eBay

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎03-30-2023

It is March 30th. The new PLS rules regarding Direct and Halo sales are now in effect.

Also, as of today, a buyer is now said to have "viewed" a Promoted Listing even if he has not clicked through to the listing, as long as he clicked the "heart" to put the item on his watch list. (This change impacts both PLS and PLA fees.)

Both of these changes expand the number of sales that can be treated as a PLS sale.

IF you use PLS , you should familiarize yourself with these changes if you haven't already.

postcardcountry · ‎04-15-2023

For this month:

Promo sales - 11

Halo Sales - 0

Non-promo - 16

and sales are ssssslllllooooowwwwww

zamo-zuan · ‎04-25-2023

@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:
@zamo-zuan Not really. Last 1 1/2 weeks have been uncharacteristically quiet with fewer sales than usual. Thought maybe it was b/c it's tax time, but not sure why. But I'm pleasantly surprised by how few Halo sales I'm having. Also, for some unknown reason, as soon as Halo went into effect, I started getting way more organic sales than usual. I hope that lasts LOL.

Yeah, this time of year should have been the rush but it just been flatlining. Feb-April is always the biggest season, but not this year. So that's very concerning as it seems either people aren't buying on eBay or the algorithms aren't very helpful.

I'd probably wager that it's an algorithm issue as that's usually the case when weekends don't have a significant slowdown compared to weekdays in auto parts, when a typical weekend should only get about 1/3 the traffic of a weekday. And well, this strange pattern started appearing right when eBay performed their updates, so it definitely seems linked.

I've learned not to get too worried with eBay's up's and downs. But hopefully this isn't the new norm!

simply-the-best-for-you · ‎04-25-2023

@zamo-zuan Some weird patterns for sure. Been pretty slow, but then suddenly I had like 8 sales on Saturday, which is normally a slow day. Who knows. Ebay is changing a lot of screens though & if it's driving me nuts, I'm sure it's driving the buyers nuts too.

This one goes to Eleven - Nigel Tufnel

Simply-the-best-for-you Volunteer Community Mentor
eBay Seller since 1996

zamo-zuan · ‎04-25-2023

@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:
@zamo-zuan Some weird patterns for sure. Been pretty slow, but then suddenly I had like 8 sales on Saturday, which is normally a slow day. Who knows. Ebay is changing a lot of screens though & if it's driving me nuts, I'm sure it's driving the buyers nuts too.

Yep, I've noticed things like that too. But it's pretty telling for us when things began flatlining suddenly when eBay did their updates and we saw basically NO fluctuation when the weekends arrive. With over 10 years experience, we know for a fact that isn't normal, lol.

Some local guys also buy from us, and we noticed some strange things happening, like we get orders steadily until 6-7PM, then suddenly our orders stop, and at that time, all of a sudden the other local guys start getting a ton of orders until midnight. Basically looking like once we reach a certain level, it pushes the sales to other people in this area.

And as always, it's very scary for us to see slow down like this and for us to *still* be #1 in our category, as this means everyone is slowing down too. It's discouraging when there's not really anything we can do to "out compete" the others.

It's not very reassuring that our traffic page is completely broken when showing anything earlier than the last month as well!

But we've went DOWN slightly since the prior period, and this literally never happens. Feb-April is THE TIME OF YEAR, and December is the SLOWEST time of the year.

This is what the yearly trends have always looked like since our very beginning on eBay:

So it's kind of crazy that we've seen a drop, in addition to all the other weird behavior, lol.

mybigsale · ‎04-25-2023

@dolcetreasures wrote:
PL %’s are absolutely absurd now. The lowest suggested rate I can see on any of my items is 9% going up to 19%. Absolutely astonishing to think that eBay thinks I can pay that from my eBay sales. I would need to be robbing stores to pay that.

What do you want? Sales or profit? You can't have both. 🙄

nuclearomen · ‎04-26-2023

@mybigsale wrote:
@dolcetreasures wrote:
PL %’s are absolutely absurd now. The lowest suggested rate I can see on any of my items is 9% going up to 19%. Absolutely astonishing to think that eBay thinks I can pay that from my eBay sales. I would need to be robbing stores to pay that.
What do you want? Sales or profit? You can't have both. 🙄

That's because when they did the Q Update and announced the new ways PL would be charged all the Suggested Rates hiked up by between 3-5% from what they were literally overnight. One of my longtime nerves about PL is their suggested rates, they have always been inflated but 9% suggested election is way to much on items they have absolutely no sales history on or very very very few (like one or 2 over a year period). The issue with these suggestive rates is they are manipulative and gear to entice sellers to up their elections making them think they need to when in actual you don't because the possibility in many categories and items is that competitors aren't electing those really high rates either. The other tactic they use is stifle sales to try and push people into their "Dynamic" method and / or PLA (especially PLA they are and have been pushing on people) - what they are doing is the one thing they shouldn't be, creating and adding to inflation in an already inflated price economy, raising prices on average 20-40% in which sellers are forced to raise their prices in order to cover their PL fees and FVF's so they can walk away from a sale in the end with 10% of that as their "profit" (let's face it, not a lot profit to be had in many cases in the end on gazzillion items that sellers can't really push high prices on as no one would buy them). On top all that, and with the huge decrease in sales and traffic, which PLs were designed to be better and aren't paying off in the investments one puts into them, been seeing constant ads on seller hub overview + inbox emails weekly from ebay to invest in their Seller Capital Loans... lol, yeah, that's going happen (not).

The great truth is there isn't one
And it only gets worse since that conclusion...
...There is something about the rigid posture of a proper, authentic blind
As if extended arms reached to pass his blindness onto others.

zamo-zuan · ‎04-26-2023

@mybigsale wrote:
@dolcetreasures wrote:
PL %’s are absolutely absurd now. The lowest suggested rate I can see on any of my items is 9% going up to 19%. Absolutely astonishing to think that eBay thinks I can pay that from my eBay sales. I would need to be robbing stores to pay that.
What do you want? Sales or profit? You can't have both. 🙄

How about for eBay's site to actually work?

As I've mentioned before, since traffic data is used by the algorithms, if their traffic pages can't even fetch the correct data, then it's likely the data being fed to the algorithms isn't correct either. Which could be a culprit for the issues we're seeing.