I can tell you exactly what is going on, the Spring Seller update. The same thing will occur in the fall also for that update. It's a twice annual destructive occurrence at Ebay. You can literally mark your calendar twice a year for the month before and the month after seller updates when you will see a downturn in traffic, sales, feedback, everything. It has happened twice a year, every year, since they changed the way the do the update.
Ebay used to do updates on a back up of the site. They would implement all the changes, test for bugs, beta test and then go live and the disruption would be minimal. Now they do everything live without notice for at least a month before the actual update's scheduled release. Then it takes at least a month after the release date for them to fix all of the bugs. This is a big reason why sales and traffic drop.
Sadly the cabal that runs Ebay is completely disconnected from reality or they would look at changing this process. It is the definition of insanity because they keep doing these updates over and over expecting big things and the exact opposite happens. Even after they do these updates, just go back after a few months and look at what the listed changes were and see how many were eliminated after a few months. They end up getting rid of quite a few of the changes that disrupted service to "improve" the site, but those changes turn out to be worthless and useless. Basically they are just wasting time, money and resources at the expense of users.
One of the major problems is the fact that people running Ebay are the wrong people to run Ebay. Look at their backgrounds, the overhwhelming majority are Wall Street and Silicon Valley cronies. It's like a plumbing company hiring florists to run their business, it doesn't work because they don't know the first thing about running a plumbing contracting business. Just take a minute and look who the executives and board members are. Not a single one has any background outside of Ebay in retail, retail marketing or online marketplaces, NOT ONE. The majority come from banking, Hollywood, D.C. politics and Silicon Valley (again, none with retail or online marketplace backgrounds). If any one of them had to spend a month as a seller, they wouldn't survive a week. If you took away their resources, made them start from scratch with a very small budget, they couldn't do it. Not one has ever stood behind a cash register, not one has every worked in a warehouse, not one has ever worked at a small business, especially a small retail business.
Another reason sales are terrible is the way Ebay is run, with horrid structure. I just got off the phone with customer service to report a reoccurring problem with Best Offer. If you try to update a price and adjust the Best Offer auto accept and decline prices, the listing is changed from an update to a new listing and fees are added. I reported this on April 22nd, reported it again last night and today again. The response was that they are working on it and it would take 20 DAYS to fix that miniscule problem. TWENTY DAYS. This tells you everything you need to know about Ebay, how it is run and the people they employ. No accountability, no urgency, no qualified developers or management and absolutely no vision or understanding of how things operate day to day on the site. It's actually impressive Ebay has managed to stay relevant for this long based on who they hire, how they run the site and who is making the decisions. The one thing they all seem to be completely oblivious to is the fact that without sellers, Ebay does not exist, they do not have jobs and that it is us, the sellers who pay their salaries. Even though that fact is reality, they continue to completely ignore us and couldn't care what we think or the ideas we have for improving the site. We have vast and wide ranging experiences as sellers, which are astronomically more than they will ever know in their San Jose echo chamber. Instead of communicating with us, they look down at us a second class citizens of sorts.
