@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:
@vintagecraze50 Exactly. That's the nature of competition. We see it here everyday. A couple recent threads about how impossible it is to make money selling clothing....this despite the fact that there are many sellers doing very, very well selling clothing. There are always winners and losers in business. And things change. A winning strategy today may not be a winning strategy tomorrow. So, yes, some sellers will undoubtedly lose money trying this, but , just for example, every day there are sellers who lose money buying poorly chosen inventory at too high prices. Or who lose money because they have valuable items but don't know it and sell them for way too little. ..leaving money on the table.
The risks with PPC can be high, but since the seller sets a cap on his ad spend, he has the opportunity (I would say the obligation) to limit his risk. And the rewards can also be high. Anyone who has spent money on ads of any type knows there's always a risk that he's just throwing money away.
A big contributor of this problem is that many people are misled by eBay's "best practices" and recommendations, and don't actually have the ability to test these things out to see what works.
Often times using eBay's best practices will give you LESS sales. The ironic thing is that eBay has made articles featuring employees who are also sellers and they say to follow eBay's best practices in public, but if you check the stores listings, they don't follow their own advice.
Most eBay reps have no clue how eBay's systems actually work. And for sellers, they are limited by many factors (pricing capabilities, experience, knowledge of competitors, availability of stock) and can't get a clear picture.
As a larger seller, if we run in to issues where it seems impossible to get sales, we have to ask why and figure out what works and doesn't in the current algorithm. This also reveals a lot of glitches and technical issues, or sometimes potential penalties/punishments that are not very transparent in eBay's system. As a software developer, we could actually look at the data found in eBay's listings, and often times corrupted data is the problem. This allows us to not only find the glitch in their system, but also see if/when they fix it (and a large portion have NOT been fixed). Most sellers will have no idea if any of these problems are what is harming their sales, and they can only see what eBay shows them in their listings, they can't see the raw data that eBay's site is working with.
This last year has been especially frustrating, as they have been often times changing things weekly. Meaning even if we dedicate a lot of effort in to figuring out what is working well, it changes soon after. So it's a constant uphill battle.
I guess the main thing I want to point out in response to your post is that business strategies and competition do matter. But based on the things we've encountered over the last few years, the battle is usually with eBay, their system, their algorithms, their penalties, their glitches. It's only if you get past all of these potential pitfalls and are in a good place that competition will even begin to matter. And sadly, competitiveness is often not the problem. Most sellers would be able to tell something is wrong, but have no way to prove it, which leads to a lot of the arguments we see on here. But it's a different story as we've encountered these types of things and saw them with my own eyes.
I honestly wish eBay would become about out-competing the other sellers again, and pleasing the customer. Business policies were much more straight forward, and it's rewarding to focus on customers. But ever since they began their AI backed search at the start of 2018, it's no longer about pleasing customers or sales history. It's all about algorithms and which variables/promotions/etc are being weighed heavily in the current algorithm. Assuming two sellers are both weighed heavily in the current algorithm? Then it's time to really compete.
