SLOW SALES!

[mrbriscoe]

🤔

Wow! business is terrible. Anyone out there experiencing the same thing?

[brightlightbookseller]

Nope. Business is booming.

[inhawaii]

Slow sales?

That's the first i've heard of such a thing.

[jgblues]

Yes, Ebay just suddenly died the last two days for me and I didnt make any change, listing and promoting daily

[dbfolks166mt]

     Pretty broad question. On eBay my sales are about the same as last year at this time as far as volume but some categories of items are selling better than others. Sales on my other venues are up considerably by volume, most of those are local forums and venues where I can list the items a bit cheaper, the risk is lower and neither the buyer or I have to worry about shipping issues. 

[inhawaii]

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@jgblues wrote:

Yes, Ebay just suddenly died the last two days for me and I didnt make any change, listing and promoting daily

---

Are you sure ebay died?

Lots of others are still getting sales.

[movieman630]

Yeah, pretty sure something is "broken".

[seibertron]

I've had a huge drop in sales as well. 7,900+ items. Regularly listing items. Revenue is about 1/4th of what it should be at the moment. In an attempt to generate sales, I started a 50% off sale on Monday this past week but sales were abysmal so I canceled the sale this morning since it wasn't driving traffic. I restructured the sale, moved some items around and then started a new sale back up. Something seems incredibly off! I can't help but think that they did something with the recent fall update.

This stuff always scares me, especially after what happened last year. ebay had a major error from July 2023 to February 2024 that I estimate cost me about $40k to $60k in sales during that time. The short story was ebay's promotional shipping tool wasn't working properly. As soon as they finally fixed the error in February, sales immediately bounced back. Last December was my worst month of 2023 instead of it being my best month like it should have been. It really sucked being at the mercy of ebay. Their error really hurt my business. 

The only "glitch" I'm seeing are certain store categories I created do not show in "My ebay" active listings, but I have a work around for it so I haven't called their support team yet to let them know.

[dbfolks166mt]

Yeah, pretty sure something is "broken".

     Maybe that's why eBay released a projected 4th quarter revenue well below Wall Street's expectations. It would not be the first time eBay has had major IT issues that have adversely impacted both buyers and sellers. 

[reallynicestamps]

Are you comparing October to December?

Or October to October.

Just as you can't sell BBQs after Father's Day, there are waves in retail.

And sometimes the number of sales and the value of sales are confused in the mind of the seller.

When we had a shop, DH would fuss when his personal high spender customers didn't turn up for a few days.

I finally started recording each days sales in a paper day book, to show him that his occasional $1000 sale was made up for by 10x $100 sales or 100x$10 sales by other staffers which DH didn't touch.

The Day Book also recorded monthly totals by category and compared those with the previous year.

Gut feelings are fine. But actual data is more useful.

You had 48 sales on Nov. 7 but most were under $3.00.

Over the past three months your average is 32 items a day.

Is the number or the value off?

[sfau]

Nope- November has started out decent!!!

[12345jamesstamps]

I am getting sales from only 'repeat buyers'...not many new buyers...and the new buyers I got this week...LOL..I don't like...'freight forward' to Kazakhstan and Colombia...

Those who promote high or are TRS seem to be getting more exposure.

Listed a few hundred items at all 5% promoted...none sold yet...LOL.

Maybe I'll take the week-end off and just hit the gym...and not list anymore this week.

[seibertron]

Comics and toys are what I sell mostly. November, December and January are our best months generally.

If that is directed to me, the value of items sold was significantly off. Low sale items mostly, but the number of items and orders is also down a bit.

I'm curious how you pulled the data for my averages. Can you share that with me? The number of items you stated above for my per day average is off but I'm curious where that data came from.  Maybe that's the number of orders instead of quantity of items sold? 

From all of my orders, I've sold approximately 6,587 items since August 6th (~95 days ago) , so about 69 or so items a day for an average of about 27 orders per day.

[houseofblair]

Something definitely is off but I have no idea what it would even be.  I have over 18,000 items in my store, list each day, promote, etc.  My sales compared to last year's sales for this month are down 67%.  It's a huge drop and I'm questioning my sanity for even keeping up with this.  I don't really want to change to another sales venue as I have invested years of time and effort into what I have here.  I'm hopeful that things will pick up soon.  I wish the best for sales for everyone.  

[seibertron]

Your post makes me feel better. I work so hard at all of this. Probably 60 to 80 hours a week. When it works, it's great. But when things dramatically drop off over the course of a couple of weeks, it gets concerning. Last year, ebay almost killed my business with their promotions error that took them over 6 months to fix (funny that they fixed it the week after I complained to BBB finally after asking them to fix it for 4 months or so). Things have actually been great this year ... until the past 2 or 3 weeks and now I have that same feeling I had in July 2023 when something felt "wrong" then and it turned out I was right that there was an error on ebay affecting my sales. 

The sanity part you speak to is what I related to. Should I be listing even more inventory than I am right now? Should I just never sleep and work 24 hours a day on our store until sales rebound? Should I be putting things on sale? Am I listing the wrong things? What am I doing wrong? (I'm not looking for anyone to answer these questions for me, just stating things going through my head). Or maybe I'm not doing anything wrong and it's just this platform once again. Or lack of ebay advertising their platform. Or the economy. Or whatever that is out of my control. 

Admittedly, sales are down on AMZ as well for me right now but that is more of a side income and ebay is our primary source of revenue currently. 

Maybe I need to use this time to list our items on WM. Already signed up, just need to start adding things to my catalog there. Or maybe it's time to build my own store module that I've been wanting to do. But I need our revenue stream in order to have time to do that.