Selling prices seem about half of 2022's prices

[fineanvintage]

I just had to do a double take of my 2022 sales, and what I've been feeling was confirmed. I compared some items that sold in early 22 to selling prices today. About 1/2 pretty consistently. Pre-owned clothing. Can this ever turn around? Americans are suffering. I know I am. A Patagonia better sweater I recently sold at half of what it would have sold for in '22. Sales prices just keep dropping, I noticed these drops started  a few years ago. 

[mam98031]

I am sorry to hear this.  As a seller that would be a bit tough to deal with.  I think you will find you will mixed responses from sellers of different items and maybe even from the category you sell in.

For me, my prices are a little higher than they were in 2022 if for no other reason than the increase is shipping costs.

[fashunu4eeuh]

I wonder if one of the main reasons for the price disparity you noted was from the pandemic surge of online sales. The number of users jumped dramatically over the course of the epidemic, driving prices higher from 2020 to 2022.

But eBay was not able to retain the numbers once the momentum began to fade. As the pandemic waned, we lost those new users. Sadly, now we have even fewer buyers than we did prior to the surge.

So sales went up, and now they are down.

(The data to support my numbers can be found at “eBay Revenue and Usage Statistics (2024)”. There are breakout charts and graphs as well, link below.) 

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/ebay-statistics/

[gurlcat]

Since this is not your seller account I can't take a look and answer these questions for myself. 

Do you sell new or used items?  -If used, how are you able to compare item-to-item, when they couldn't be identical in all aspects (or that would be incredibly rare anyway)? 

In terms of how much the items sold for, how was their sale amount determined?  By you (Buy It Now listings) or by auction bidders?  -If you sell primarily or entirely by auctions, that would be a huge factor.  Since eBay is rolling out payment pre-authorization for buyers, they're dropping out of the game like flies.   And that's even if the seller (like myself) has the requirement switched OFF in seller preferences.  -Problem is buyers can't tell which seller has it or not; the only way to tell is to try to bid, which they don't want to do if their intention is to snipe ...... and anyway for a lot of them, if they got stopped by it once, they ignorantly assume it's the same for all auctions, so they won't even bother trying anymore.  

Long explanation short, it's bound to be the death of auctions on eBay, period.  Even if (some) buyers won't mind taking a chance over and over, the loss of bidders will bring down winning bids so much sellers won't want to risk their stuff selling for too low anymore.  -I already experienced it and I'm not usually one for taking my toys and bouncing, but I just cannot afford the risk  of that mess.  I'm rethinking everything now, and it's hard because auctions used be HALF my annual revenue, even though they were only about 5% of my listings (the rest being BIN).