Are impressions organic or manipulated?

[movieman630]

I looked at a chart of the past few months with my impressions and what I see is shocking. 

I update my existing listings frequently.  For the past 6 months I've been updating my listings using PL's and I've been setting the rate at .01% higher than the "suggested rate". 

My question is this.  If ebay is using PL's to show your listings to people and I'm rewarding ebay with a higher than their "suggested rate" wouldn't you think that the impressions should be going UP not DOWN?

I'd like to know what's going on.  This is not right.  I've been working so hard to keep my store updated and running.  I have a new baby born in March.  3 kids to feed now.  I need my business to be allowed to grow, NOT SHRINK!

Is this manipulation to try and get people to use their PL Advanced?  If so, it's morally and ethically wrong.  If I'm using PL's and giving ebay upwards of 13% more in fees I should see an increase in sales, not a decrease with 13% more fees!

Here's the image:

Impressions going down despite 13% PL rates on most of my items added during this same period.

[blacktopautoparts]

Looking at your items, you have some really nice auto parts. The nice thing is that you also have some higher valued items, but a recommendation, some of the sun visors that you have are a little too overpriced. One of the things right now is that customers are looking for more lower cost items due to the economy and that just a recommendation. 

On to the real problem with eBay, our July was the worst we have had selling on this platform in the 20+ years. It all started in March of this year where we took quite the drop from last year, and we trucked on trying to make various changes, but nothing was working. Then on 7/17/24 we took a huge drop and it continued up until the last few days where we have slowly started to recover a little bit, but not like what it used to be. That is 2 weeks of really abysmal sales that has been so strange the drop that we have taken. I'm also involved in several other facebook groups and a lot of people selling across different categories complaining of how bad their sales have gotten in July.

I am noticing that not even offsite ads are helping at all like eBay wants us to believe. I have been running mine for almost a week now and the amount of sales that have come in are pathetic. The regular promoted listings suggested ad rates seem to be all over the place the past month and have increased exponentially. As I've stated for a very long time, I think that eBay pulls these numbers out of thin air. I've had talks with management, they have even told me that nobody was promoting as high as we have and from what I am seeing when compared to what we were promoting at, these numbers are way too high. 

[redlinear]

@sweepalot 
    I disagree on the visors.  Almost any NICE sun visor can be on the pricey side (pricey according to us).
Anything that gets touched or handled inside gets a price bump if it's nice.
@blacktopautoparts, go to his listings, search visor, switch to sold (WOW!!!)
 

[blacktopautoparts]

I totally agree @redlinear on the sun visors, but there are some that could probably move easier at a lower price. The newer year ones I would not drop the price on, but some of the older years where there are so many listed on eBay, those are the ones that can be tough to move. 

In the past 6 months I've noticed sellers pricing BMW door mirrors for an example at 60% of the cost of what they were going for just to move them. I'm thinking to myself, why are you guys doing this as its causing such a race to the bottom, but whatever floats peoples boats.

I will say that @sweepalot has an awesome store with higher quality/value items. 

[redlinear]

@blacktopautoparts 
   As of a few weeks ago, I'm going through my cheap listings and price checking.
Search the item, switch to used, switch to lowest $ 1st.  (and stopping there. NOT clicking that little hidden fine print thing to see more results...IE: the cheaper stuff).
I'm raising my prices and matching what the lowest price is that I'm shown in that quicky search.
It's working.
Apparently "most" ebay shoppers don't know about that little almost hidden link.  And my undercut prices were being hidden in there and never seen.
   Something to think about anyway.

[thecosmeticswholesalersllc]

Spot on blacktopautoparts.  We have seen the same thing not getting a sale for hours then get 4 sales then not another sale for 6 hours.  It never was like this before.  Our numbers are down all across the board on eBay but on other sites it's business as usual. 

We also noticed after midnight no sales until 8 or 9 the next morning.  We use to get a bunch of sales overnight.  We have added more products, tweaked listing plus other edits.

It's so frustrating.

[redlinear]

---

@thecosmeticswholesalersllc wrote:

Spot on blacktopautoparts.  We have seen the same thing not getting a sale for hours then get 4 sales then not another sale for 6 hours.  It never was like this before.  Our numbers are down all across the board on eBay but on other sites it's business as usual. 

We also noticed after midnight no sales until 8 or 9 the next morning.  We use to get a bunch of sales overnight.  We have added more products, tweaked listing plus other edits.

It's so frustrating.

---

I looked at 6:00 Tuesday evening and had 5 items sold.
Wed morning at 8:00, I had 6.
Packaged and labelled those.  Finished at 10:00
15 minutes later, I had another 5 sales to package (different items, different buyers, different states)

[blacktopautoparts]

We are getting the same exact selling behavior as you have mentioned. Yesterday was a great example of that. There were stretches of 2-3 hours at a time without a single sale. I have even had days where we went without selling anything for 4-5 hours, which is hard to believe with the size of our inventory and it is not like we have all junk parts. LOL! Then all of a sudden we would get 3-4 sales hit within minutes of each other. This tends to be the norm of late. Then sales will shut off at about 8-10 pm, and they will not start up again till sometime later the next day in the morning. For a platform that is worldwide, this makes no sense at all. We are even promoting pretty heavily (both general promoted above the suggested ad rate + offsite ads) with some fairly decent prices, good pictures, and listings where the descriptions, item specifics (filled all the way where applicable), and the eBay compatibility charts are all filled out.

I'll tell you that we are active on the site pretty much all day long from adding new listings, editing old listings, ending old listings and selling similar, and updating prices. So there is a ton of activity going on the account. I told the eBay rep last night that at this point, eBay is doing a great job at fostering a search engine now where no longer the top rated good sellers are selling over the ones that are doing such a bad job. She was telling me how there are a lot of bad sellers out there that have chased customers away, and I agreed with her that is very true. It doesn't help when they changed the site search where bad sellers are having their items appear over those that provide great customer service.

[therapy_dragon]

Imagine a Karen boomer who already has more money than they ever need. They're no longer interested in financials. But now they are in a position to play god within their own realm. Become supreme leader of their own HOA like they always wanted, dictating what others can and can't do on a whim. 

In other words, it's about control and getting power-high. 

[therapy_dragon]

Also worth pointing out that the history of obsession with power & control. It was only 4 years ago that eBay's global security team was charged with cyber stalking by sending cockroaches and a bloody pig head to harass and intimidate the people working at ecommercebytes. 

It's extremely obvious whenever eBay changes the sales cutoff to your store. Weeks on end of daily sales at one number, followed by an immediate and sustained change to a new daily sales limit.

[dailydeals-business]

I fully agree and have done my own tests, over 3-4 years as we "scale". Promotions is pretty much all bull. It simply doesn't make more sales, you just spend more and once you stop you're screwed until you start again.  There is some sort of sales limit imposed on accounts based on overall inventory value and listing speed rates.  Increase that listing rate and you'll tap into a new level of sales limit for the month? quarter? If you stop listing you simply maintain a monthly sales amount proportional to your inventory value. 

But each revenue number will per.fect.ly ping. ping. ping. that sales ceiling. Quarter after quarter after quarter. Holidays be damned, summer slump, tax season. Ping. Ping. Ping you will hit the same quarterly sales figure over and over again if you yourself are consistent.  

[sweepalot]

I could absolutely drop some prices on many items, especially the slower selling ones just to get them moved. I need to start working on that but I have tried to focus my time on changes to try and move the needle. Our sales are almost exactly in line with what you are saying. Had a decent Jan and Feb, even though our fees had gone up. March started our slide downward. Then by the time July hit, it was very bad. The last week or so it has started to come back, but still way down compared to last year. For the better part of my time selling on ebay, I tried to focus on higher ticket items and my sale price per item was always high. Towards the middle of last year I wanted to sell more parts, so I tried to mix in lower selling parts that would move easier, along with my higher priced items. I think that has been some of my issue as well to everything going on with ebay. I am going to shift back to what I used to do and see if that can get us back. I basically do this one my own, with only 1 part time employee so I don't really have time to try to many different things. 

[sweepalot]

This is true for us as well. I almost always would wake up to several overnight sales in the past. Now it is rare to have more than 1, if that. It seems like 9:00-12:00pm we get sales, then nothing until the evening. The traffic just isn't there anymore, or there is something else going on. 

[sweepalot]

Also, regarding the offite ad campaign, it is awful for us. I am almost 3 weeks in to our first one and we've had 4 sales at a 25% cost, lol. The "priority" ad campaign within ebay is even worse. 

[esg-enterprises]

Zamo, great to hear your insight. The current situation with the platform is concerning all serious sellers.

[siamjane8]

Just a thought.... allot of these changes and the slow down of sales seems to correspond with the announcements from CEO about introducing more AI in searches and they have been leaning heavily on this artificial intelligence to "outsource" human jobs lately.     My personal experience with AI - everywhere- even google, is a very poor one.  It randomly returns irrelevant results and in most cases is just replacing what i actually searched for with "who knows what".     

    I remember over the years as ebay started replacing the "key word" matching search algorithms with the "we know what you want " search - sales decreased as people were no longer shown what they typed in the box.

Could this be having a neg result on sales again?