Sales down 95% from last year. Completely stumped.

[morah_69]

Forgive me for this long post. I'm just clueless about how to fix my sales. From 2014 to 2017, I averaged 50 sales a day. From Spring 2017 until now, sales began to drop. I'm now at 3 sales a day. The only change that happened was I lost my TRS back in October due to a family situation that caused my shipping performance to suffer (still don't have it back). However, my feedback had always remained at around 99.3% and my score is around 20,000.

I thought I've been doing everything right:

- Free shipping with 1 day handling time
- Images for every model that I offer (usually 10+ in every listing)
- Clear description
- 30 day returns (my return rate is under 1%)
- Converstion rate has been consistently around 4% since 2014.
- All of my listings under Promoted Listings. This has done practically nothing for my sales.

- I've used different pricing for months at a time with no change in results. Currently am one of the cheapest for my products.

The problems I'm noticing are the following:

- My search ranking is TERRIBLE - Had impressions of 30,000 per day from 2014-2017, and then began to sharply decline in the summer of 2017. Currently at 2,500 impressions per day. This is very clearly my biggest problem. I used to be at the very top, and now I'm either at the end of the first page or I don't show at all. I sell specific items customized with popular sport teams, music artists, and just very well known trendy stuff that teenagers flock to these days. Some may say "it may be an extremely saturated market" but that doesn't explain why other sellers with much less feedback and percentage are doing very well and ranking above me. Let me also mention that there are probably about 5 other sellers selling similar items as I am. It has always been like this.

- Fast N Free not showing for most people outside of my state. I'm in Illinois...customers from Michigan do not see the Fast N Free logo which is crazy. It typically takes 2 days to get a package to Michigan. I see sellers in California with a Fast N Free logo using my same shipping method (USPS First Class) so I don't understand what's going on here.

I just don't know where to start to fix this problem. As I mentioned, I feel that the search results are the biggest problem. If Cassini is the issue, where can I learn what needs to be done to increase my ranking?

[dtexley3]

Turn off the promoted listings for a while, see what happens.

Are your listings GTC or 30 day fixed?  GTC listings will drop steadily in the search rankings unless they have a fairly high conversion rate.  I found this made a HUGE difference for me but ymmv.

Right now the #1 thing that **appears** to help is to list "new" items, so try using Sell Similar when relisting expired 30 day fixed.

[lewisburggold]

Were down 50% think the markets just down right now.  But who knows.  Best regards

[tunicaslot]

dt is spot on with his suggestions. I had a sudden drop in sales around the end of Aug / beginning of Sept. I've maintained TRS / TRS+ - do everything except free returns and still haven't gained my placement back.

Instead of promoted listings and changing your prices. Try runnng a markdown sale each week - doesn't matter if you vary it or leave it at 5 - 10%. A lot of people seem to gain more visibility doing that rather than using promoted listings.

[dhbookds]

very hard to give any guesses without seeing products, how many listings, etc.

This makes  me wonder  tho:

Some may say "it may be an extremely saturated market" but that doesn't explain why other sellers with much less feedback and percentage are doing very well and ranking above me.

Are any of those sellers actually selling 30- 50 items a day or do you mean their items are above you in search and that's what may be causing your decline?  If it's a saturated market and interest flags just a bit from customers it could be hurting everyone in some way.......and you more, because you had more of the pie to begin with.......  In other words you may need to add new product lines to regain previous volume. 

I think most long term sellers do have to branch out at some point......because more new sellers come in and popular items become less popular......

[Anonymous]

Having same identical problem.  Sales are dismal and can never find any of my items in searches. One  of my competitors shows the identical  product 20 times ( in different colors) on one search page.  An item that was a high demand sell two years ago has zero hits, but is still  being sold by others.  I have also tried all the improvements which you have and had no results to speak of.  Thought it was just me.

[uncseniorsportsfan]

Seems to me you are putting entirely too much emphasis on feedback, free shipping, promoted listings, returns, pictures, etc.  and not enough emphasis on product demand,  competition, and new items.

I have a store with almost 5000 feedback and TRS status - I also have two other non-store accounts opened over the past year with less than 30 feedback and above standard rating.    Most months I sell as many items with 1/3 the listings in my non-store accounts as in the store account. 

I decided last year that a store was no longer worth the price, now have four accounts - each for different categories of items,  and will close my last store the end of this month.  For most items I offer no returns, 3 day handling, free shipping only on books, two photos at most, and never use markdown manager or promoted listings.  

The one thing I do concentrate on is fresh listings.    My conversion rate averages 6-12% monthly on all but my store account which has been hovering in the 4-5% range.    BUT my conversion rate on items listed for the first time averages closer to 20-25%.    And I've found that certain types of items sell better at certain times of the year, and past sales aren't the best predictor of future sales.

My advice would be to spend more time focusing on your inventory and that of your competition, and pay less attention to what ebay promotes as "doing things right".

[odditiesandantiquities1]

I'm so sorry you are experiencing this. I had my hills and valleys quite a lot over the past year.  Lately things have been picking up. These are a few things that I've tried. I hope they might help.

As mentioned previously, relist using sell similar.

Keywords for the first six words in the title. Main keywords the first two words.

Add extra information in the item specifics. That did wonders for my listings.

Check for inconsistencies. I did notice when I used a template to start a new item, sometimes I'd forget to update a field.

Check that your images on phones are nice and clear. I hate the phone App but people do use it.

Don't overdo information. Give enough to clearly explain the item without going too far.

I leave details about who we are in our business at the bottom of every listing. Just gives the customers a bit more of a sense who they are buying from.

I do hope some of these ideas help you. I know how frustrating it can be.

Ann

[luckythewinner]

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I take every "my items are ranked low in search " story with a great big grain of salt. 

First, there is no such thing as an item being ranked low "in search". Search ranking only applies to a specific search because each search is different - and the results may even vary from one person to another. 

Second, search ranking only affects Best Match searches. There are other searches out there, include the favorite one I use when I am looking for the best price: "Price-Lowest First". That search does not take factors like free shipping, conversion rate, and return policy into account. 

Without a specific example of an item number and the search terms used to find it, these threads generally end up being one great big pile of wild guesses. 

[morah_69]

Thanks for the suggestions. I do currently have most on GTC. After testing back and forth the past year, I didn't see any difference between GTC or 30 day fixed. Any idea if that's something that has changed recently?

The main reason I left it on GTC is because relisting items seems to reset the quantities of the listing to what I originally had it at. Do you know any way of stopping that? It is a huge hassle when having tons of listings and having to go through each one manually and adjusting the quantities before relisting.

I did end a few items and used Sell Similar sometime last week after I kept coming across suggestions like yours, just to see what would happen. So far none of them have gotten any sales and only around 10-15 views on all of those items. I used to sell 5-10 of one of those items daily.

[morah_69]

The part that has me very confused is even if the market is saturated or not, why does a very inexperienced seller places above me every single time when we both sell a similar item? One specific seller started last April, has 1000 feedback at 99.1%, terrible listings (his description is basically just the title again with no additional information), 1 image per listing. I've been doing this since 2014, have 20,000 feedback at 99.3%, had TRS for years, many images, clear description, the list goes on. 

There are a few things I notice about this seller though:

- he has twice as many listings as me, because he runs duplicate listings with different models instead of putting them all in one like I do. I was told by eBay that multivariation listings would benefit more in the search results.

- he keyword spams his titles. For example, "phone case iphone 4 4s 5 5s 6 6s 6s+ plus" etc.

Could those really be the reason he places above me? 

I also want to mention that Chinese sellers put me way down in the search ranking well. My only hope of showing up on the first page is if people use the US Only filter.

[morah_69]

I appreciate your response. I truthfully don't like to put my actual business in forums for several reasons but let me try to clarify.

For my products, searches are usually very generic. For example, if I was selling a painting of Michael Jordan, I'd just search "Michael Jordan painting" since there could be many different types of Michael Jordan paintings. In the past, I'd be at the top or very near the top of the search results with Best Match. Now, nowhere to be found. Instead, a lot of smaller sellers or China sellers rank above me.

I'm very well aware that search rankings are affected only on Best Match. I was a part of the group that was upset when eBay made that change. However, I still did well when they implemented that until now.

Overall, it's clear that the impressions I'm getting are the problem. Literally nothing has changed in my business from 2014 as far as HOW I do business. I offer more and newer versions of the products but thats it. It just makes absolutely no sense why I have been selling 50 per day for years, at around 40,000 impressions per day on average down to where I am now.

Just to give you some quick numbers about when it really began to drop:

March 2017 to June 2017 - 15,000 impressions per day consistently

June 2017 to September 2017 - Immediately dropped to 10,000 at the beginning of June, and linearly decreased down to 2,000 by the end of August and I'm hovering around there now.

[tiramisu41]

---

@morah_69wrote:

There are a few things I notice about this seller though:

- he has twice as many listings as me, because he runs duplicate listings with different models instead of putting them all in one like I do. I was told by eBay that multivariation listings would benefit more in the search results.

- he keyword spams his titles. For example, "phone case iphone 4 4s 5 5s 6 6s 6s+ plus" etc.

Could those really be the reason he places above me? 

---

Well, there certainly is a way to find out, don't you think?

Take a handful of products you have in common with this seller and emulate his listings in terms of title.  Price your item slightly under his even if it's just a nickel.   If he's not using variations within one listing, then separate yours out into separate listings.   Fiddle with your photos so that a different main one appears from what you have been using.   If he does free shipping, you do the same. List the item as a 30-day fixed, not GTC.

GTC's are convenient, but they bury your items in search.  And, to answer your earlier question, yes, it is a PITA to relist using "Sell Similar" as you will have to manually adjust quantity on each listing, but it's a trade off worth making if it helps get your items seen.

Try the above on a handful of items and see what happens.  If it helps, then you'll know what to do.

[dhbookds]

IF GTC's are multiple quantity listings AND have a number of sales, they should rank higher.......if they have few or no sales, they will probably be at the bottom........and should be replaced by a sell similar.

I don't know how anyone can compete on cell phone covers, especially with China Sellers........that pie must really be divided....... also remember that international sellers may be selling more internationally, and that boosts their sales #'s...  I doubt Americans can compete well, with our cost of shipping......but certainly am no expert in the category......

[timzbiz]

I feel your pain. I am down 50% compared to the same period a year ago. 50 PERCENT! I have 25% off on all my listings, plus ebay is offering 15% off today only. That is a total of 40% off and I have not had a single sale. I don't know any business that can survive whatever is happening here on ebay.