Are my items not being seen?

[luvcash]

I sell in the Midwest.  Seems like 98% of my sales go to California, Texas or the East Coast.  A lot of my items are Collectibles from the Midwest.  Does the Bay only send my listings to those areas or is the Midwest just not buying.  I NEVER see EBay ads anywhere now days.

[chapeau-noir]

Regional tastes may play into this.  I travel a lot and with clothing (which I sell) styles change subtly and sometimes greatly depending upon where I am.  I haven't really gone anywhere with trying to map this, though, I'm just glad the stuff sells at this point, but when I was a hat seller, my most ornate and fantabulous hats went to the deep south. 👍

[buyselljack2016]

Those of us seeing all the OP's listings, or anyone else's when we look knowing what their ID is, and seeing things in a random search...........................   may be,........ may be, two different things.

Seeing that someone has 50, 150, or 1500 listings does not prove that they are seen when searching.

[laserpartshq2]

I bet Elon Musk could figure it out, maybe he should buy the company........lol

[chapeau-noir]

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@kalyoth wrote:

I have begun to suspect - like most things - 80% of the country cares not at all for digital commerce sites. So that would mean most people potentially looking on ebay may now primarily reside along the coastlines - hence the distance I have also seen with my customer shipping. There is a very good chance, like all fads & businesses, ebay is now in its twilight phase of decline & it only has legacy users left.

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The majority of people in this country live along the coastlines.

[coolections]

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@buyselljack2016 wrote:

Those of us seeing all the OP's listings, or anyone else's when we look knowing what their ID is, and seeing things in a random search...........................   may be,........ may be, two different things.  Seeing that someone has 50, 150, or 1500 listings does not prove that they are seen when searching.

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@buyselljack2016   When I check someone with the conspiracy of Ebay hiding their stuff, I ALWAYS do a regular search.  In the last 5 years or so I have found everything the seller says is hidden. Not once was an item not there.

[reallynicestamps]

Have you ever seen a population map of the USA?

The most heavily populated areas are California, Texas, and the East Coast.

I NEVER see EBay ads anywhere now days.

I see them on FaceBook and The Hill (a news site). Occasionally on the homepage for Microsoft/Outlook News. And on Comedy Central (I'm actually not sure what it is called, but it is humour).

It makes sense for an online seller to advertise online.

One thing I am fairly sure of, if I make a sale to a given location, my listings are shown more often in that location.

I base this on anecdote, not data.

But during the week after I made a sale to Liechtenstein (population ~45,000) I made a second sale to Liechtenstein.  I've never  made one since.

Same tends to happen when I make a sale to a thinly populated part of the USA. I will see another sale from there soon after.

We are all pretty sure that eBay cycles our listings through various locations (some call it throttling but I would say it's the opposite) and to my mind this is a possible proof of that.

[aprilmoviebuf2000]

We are in the upper midwest, and I can truly say that our sales go pretty much everywhere.  Some 1 or 2 states away, some to one coast or another, some down south, etc.  
So I don't know what the answer is in your case....

I am really curious though....is there a particular reason why you only use Parcel Select Ground?  
Priority is usually not much more (unless the item is heavy or oversized), and many of your items can go First Class as well, and both of these would get items to your buyers faster.  I'll bet you'd have better results if you use calculated shipping and ditch PSG.  

[eburtonlab]

When I check someone with the conspiracy of Ebay hiding their stuff, I ALWAYS do a regular search.  In the last 5 years or so I have found everything the seller says is hidden. Not once was an item not there.

There have been a few situations where items that should have legitimately been found could not be found for various non-conspiracy related reasons, where sellers posting questions about not seeing their own items were actually assisted by responses from other users searching and troubleshooting.

There was the notorious HATA bug that affected some users in Hawaii, Alaska, US Territories and armed forces APO locations, making it hard for those users to find local items (and for sellers to see their own items in those locations).

Users in India at one point were only able to purchase, sell and see listings outside of India, making it hard for Indian sellers to see their own items when searching with a local address to calculate shipping.

Some other locations such as Japan had serious issues where items that had valid shipping methods were not always findable as they should have been.

There were numerous situations where buyers or sellers inadvertently changed the location setting used to calculate shipping to an obscure country location where few sellers offered a valid shipping method, preventing many items from being found.

In one Dr. House-like case, @berserkerplanet  diagnosed a continental US seller's problem as exactly mimicking symptoms of the HATA bug despite the seller not fitting the profile, and the seller quickly responded that the seller's location setting had previously been changed to Hawaii in order to help calculate shipping for a potential buyer there and had not been changed back afterwards as it should have been, leading to problems searching. Once the true location setting was restored, missing items appeared in search again.

Back before the Time Away feature was extended to all users and when only users with a store subscription could put those stores on vacation to hide their listings, there were a couple of cases of sellers putting stores on vacation, then later deciding to end the store subscriptions. Much later when those sellers tried to sell again, the listings would stubbornly not appear in search at all -- due to the long forgotten but apparently still ongoing vacation settings, which could not be undone without a store page to work from.

From time to time it is a good idea for sellers to sign out of their seller accounts and try searching for some of their items as a potential buyer might, just to see what does or does not turn up.

[chapeau-noir]

I've found that the gotcha "See, I found it!" isn't really very relevant unless one does NOT know the exact title or parts of titles, but are using proximate search terms as might someone actually searching.  I do usually find these items on anonymous searches, but enough times I have had to search through Google or Bing to find what I'm looking for.  No search engine is infallible and it's the nature of distributed search that results will vary.  I don't think it's a conscious effort on eBay's part to hide listings, I think they're just not that great at the IT side of things and have a huge complicated site to manage.  They're not a tech company, they're a marketing platform that uses tech. Big difference.

ETA:  With 1.5 billion plus items on here, I'm actually surprised search works as well as it does, particularly when many people may not be very search savvy.  Amazon makes me want to tear my hair out the search is so bad and they're "supposed" to be a tech company, earning more than half their revenue with AWS.

[baydistributionllc]

The first factor is free shipping. I sell things to far flung place’s because of free shipping. A lot of stuff to remote area of WA, CA, TX.

One thing I noticed is that when sales are slow all of the few items I sell go to the same geographic area. I have days with ten Texas and one California. All California and one Nevada. 

I think California is home base for everyone’s listings and branching out to other geographic areas requires server power they don’t have enough of, don’t want to pay for more of, and that they suck dry when they update.

There was a down period for two weeks for the last update. I heard it said CA servers went down. Since then there have been several changes to the site. It doesn’t seem to be killing sales per usual. Im hoping they added some power. I haven’t had an all CA or all TX day in a while.

[baydistributionllc]

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@onefootflipper wrote:

You need to switch to calculated shipping. Flat shipping or free shipping means that your items are most desirable to those in the furthest away zones from you. 

Ebay spends most of its ad money on google shopping, exactly where it needs to. Reminding people that ebay exists is not needed. It has no direct competition.

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Thats a good way to sell nearly nothing. The calculator doesn’t work right. It charges double the actual cost AND it displays the fastest option first. You May offer a cheaper option as well but no buyer will ever know that. Furthermore if you know how to ship right nearly everything under a cubic foot is predictable and nearly the same price to ship anywhere.

   I can hold something in my hand and know the shipping cost to across the country vs next store. Its like $2-3. Calculated shipping policies that have to meticulously set up and maintained, bad math buyers buying someone elses more expensive item, all due to fear of the shipping being $3 more than estimated. Please. The shipping is predictable on just about everything and the difference in close vs far away is only a few dollars. Calculated shipping is for newbs.

   Sometimes the shipping is $10 more than I estimated. Oh no! What to do!? I ship it anyway. No biggie because far more often its less. 

   Then theres people constantly crying combined shipping. People crying for shipping refunds. People complaining about the shipping charged because they think it to much. You know why they think its to much? Because of asinine flat rate policies that are half the actual shipping cost. They think those policies other sellers had were the actual shipping cost. 
     Anything other than free shipping is an enormous time suck that hinders sales.

[pargran3]

Trying to draw conclusions about how listings are shown based on one seller's sales is meaningless.

Maybe a spreadsheet with thousands of sellers with the exact same items in different parts of the country might tell something significant. Maybe not.

[eburtonlab]

I've found that the gotcha "See, I found it!" isn't really very relevant unless one does NOT know the exact title or parts of titles, but are using proximate search terms as might someone actually searching. I do usually find these items on anonymous searches, but enough times I have had to search through Google or Bing to find what I'm looking for. No search engine is infallible and it's the nature of distributed search that results will vary.

A savvy buyer may be able to find a listing even if it is listed in the "wrong" category or the seller omits important keywords or item-specifics, or eBay is making an inappropriate keyword substitution.

A clever seller can make it easy for almost any unskilled buyer to find something using a simple default search, and can work around eBay's odd and often inappropriate "automatic category navigation" options.

And in some situations, eBay's default search behavior can help steer inexperienced buyers in the right direction to find the listings of similarly inexperienced sellers and lead to sales that might not otherwise occur.

Sellers that want to maximize sales should not rely on their buyers knowing all the ins and outs of searching; nor should sellers rely too much on eBay to steer buyers to the seller's listings. It is important for sellers to understand enough about how eBay's search works so that their buyers do not need to be experts in order to find their items.

"How come when I search this way, this item does not appear in the results?" is often a very important question, and the correct answer ("it is listed in a different category than the default for those keywords" or "the seller did not include relevant items specifics" or even "eBay is doing something odd with that particular keyword, this other keyword may work better") can help a seller to make the seller's listings more visible in relevant searches.

And the wrong answer ("eBay just hides things for no reason" or "you just need to cancel all your listings and relist them again to gain visibility") can steer a seller into a maze of conspiracy theories that ultimately leads nowhere.

[buyselljack2016]

I am really curious though....is there a particular reason why you only use Parcel Select Ground?  
Priority is usually not much more (unless the item is heavy or oversized), and many of your items can go First Class as well

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For sure 1st Class is better price wise for buyer/seller when they can go that way instead of PP, but as to Priority vs. Parcel........................     that's a bit of a gray area now. Depends upon far it is going. Back a bit the rate gap was closed for distant shipping, and were $ close, but after some changes (see 2022 rate fold), the rates can jump $$ when distance is involved.

[djvp53]

I'm not sure you do understand the population thing. Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, and South Dakota have a total of 1% of the US population. The "east coast" depending on how you define it, has roughly 40% of the US population. Yeah, you're going to sell more stuff to the east coast than to Montana, Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota.