I feel your frustration and anger, as we're experiencing exactly the same range of feelings. Even though everything is blamed on seasonality, and on buying trends, that's obviously just a scripted answer customer service keeps giving me. There are categories that don't have much to do with seasons, like auto parts, which sell year-round (yes, less around major holidays, but those are not that many and only last a few days), eBay motors has nothing to do with seasonality, people are fixing their cars regardless of the trends.
I honestly have better things to do and am too busy caring for 2 toddlers and doing eBay full time, at the same time, and can't find hours to spend on putting together exact charts and patterns, but even at a glance it is so obvious things don't work as they should. Over the past few weeks sales were horrible, and when they drop they do it all the way; I find it quite impossible that everybody is looking to buy auto parts one week, and then no one in the whole USA looks for car parts the following week.
I love the freedom and flexibility eBay offered us as a family, that much that my husband and I left our jobs and are living off eBay, and we were making more than ever, hard work and stress with scammers & returns but it was worth it. But it became very unpredictable, I cannot count on sales for paying the bills on time, just like I said, one month sales could be booming, the next all I see rising is the eBay invoice.
I noticed that our sales drop or even stop all the way when eBay pushes some new updates, fixes or introduces some new things, changes layouts, buttons, shipping pages, you name it, even small changes... it just screws up our sales. That happens ALWAYS. When our sales drop abruptly, my husband asks me if eBay changed anything, and the answer is usually yes.
Also... not sure if we are in some kind of a rotation placement, like a rotation between all sellers, because I can't find another explanation: we have had days on end of selling only to a handful of sates, grouped close together, like only the people of east coast, or north west, all of a sudden are buying parts.
We also have days when we only sell a certain category of parts, with a couple exceptions in between, like everyone on eBay is looking to buy only headlights, or airbags, or tail lights. Last week, after days of almost no sales, we sold 8 airbags of the same kind in 2 days (they've been listed for weeks or months). Then I went quickly and listed some more, thinking it's the seasonality 
- they're still there with barely any views.
Before I list, I run some searches, checking for prices, condition etc, and I'm sick and tired to go through pages of irrelevant stuff when looking for something. I do know my way around the search engine, and how to eventually find what I'm looking for, tweaking the search options and keywords, jumping pages, but that comes from being on eBay the whole day, and most of our buyers don't.
Then I suppose I shouldn't even mention how exhausted I am about being scammed, losing precious hours and days doing investigative work, trying to fight false NAD claims, filing police reports or just throwing a fit about losing hundreds of $ when I've done nothing wrong, just to hear some CS suggesting I offered free returns to help my sales and get more protection 
eBay does not understand that not all categories are equal and that a small seller can't offer free returns when they spend hours packing something, and when when one way shipping only costs me $30, $40, $60, I'm not selling t-shirts!
Also, can eBay hire someone who actually has any hands on experience on selling and buying on eBay, to implement and come up with any policy and design/functionality changes?
@greg5000 wrote:
@rograc-37 wrote:My sales tanked after the Spring Update last year and went down and down through out the year. Christmas was disastrous. January and February, for some reason were almost normal (almost meaning 25% down, don't know what is normal anymore), then this year's Spring Update. Boom, down the toilet yet again. Tested out so called seller protections. It was obvious they weren't ready for that in the Spring. Can't made any head or tails sense out of the performance numbers. Some times it says I'm up 120% in listings, other times I'm down 40%. I have 220-225 listings on a consistent basis. Then it tells me to watch my seller levels. I'm TSR and not in any danger of losing it.
It they can't get that right, how can anyone expect them to figure out more intricate things. Performance is just basic number calculations. I think it's utterly frightening.
On a side note. Wendy Jones appears to be the only eBay exec to receive a share bonus this month. Interesting. (Of which she sold half immediately)
I met Wendy and most of the eBay Leadership Team last year when I was invited to eBay Headquarters.
Bonuses should only be given out for good performance. eBay's 2nd Quarter Financials show a continuing decline of GMV.
GMV is down for both US and International markets. Comparing Q2 19 with Q2 18 you see International GMV is down 4.1 % and US GMV is down 4.7%. The numbers show a continuing decline in sales.
Since GMV doesn't include returns, unpaid items or cancellations, it’s not a true indicator of all "completed sales." Since we've been seeing a lot of discussions here about high return rates and buyers cancelling purchases, the true sales numbers are probably on a steeper decline then the numbers above.
Our return rate due to Free Returns is over 4%. More than 3% (almost 3.5) of those are remorse returns/not SNAD. According to our seller metrics page, we're in "average" at 1.13%.
Based on these numbers, we could imagine how much lower the true numbers are...
