eBay

morah_69 · ‎03-20-2018

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?

luckythewinner · ‎03-20-2018

@morah_69wrote:
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.
{snip}
Literally nothing has changed in my business from 2014 as far as HOW I do business.

It sounds like while you were not changing anything, the competition was.

timemachine777 · ‎03-21-2018

@morah_69wrote:
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.

All of 2014 I was selling about 40 to 45 items a month with an avg monthly inventory of 200 items. from 2015 onward my impressions tanked along with my outside eBay page views, and my sales dropped to 1 to 10 sales a month with the same size avg monthly inventory as in 2014.

Even though nothing is changing on your end, eBay is constantly changing things on their end. Many of these changes have negative impacts on some sellers vs others. Nobody knows who will be impacted next. Sellers will come here complaining about issues that might affect only a few other sellers that are posting here at the time, so it's hard to gauge what's happening.

For example; about a year now, many sellers keep complaining about eBay adding best offer to their listings, and they can't get it stopped, while loads of other sellers don't have this problem. I only had it happen once this fall to only one of my four accounts, and never again. Others on the other hand are plagued be it.

grasshopperx · ‎03-21-2018

This happened to us in 2013. Right after a wonderful streak of sales. It actually happened in one days time... it was between may 31st and June 1st the next day. Totally GONZO. I also need to mention this. 100 percent perfect feedback for 17 years, never even had one return. And spend alot on here to for supplies. So there you have it. Then we fiddled with titles, prices anything you could think of. Finally after five years of waiting for ebay to improve, we have decided its not worth it anymore. So I feel betrayed, after being such a good seller here. Could care less now at all. Have no respect for this company. Just seeing it sink down worse and worse by the day.