@onlinesportsrus wrote:
Hi Zamo,
We have this issue destroying our business. We are about to even lose our home. Before they started all these spring and fall updates we were doing about 250k a year in sales ( i wish that was all ours) but every since the updates we are lucky to make a few hundred in sales each week and since friday we have had about 4 sales when we used to have 20 to 30 sales a day and ebay staff will not help us and say there is nothing wrong. Is there anything we can do or any help you can give? We are really desperate. We have been on the phone with them for months and they just tell us to so this and that and nothing we do that they tell us to do has fixed it so i believe our account has these bugs because you cannot go from huge sales every day to nothing and that is happening the same on two seperate ebay business's/ Can you help? Please contact us if there is anything you can have us do. We are maybe 3 months from losing everything if we do not start getting our products seen again.
I definitely know how that feels to be in that situation!
So my first piece of advice, if you try to discuss with them about lost sales, it will get nowhere. You 100% have to focus on impressions. Sales comments are dismissed as "We can't choose what the buyer does". CSR's have directly told me, that their requests get rejected by the tech team for this reason. But impressions are before the buyer has any choice. If the buyer can not see your item, the buyer can not make a choice.
On sellers hub, you can view impressions if you hit the Performance tab. Make sure to set it to 31 days - it sometimes automatically sets to different date ranges which would make it inaccurate. Compare 31 days to prior, to last years, etc. Look for inconsistencies, and exactly where they started.
Next, it's very hard from sellers hub alone to actually see if you have any bug affecting your account. The only indication you could use, if you check your Sales (31 days) daily and see repeated "incorrect" errors on Active Listings. What I mean is, if your active listings were 1000 last week, 1010 this week, but you get a message "Active Listings Down 30%". This message DOES rarely appear without the bug, but it is usually a lower percentage. 30-40% or above, I have found to be linked to the bug. It's almost as if eBay can no longer properly "see" all your listings.
The way to get the best evidence is to call up eBay, and request if you can have someone from the Sellers Health team to give you a business read out. This sheet is where I was able to find the best evidence.
One key error to look for, is if your "Active" listing count does not match all of your other listing counts. EBay was saying we had 1000 more active listings, than total listings, which is obviously impossible. Another area to watch for is the "Stagnant Listings" section. Our Sellers Health rep confirmed we had around 30ish stagnant listings (stagnant = over 90 days unsold), but the sellers health read out was saying 580 stagnant!
Also, just browse for -any- other technical errors on the sellers health sheet. This can give you actual confirmation if something is wrong with your account.
Now I will be honest, finding this did NOT resolve the problem. Even after discovering this & reporting this, we got passed around, and noone could explain it. We had probs from January-Feb 19th. Then things were good until March 23rd (day of the Spring Update), then our drop came back, and did not resolve at all until June 18th. Even then, we're 20-25% less than normal, but at least we are able to do business.
More importantly, we are able to compete again - that is all we ask for. It is discouraging when nothing you do has any affect on impressions.
Once our drop stopped, those technical issues resolved themselves. I 100% believe they are at the very least, linked with some kind of correlation to the drop. It has to be. Not only did the sellers health sheet improve, but for the next couple months, our Sales (31 days) would say active listings UP 30%, 25%, etc. The complete opposite of the bugs earlier in the year. It's like all our listings slowly became visible again.
But I would like to make sure your attention is focused on the best areas. Impressions, and technical issues. These things can not be argued that they are "sellers decision".
This is specifically to tell if you have the bug that affected our account , affecting yours as well. If this happens to not be the case, let me know (you can tell me on here or private message me), and I can help look at your listings, see if your issue might be with the new catalog, or take a look at what is happening & see if there's any ideas I have on how to resolve your situation!
Good luck! I hope things turn around soon!
