSD from this experience. I wouldnt have minded an increase in fees with a somewhat transparent working platform.

Someone figured out how to make money ripping ebay apart and damaging the longterm platform because they didnt know how to make money by building something.  Thats what selling to the wrong people and hiring the wrong people can do.  I feel sometimes like ebay employees hate us but were just working in createing something, not denying or hurting something for wages.

This is what I think of every morning when I wake up. Watching my business here shrivel when the demand for what I sell is so high and the products so scarce.  It appears to be poorly run by design.

[southern*sweet*tea]

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@soccerteeth wrote:

 If you look at Khoros, they provide social care.  

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What the flying fig is social care??  More social media garbage?

As to the rest of your post, if you want to build a solid, long term business, you can't do it on someone else's website. You have to have your own.

Ebay doesn't care - not about sellers, not about buyers. They're in it for as much short term money as they can get. All these third party selling venue websites are the same. The sooner people realize that, the better.

[zamo-zuan]

Sorry to hear you're still having issues.

Question, did eBay give any warnings or anything before the issues began? Even if it was something that shouldn't result in penalty? Meaning VeRO fair warnings, or duplicate warnings, anything like that?

The reason I ask is because I've ran in to issues where you *do* receive the penalties even in situations you should not.

Another question, did you happen to bulk relist or bulk revise a large portion of your listings recently? EBay sometimes has issues with data corruption, and if you were unfortunate enough to do a large bulk change while this happened, it could have damaged many of your listings.

Aside from that, it's hard to guess what the issue is. One advantage that we have is we have our own software so we can look at the actual data, eBay's server messages, and so on, to help diagnose issues. But I don't know that this is available to you/your store. 

Some issues I'm seeing a lot lately are corrupted "Shipping Details" section. Meaning a part of the data eBay uses for shipping is simply missing. If we use the Sellers Hub to revise the listing it goes through, but if we try to have our software revise the listing, it'll report the actual error to us, and we can see whats going on to fix it.

[soccerteeth]

Weve never had a VERO warning but, you bring something good up.  Our last contact was yesterday at 5pm.  Wevebeen almost 24 hours with no questions or sales.  We have well over 4000 high quality items listed. Were more than 35% of the entire market for our stuff.

This week when we were all get paymenst from paypal but ebay wasnt showing we had 2 probllems with buyers purchasing twice. One just asked as he said his card showed charged twice.  I assured him that we only had one payment.  The second one ordered 2 of something and next morning before we shipped, he ordered a 3rd.  This person had zero feeback.  I get a message through email, not through ebay telling me he only wanted 2 but, after ordering ebay said the item was not available.   I told him to communicate through ebay and to open a return with "ordered by mistake" . Next day he opens a return with no other communication for missing pieces.  No idea if he doesnt pay attention or wanted free return etc.  I let him know there was an issue with ebay that day and didnt blame him.   

So right after getting that defect for missing pieces, my contact goes away and this has happened before.  When some weird feedback or scam occurred, our standing goes way down immediately when we get an undeserved negative or a false defect. And I mean, ebay removes them because weve blocked buyers use different accounts and try to harm us.  Were expensive, not everyone loves us for that but, we dont race to the bottom and have helped keep our market healthy for years.

I contacted merchantsupport_NA.   They acknowledged the error, closed it with no fault but, still said defects are hard to remove. Which is intself is absolutely insane as he also stated he could see everything that happened. Ebay refunded the buyer over $50 and didnt take it from me.  So they acknowledged some kind of responsibility but couldnt guaruntee that the defect would be removed if it shows up.  We'll wait and see if that happens.

According to ebays algorithm, I with 100% feedback and 400k a year for years. Last year our first 6 months were putting us on target to hit 600k. June came and we barely made 400k. Easy to do the math. It was our biggest first half ever and then blammo. We could barely make 35% pretty much overnight with the summer update.  This year we may make half of that and may close our store as well and put all energy elsewhere. 

So, this has happened before where we have an issue, ebay resolves it but our sales and contact go almost non-existent, like were penalized.  You could hold us up against every other major player in our niche (of which the next biggest is half our size) and we would blow every one out of the water with metrics. Ive watch ed these people for years. 

The last few nights being off is when we make a lot of international sales usually and those have suffered. Todays load was 3 items.  Our weekends are now 23 packages and a lot more problems. They used to be 50-60 packages on sunday night. Im talking upward trajectory for years.   I would doubt weve had more than 1 or 2 days with no contact at all.

We have enough inventory to do several million per year for years but its a 2 person business and we value that so were growing at a sane pace which is almost nonexistent in the corrupt corporate world.

We decided to step out of social media end ebay for the weekend to recoup our sanity.  I saw your reply and Ive read a lot of your posts and youre backing it up with data.  We sell completely different things and Your area is much more competitive than mine and were both seeing the same thing.  Our response to everything was to have a large store, 5000 items before we decided to start moving energy elsewhere. Something is always selling and our feedback is generally love letters about speed and better than expected stuff. A lot of the rules of the economy dont hit us much.

I dont know if caught the main rant on this post was that the company behind this board is basically PR and Ive always suspected there were "sellers" here who were paid by someone other than ebay to push a narrative.  Ive seen others say the same.  This is just the most all encompassing negative company Ive ever dealt with.  I know we get hit as collateral damage in with the modern commodities dealers of which there is much competition but I dont think ebay has ever listened to the niche sellers like us.  There has to be a plan to suck as much money out as possible and pass it on.   I think this is more about political economics than anything. I saw someone say ebay hiding listings is socialism and I couldnt even reply because its actually unbridled no checks capitalism that allows people with zero interest in companies to buy and wreck them with zero regard for what it does to the entre American economy. 

We will sell anywhere, were lucky enough to have the product. I even toy with the idea of creating anew marketplace. Always ranting becasue its just so frustrating.

[zamo-zuan]

I understand what you're going through and we've been in the same situation for awhile now. Our month might be doing better than last month (and better than more than half of this year) but at the end of the day, we're down 29.1% from this time period last year, and last year we were down a similar amount from the year before. In total, our yearly sales are under half what it was 2 years ago. 

So first off, feedback seems to have absolutely nothing to do with visibility anymore. If you browse various categories (and the different clothing categories are a good example) many of the top 10 sellers have absolutely horrid feedback. I've seen as low as 70%. So certainly feedback is not being used since this is the case.

For the record, I do think feedback percentages should mean *something* for sellers. It makes no sense that you could take great care of your customers, be a perfect model of how an eBay seller should treat their customers, and take losses for your customers, with nothing in return.

Anyway, beyond feedback, metric damage is certainly a possibility. 

One thing that concerns me is the reasoning they gave you. I can 100% guarantee you that it's absolutely easy for them to remove those defects. EBay has assisted us numerous times where there's been a glitch and they removed the defect. It takes a few days to process, but they absolutely have the ability to do so.

Violations, on the other hand, are different. Those don't seem to be removable. The only place that lists violations that I've seen is on the MSO Sellers Health reports, the section down bottom. I can't think of any violations that may be caused by the situation you explain, though. They are:

"Item Loc Misrep, Off-eBay, Contact Info, VeRO, Listing Practices, Duplicates, Search & Browse".

It doesn't sound like any of those might have happened on your side.

Your situation makes me think of one thing, though. The amount of items you have, and being in a niche category. It makes me think of stagnant listings.

Listings go stagnant after 90 days unsold, at which point they receive a penalty and have reduced visibility. Stales are 30 days unsold with just a very minor penalty. But the system is a bit deeper than that... there's 2 aspects:

1) The individual listings becoming stagnant receiving a penalty on that listing.

2) There's also "Stagnant Percentage" and "Stale Percentage" variables that eBay keeps track of. 

If you have a high 5 of stagnants, it may be (at least a part of ) what is causing your issues?

One reason I suspect this is a lot of sellers I know are doing bad the last few weeks-month. But as mentioned, we actually have seen a slight improvement from past months. The only thing we've been doing different lately is working on reducing our number of stagnant listings. About a month prior to our improvement is when we started working on the stagnants. That's the biggest change we've been consistent with lately, so I suspect stagnants may have been made more important in the algorithm.

That's the best advice I could give. I just wonder if there might be some corruption for your listing data, but there's no easy way to check that without having software with API access. 

Good luck, I hope your issues get resolved soon!

[soccerteeth]

Its apparent to all of us that Ebay doesnt care and my eggs arent all in this basket.  Because of that we shouldnt bring problems to the light? If noone ever says anything. If noone ever complains about injustices, then nothing dofeintely will change. 

To the rest of my post, I have a solid til the end business plan. Ebay managed to capture entire markets and has been the easiest place to sell for a number of years but, thats changing and complainst are what get people to roll back plans.  No idea if theyll hire anyone with freewill but, i wouldnt take the job if it wasnt to clean it up. That blackmark could follow you for a long time. "The CEO's who helped destroy ebay".

[aerosedan]

What we are seeing here is the transformation of a business founded with the idea of providing a useful service to people being transformed into a platform / tool to extract value from them.

From an innovation standpoint, there has been nothing creative about recent actions that could stimulate growth by generating additional value for users of the site. That is the route that benefits all, but also the hardest path for businesses.

It’s easy to relate to your comments about misguided focus on short-term profit and companies being gutted. The results make themselves very evident with a reduction of choice and quality in products and services. Apparently even the corporate world is recognizing things have to change.

The Power Of Purpose: The End Of Shareholder Supremacy (Aug 23, 2019)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/afdhelaziz/2019/08/23/the-power-of-purpose-milton-friedman-is-rolling-i...

Business Roundtable Statement On Purpose Of Companies (Aug 24, 2019)

https://qz.com/work/1691365/business-roundtable-statement-on-purpose-of-companies-goes-back-to-the-f...

As a seller on a platform you do not own, ultimately your fate is in the hands of other people. That’s fine if they share the same values and vision. But it seems the gap is rapidly increasing here.