eBay

ad2030 · ‎10-12-2022

Hello, I have been on ebay for 20 years selling off and on. I opened my ebay stores in 2013 and have been having great sales until the last 2 1/2 years. Sales have been declining slowly and steady for the last year and a half. 2021 and 2022 have been horrible nothing but a downward spiral..

I have done updating, relisting, sell similar, new listings, new pics, updated coded listings, added promo, having sales 10%-15% off. new titles Nothing is giving.

I know my listings are not being found on the search results. I'm pretty much ghosted even though i can see them myself. No page impressions.. Not to mention china sellers are always at the top of the search results because of multiple never ending new accounts from the same seller and low prices.

This is it I'm calling it quits as the business has dwindled to $100 dollar weeks.

I sell industrial filtering media so the demand will be there. I keep reading how online shopping is down all around ebay, posh, mercari etc. This is an ebay issue. Looks like they are weeding out sellers quickly.

ebay sent me a message to try the new beta marketing campaign $500 off **bleep**! to get listings at the top of search results.

Anybody having a similar experience, I would like to hear from you.

zamo-zuan · ‎02-22-2023

@blacktopautoparts wrote:

I'd love to hear what @zamo-zuan and a few others are experiencing where we have had these kind of talks the last few years.

Things are going relatively normal for us. A bit slow, but nothing that unusual when dealing with eBay. Our patterns hadn't changed within the last 2 weeks, but around a month or so ago they had changed.

The "1 day of good sales/1 day of bad" thing is what I would typically start watching the monthly numbers for. Because almost every time that happens, it's trying to "lock" us at a certain number/30 days. For example, a seller might be at $150k/30 days (or 5k/day). One day they get a big sale and end up at $155k, then the next day they have almost nothing. Or the last day of the month may have been a really low day, suddenly you have a big next day. But during this time period, you're basically always being "balanced" to 150k/day.

This I believe is what eBay meant by the "velocity limits" when that eBay rep leaked/admit the limits they have.

With that said, it could also be a few other possibilities. You and me may be running on different algorithms (that has happened to us in the past, and a recent example being how we had the 2% "requirement" on promotions to get traffic over a year before everyone else).

Or there could be random penalties on your account. For anything like a duplicate listing, VeRO, address mismatch, etc - there's usually a 3-6 month penalty applied to your account. During this time you're more limited than before. (Which I believe is what the "Risk" limits are in that leaked post - and one of the eBay Supervisors that worked his way up the chain straight up told us we had a "risk level" on our account in the past).

I don't know that returns cause issues with search, unless they're closed without seller resolution. Or if you caught a penalty from INR service metrics.

But I should mention, I saw that @valueaddedresource had covered many reports of people having broken promotions. So that could be part of the problem as well.

Aside from everything I mentioned, tech issues are a very real possibility with eBay for the last 5+ years as their speed of development has increased while their rate of repairing tech issues has decreased.

goldgoose · ‎02-24-2023

I've been selling for 22yrs. eBay has run its course. It's become more of a burden for me. No sales or extremely low sales. Cutting my ties now. Marking down all items. Plenty of other places to sell. To be honest I would rather donate my items to someone who can use them. Adios, eBay

blacktopautoparts · ‎02-24-2023

Glad to hear @zamo-zuan that you guys are somewhat back to normal with your sales. I do agree that things slowed down a bit for sure. Our January was better than December, and December ended up being the worst month of 2022 for us when compared to looking at numbers over the last 5 years when I was looking at our numbers.

Thanks on the explanation on what you think is going on with the 1 day of low sales and then the next day of good sales. This pattern will continue for a week or two at a time, then bam, we have 4-5 days where sales are consistent this past month. There hasn't been many ebs and flows sales days which is one thing that I noticed was no longer a pattern in 2022. It very well could be the algos and how they are trying to position the account.

As you mention account restrictions. We have none as I have had even my growth advisor check and several of the reps that are in trust and safety. This has to be more of an issue with limits, and I know we have had this theory for years that there are selling limits built into our accounts. Every few days I run a report out of our database to see if we have any duplicate listings and get those taken care of ASAP.

I know returns do not cause an issue, unless you are in Very High from my understanding. I do also know others that sell in our category and are in Very High, it hasn't impacted their sales as much. I do know back in Fall with the latest seller update, one of the higher ups did say they were implementing a process where if you received a return that was a SNAD, it would impact your sales during that day as they would come in. To me, that is crazy doing something like that and I am not sure if they ever went through with it or not.

I do follow @valueaddedresource and think they do a really good job reporting many of these issues. I remember when many of us went through that issue with the promotions being broken.

One guy that I follow on YT has a theory about how they keep shifting our accounts from one server to the next throughout the day. Here is his latest video on the issues he is experiencing which at times are similar to mine of late. He had several good days in a row, then will go till almost the start of the afternoon with barely any sales. This guy has been at it for 20 years and has well over 30,000 plus items in his store.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gsFhIBD3Yc

At this rate, they really need to figure out the issues with the platform and their long term strategy here because this is now the 8th quarter in a row where they have lost GMV, sellers and buyers at a rate of 9%.

kh-belma · ‎02-24-2023

Hi everyone,

Due to the age of this thread, it has been closed to further replies. Please feel free to start a new thread HERE if you wish to continue to discuss this topic.

Thank you for understanding.