@double2trouble wrote:
I also am assuming they are hiding listings to force sellers into promoted listings, but I kinda lean toward conspiray more often than not. I had some hard to find Brembo rotors I had up here for a couple months, NOS, killer price, nothing. I put them up on a different site whose name I won"t mention, for 50 bucks more than I was asking here, still a good price, and they sold the first day. Coincidence? Maybe, but I have noticed the selection for many things here has gotten real slim. I'm thinking it's a good site for mega sellers, but not for small guys who really don't bring much traffic. I took everything down to take a break for a while, and am concentrating on my repair/restoration/custom parts gig. I really used to enjoy selling here, and I still would like to use one site like the old days. My stuff I sell though is really geared towards a small segment of mostly Baby Boomers, along with the things I repair and make parts for, and dinosaurs like me will die out with passing of the Boomers.
You are not alone. My sales fell off a cliff overnight after breaking records constantly. I tried everything I could think of to fix the problem and get my sales back, but nothing has worked. I will go days without a sale now, then a couple of $50 or $60 days before nothing. Just as suddenly, I will sell 6 or 7 items in a single day that I was about to consider dead stock that had sat unsold, hardly any views for 6+ months.
I ended up getting fed up, and started cross posting my listings to another site, the one where all sales are final after 3 days, and the results were curious. I had stuff that had sat unsold on eBay for 6 months or better that was selling within days on this other site for higher prices than I had on eBay, and with vastly fewer buyers on that other site as well.
It goes feast, them famine, then feast and then back to famine so regularly here on eBay that there is no question in my mind that something shady is going on. You don't go from amazing sales daily to nothing, and then to all of the sudden selling dead stock nobody cared about for the last 6 months to a year before the switch is flipped and your store goes dead again if there is not some funny business going on.
My conspiracy theory is that eBay is killing our sales so that we promote our listings to try and get them back, just so they can flip the switch back on after we promote in order to double dip on the fees that they would not have gotten had they not flipped the switch off on us to start with.
