Refresh eBay store?

[shoecitychampions]

Anyone have any experience with eBay customer service 'refreshing' your store?  They supposedly have your store manually spidered?  

[mrflintstones]

Never heard of that, But if thats the case just have a store month to month and close it when sales drop. ?

[mistwomandancing]

---

@shoecitychampions wrote:

Anyone have any experience with eBay customer service 'refreshing' your store?  They supposedly have your store manually spidered?  

---

I have no idea what any of this ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ even means.  But, I've never felt like I had any store problems on here. 

[dhbookds]

Can you tell us exactly what they said?

In years past, when listing counts would vary if one refreshed a sellers listing page......Ebay would do something (after a lot of reports).....  I never heard it called "refreshing your store".....  but a store was where it would be noticed.......

[tiramisu41]

---

@dhbookds wrote:

Can you tell us exactly what they said?

In years past, when listing counts would vary if one refreshed a sellers listing page......Ebay would do something (after a lot of reports).....  I never heard it called "refreshing your store".....  but a store was where it would be noticed.......

---

@dhbookds - Probably because a spider (more commonly known as a "webcrawler" or "bot"),  is a program that visits websites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index.

That's how after you list a new item on eBay you'll see (or should see) at least one view on each of your listings when you look at your Active Listing status page.   If the OP's stats showed a lot of items with zero views, that means for whatever reason his/her items (or the entire store) was/were being ignored or skipped over by the bots that help create the index for eBay's search engine which in turn would mean it would be impossible to find his/her items via search.

"Refreshing" the store/listings is just a fancy geek-term to describe what your boss does when you've fallen asleep at your desk at work.  

He/she gives you a good poke and tells you to get back to work.   Only difference is, at eBay, no one ever seems to get fired for falling alseep at the wheel.  

[mistwomandancing]

Very interesting.  Glad to be able to read here and learn a bit more about terminology.  Thanks!

[timemachine777]

---

@shoecitychampions wrote:

Anyone have any experience with eBay customer service 'refreshing' your store?  They supposedly have your store manually spidered?  

---

Yes. But it was over a year ago. I was having problems with the RSS feed, so I got eBay to refresh those stores, to help with data collection on the Internet. Primarily with Google. I have a Google account and I was manually submitting my store URL's to Google and other search engines, back when eBay had the major falling out with Google over Googles claims that eBay was gaming their search program.

[ncplates]

I've never heard of "refreshing" a store, but a little over a month ago, I got a message from a potential buyer on the other side of my home county asking if he could pick up the item instead of having it shipped. Having 'Local pickup' made available in the listing, I reply back "Sure, no problem. Provide a physical address in the Paypal payment notes and I can deliver to your door." No reply after that, item still in my inventory and a week goes by when I get an email from eBay stating they viewed that as an attempt to sell outside of eBay and my account could be suspended. After that email, I've had a total of 6 sales from over 700 listings and the last item was sold on 6/4. I've never had a slump in sales like this so I decided to check Google Images to see if my listings can be seen. None of my current listings were on Google or Bing. Some previous listings were on a few third party sites, but nothing of my current listings can be found.  I also at the time I was subscribing to the basic store which on 6/9 I unsubscribed after seeing my sellers numbers. On the graph showing where views are coming from my average from eBay is anywhere from 40-90 compared to outside of ebay averaging 0 to 3 with the highest number being 9 on 5/31. This supports a theory I have that all free listings with the stores and promotions are block from Google & Bing SEOs. You see your listings in all of ebay, but search the rest of the net and nothing gets shown. As a test of this, I searched on Google Images a license plate with a particular number that is in my web store on my business website, another marketplace and here on eBay. The picture came up from my web store and the other marketplace, but the one on eBay just is not there.

Something else I was thinking about are products like oil filters. Do a search on ebay for  "ACDelco PF52 oil filter" in all of eBay Motors and thousands of listings pop up which include other brands like Fram and Wix that interchange. Still reducing the search to the ACDelco brand nets over 800 listings of the same filter. Now if I have the filter in my listing at a wholesale price as an example $6.00, that's pretty much going to be in the middle of most other listings between $4 and $8. And if that listing is a 30 day fixed price listing, I highly doubt anyone is going to browse through those 800 listings to see who has the better deal. Browsing might occur in the first couple of days the listing is posted and within the last 2 days before the listing ends. That means that between days 3 through 28, you're dead in the water. Same thing on a search between highest and lowest price. So now begs the question, "Why compete with the sellers of the other 800 listings which include ACDelco distributors and wholesalers as well as many GM dealers?" The sellers that have that filter for $4 are pretty much the same people as I buy my filters from.

After thinking about these things and playing out different scenarios, I'm convinced that when it comes to selling on eBay, you pretty much have to have items that many people don't have, chomping at the bit to have or is just impossible to find anywhere else. And with every ebay seller without a store getting 500 listings on a promotion where I'm paying $24.95 each month in a store, it suddenly feels I'm getting ripped off when you have a 2 week period with only 4 sales over the weekend in between. And I won't go into the eBay ads cutting in the NASCAR races where advertise THEIR inventory. Sorry but it sounds like eBay needs to perform a "refresh" on their entire concept.

[timemachine777]

When I line up all my 90 day traffic charts from back in Mar of 2014 to present. My charts of page views from outside eBay all have a slow but steady decline over the last two plus years on all my accounts. This account for instance starts out with a steady range of 25 to 50 page views from outside eBay back in Mar of 2014.

Then as my inventory increased by 25 to 50 items each month that range didn't go up with the listing inventory increasing from 50 items a month to 550 items per month, it stayed flat. Then around Jan of 2015 It shows the decline which is gradual. Now I'm down to 0 to 2 page views per day on about 250 active listings.

I tried every thing to get those numbers too increase. I also started to submit my eBay store and item URL's directly to Google and the other search engines myself. Nothing helps raise those numbers back to 25 to 50 per day. I went from 120 to 140 sales per 90 day time frame to about 20 to 30. That's a huge drop also. The more page views that I got outside of eBay, the more sales I got.

The most interesting fact is that my within eBay page views have not change that much over the past 3 years. So that's pretty weird that the outside views dropped off so badly.

[dhbookds]

---

@tiramisu41 wrote:

---

@dhbookds wrote:

Can you tell us exactly what they said?

In years past, when listing counts would vary if one refreshed a sellers listing page......Ebay would do something (after a lot of reports).....  I never heard it called "refreshing your store".....  but a store was where it would be noticed.......

---

@dhbookds - Probably because a spider (more commonly known as a "webcrawler" or "bot"),  is a program that visits websites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index.

That's how after you list a new item on eBay you'll see (or should see) at least one view on each of your listings when you look at your Active Listing status page.   If the OP's stats showed a lot of items with zero views, that means for whatever reason his/her items (or the entire store) was/were being ignored or skipped over by the bots that help create the index for eBay's search engine which in turn would mean it would be impossible to find his/her items via search.

"Refreshing" the store/listings is just a fancy geek-term to describe what your boss does when you've fallen asleep at your desk at work.  

He/she gives you a good poke and tells you to get back to work.   Only difference is, at eBay, no one ever seems to get fired for falling alseep at the wheel.  

---

@tiramisu41  Thanks for the info!!!!  Haven't heard the term "spider" in years, but makes perfect sense........

[papermoneyforme]

paragraphs please

[mrflintstones]

WatZ a Paragraphy?

[honestabe411]

Not trying to bring up and old thread, but figured I'd do this instead of starting a repetitive thread like you see so much on here. 

I acrually just called eBay asking what's up with the slow sales, and to check out my account...and the rep said the SAME thing. He said he was 'refreshing' my listings..very interesting. We shall see..

[designerrose]

I have asked ebay to refresh my store about 5 times or so over the years and while it was dead for a week or so, I did see results from it each time. I just asked them to do this tonight so we'll see what happens. At this point, sales can't get any worse. I have been on ebay for 20 years! Yes! and have jumped through every hoop imaginable just to stay alive. My sales have been down 75% since their new policies went into place and getting very worried about the future.....

I JUST saw this and wanted to share. It seems legit to me. Hope it helps you. (This is NOT Me)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_wCtCavK_0

Good luck everyone~

[jewels4veteranshavasu]

Our store had super sales this time last year. This year zip.

Most of  our Non-profit Veterans eBay store is on sale or max promoted (twice other listings) Still Zip.

Listed a couple of things on another platform and they sold right away.

Called eBay and they gave me the old algorithm and re-fresh  story.

Seriously looking at other selling platforms.

The Veterans depend on this eBay store for so much; Medical equipment, car repairs and keeping a roof over the equipment/clothes and supplies that are purely set aside for our homeless heroes.

I hope things pick up on eBay, but if not, at least there are other avenues.