Maintenance on GTC Listings

[calntom]

Maintenance on GTC Listings

In February, I had embarked on a campaign to sell similar on ~400 listings that had not sold anything over the past 16 months. All of these listings were getting this message, “This listing hasn't had any sales in at least 16 months. Please consider updating it".

I sell mostly new parts so the listings will not be ended and trashed. Many will sell; it is just a matter of time.

Due to the eBay message about “no sales over the past 16 months”, I ended the listings and did a sell similar to prevent eBay from ending or deleting the listings or possibly purging most of the pictures. All reasons that may or may not have ever been implemented by eBay.

I probably have another 200 that have sold before, but not sold another over the last 16 months. I did not end and sell similar on those listings that had sold before, but not sold over the past 16 months. 

I have another ~150 of these listings coming up this month that have not sold over the past 16 months.

While ending the listings and implementing sell similar, I did the following:

Check Pricing and update

Improve Title

Check Category

Sell in lots

Check description condition, photos, item specifics, shipping selection and add volume pricing if applicable.

I am now wondering if ending the listings and doing sell similar was an exercise of counter productiveness since the eBay focus seems to be on a longer duration of GTC listings to improve “sales velocity” via general web search. 

Sounds like I may have jumped the gun a bit as since then, we received the early seller update and it sounds like we should leave the older GTC listings out there and just revise and update them.

Your Thoughts on GTC maintenance? 

[castlemagicmemories]

The message you received is very interesting because Ebay has simply been ending GTC listings that did not have a sale in over a year.  

[dhbookds]

I would (now) probably just revise them.......  but considering the amount of time they had been up....... I doubt you did anything that would really hurt......

[escuintla]

Ebay wants you to do something to the listing, you know, a little tweak. 

So, what I do, I have some right now, is to just add or take $.01 to/from the price. 

You know that nowadays you go to your active listings and click on the price and do the change right there.  I know, 400 is a lot, but I don't think all of them need a change. 

Good luck. 

[calntom]

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@castlemagicmemories wrote:

The message you received is very interesting because Ebay has simply been ending GTC listings that did not have a sale in over a year.  

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They put that message in a shaded sentence right across the listing in the Manage Active Listings pages in the Seller Hub. I keep a close tab on the number of listings I have up every time I add or delete listings to identify any eBay funny business that may enter my realm. I do have more listings that should start showing that message in a few days. 

eBay has never ended any listings for me since about summer of 2017 timeframe when eBay had some other initiative that was causing sellers to make changes to listings. It might have been html or something like that, can't remember.

[calntom]

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@dhbookds wrote:

I would (now) probably just revise them.......  but considering the amount of time they had been up....... I doubt you did anything that would really hurt......

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Roger that. The "sell similar" did bust loose about a 8 sales on those listings over the course of the past couple of weeks. I will be revising and leaving it at that until eBay provides some definite maintenance guidelines. 

I may give them time to put something in print or I may start calling CS until I talk to someone who knows WTH is going on.

[fashunu4eeuh]

On the surface, it looks like eBay is sending mixed signals. On the one hand, they are ending old GTC listings with no sales history over a year's time. And on the other, we hear that eBay wants all fixed price listings to be Good Til Canceled. After considering what this means, I'm beginning to think the reason for both policies is the same. Conversion rates. I think they want sellers to only list items that will be the most likely to sell and that will sell sooner rather than later.

So I don't think you hurt your position by ending listings, updating, and relisting. You did what you felt was necessary to encourage sales, and I think that is in line with the agenda that eBay is working from now. My one concern would be the length of time in which your items are selling--if my theory is correct, if eBay will indeed encourage listings with quicker conversion rates, yours might get dumped at the bottom of Search, in favor of those whose listings sell in a more timely manner.

Just my thoughts, I have no hard and fast data to base them on.

[calntom]

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@escuintla wrote:

Ebay wants you to do something to the listing, you know, a little tweak. 

So, what I do, I have some right now, is to just add or take $.01 to/from the price. 

You know that nowadays you go to your active listings and click on the price and do the change right there.  I know, 400 is a lot, but I don't think all of them need a change. 

Good luck. 

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I did not see where tweaking them made the message go away. How about you? 

My active listing pages have not been updated yet to change the price there. Looks like I can still only "change the custom label". 

This whole deal with the note they put in there about updating the listings and then the thing that Castle says about "Ebay has simply been ending GTC listings that did not have a sale in over a year," makes you wonder what could happen.

This GTC initiative just begs a lot of questions. It would have been nice if they had the whole thing figured out in advance and provided the written documentation that we need to be following going forward. Maybe we will see that when they push out the final update to the Spring Seller Update...……..

[div_style]

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@castlemagicmemories wrote:

The message you received is very interesting because Ebay has simply been ending GTC listings that did not have a sale in over a year.  

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Well, not for everyone.  I have quite a few listings with that message, that, eventually, I will get around to dealing with.   Meantime, they're still active.