Since November 21, 2019 - Have your sales dropped? Any other issues?

[whitezoner]

Many of us have experienced a significant drop in sales along with other technical issues which began around November 21st. Please share your experience and any solutions you may have found. Thank you!

[mam98031]

What technical issues do you feel you are having?

Speaking for myself only.  Other than search engine issues, I'm not experiencing any technical issues and my sales have not dropped starting on or around Nov. 21st.  They aren't what I'd like to see this time of year, but the are OK.

[whitezoner]

I discovered that all of my listings have dropped the Fast N Free logo (about 2 weeks ago) and are now showing 7-10 day estimated delivery times regardless of location. All of my listings have a 1 day handling time and my shipping history is perfect. Ironically, the listings with expedited shipping are the ones showing a 10 day shipping time. This has caused a vast reduction in sales as nobody wants to wait 10 days for their items to arrive. Went from 5-15 orders per day to as little as zero sales per day. Several calls to customer service and it still isn't fixed. They say it is a "very rare glitch" and that they are working to resolve the problem. I have since adjusted nearly all listings to standard shipping in order to reduce the estimated shipping time by 1 day.

Update:

The problem with the excessive estimated shipping times began on November 22nd. While on the phone today with a rep, I reviewed estimated shipping times on past sales and found that everything was normal through November 21st. As a last effort to resolve the issue, they reset our listings today. Shortly after resetting the listings, about half of them were showing normal estimated delivery times and regained the "Fast N Free" logo. It's been a few hours now and all of the listings with expedited shipping have reverted back to excessive estimated arrival dates. Various listings with "standard" shipping are still showing "Fast N Free".  There are obvious tech problems and it appears that they originated sometime on November 21st. 

[luckythewinner]

Re: Since November 21, 2019 - Have your sales dropped? Any other issues?

"No" and "None". 

[mam98031 · Accepted solution]

Sorry to hear you are experiencing that.  It sounds like you are on your way of having it fixed but have a ways to go yet.  And I see the problem too.  I looked at a couple listings one told me the ETA is Dec. 11th and the other said Fast N Free and Guaranteed by Dec. 9th.

I'd call again and see if they can figure out how to get the rest of your listings fixed.  I wish you good luck.

FYI, when calling the call center, you are sometimes given the option to have them call you.  Take that option.  They usually call in less than 5 minutes and I have much better luck in getting a US CSR.

[laurabeardsley]

My sales are almost non existent now. Also everyday I try to do something here ,I run into another glitch. Why can't they get this site running correctly like they used to be able to do? Everything seems to falling apart on 
Ebay and I see no effort on their part to reverse this.

[chdmed]

Sales have been on a steady decline beginning of 2019. We are almost at no sales and down over 70% from last year.

[doubledz-a2z]

I randomly clicked on the scissors listing and when you keep revising a listing it takes awhile to cycle back into place.   This time of year there are ALOT of buying choices out there both online and stores, FB, CL.   It isn't as easy to SELL as it was in years past.   Maybe the items you have numberous watchers on you could lower the price a buck or so.  

[mam98031]

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@chdmed wrote:

Sales have been on a steady decline beginning of 2019. We are almost at no sales and down over 70% from last year.

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My sales have shown a different trend.  2013 was a very good year, 1st quarter of 2014 was terrific too, then in the 2nd quarter things feel off dramatically.  2015 was a horrible year, 2016 things got a little better, 2017 a little better than the year before, 2018 again a bit better than the year before, and now 2019 a bit better than 2018.  

I'm not sharing this to make your position seem any less important, because the lack of sales is a very serious issue.  I share this so that you know that there are many that are experiencing what you are and others that are not.  It is always a mixed bag here on Ebay.  I don't have any answers as to why, just some guesses.  But they won't help you to increase your sales.  

With that said, unless you have another selling account, I'm unsure were you are getting your stats from.  You have one FB as a seller from over a year ago, so it appears that you just returned to selling.

[zamo-zuan]

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@whitezoner wrote:

Many of us have experienced a significant drop in sales along with other technical issues which began around November 21st. Please share your experience and any solutions you may have found. Thank you!

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Sales usually slow down for Thanksgiving and then recover.

This year if we look at the graphs alone, it seems that the recovery is happening slower than usual. 

But Monday I seen some signs that may have indicated a change in the algorithms, and doing a bit more research, it seems amount of items sold is not so abnormal, but the cost of items sold has significantly changed as of Monday.

It's still early to tell, but based on discussions with some other sellers, I suspect that "ASP" (average selling price) may have been rebalanced in the algorithm, as for a few months prior to Thanksgiving, it seemed to heavily favor items that were $100 and up. Now it's favoring cheaper items suddenly.

Regarding issues... 2 major ones I'm very upset with at the moment.

1) Vehicle Fitment charts are bugged, and this has been reported for months, but we're suddenly finding more and more listings with this issue.

Long story short, let's say I'm selling an item for 2004-2007 Honda Civic 2.0L. All those vehicles are showing up in our fitment chart. Customer comes to buy the item, puts that vehicle in the fitment chart: eBay is telling them "THIS ITEM IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH YOUR VEHICLE"! I have posted examples that could be reproduced on the Motors forum.

This is a MAJOR issue! First off, we're certainly losing sales from this, as customers are being told our items don't fit their car!

Second, it's hurting our VISIBILITY as many sellers SEARCH by vehicle. And we're not matching. So we're losing impressions and clicks. As with any case, any time you lose visibility, this is also hurting your search placement! 

I even tried contacting a Sr Manager regarding these issues and still no response. 

2) We discovered issues with our items not appearing properly in Puerto Rico a couple weeks back. PR is setup properly in our shipping settings, but it is NOT showing up in our listings! 

If we try the "Apply All" option in our Shipping Settings, it errors and says try again later.

We've set it in the individual listing, and it doesn't do anything.

In the Shipping setting of our listing, it doesn't show PR on "excluded", but doesn't show us on "included" either.

I thought it was odd, though, that we still get daily orders from PR. When I looked in to it further, I found the most disturbing part of this issue: All of our sales are through promoted listings and we don't seem to be showing up properly in PR outside of promotions!

Doesn't seem there's anything we can do about these issues, but it's so frustrating as we have to sit aside and watch as these things hurt our business.

[mam98031]

The OP is well on their way of having their problem resolved.

I'm sorry to hear you are having more problems.

[whitezoner]

After many calls to customer service amounting to numerous wasted hours, the excessive delivery times problem still isn't resolved. I gave up on customer service and tried a few adjustments on my own. I created 2 brand new shipping policies. One policy for Priority and one for First Class with same day handling on both. I also omitted international shipping from both policies. Then I reassigned all listings to the corresponding new policies and deleted all of the old shipping policies. Within an hour all of my listings were back to "Fast N Free".  However, the expedited listings soon reverted back to long estimated delivery times while the First Class listings remained "Fast N Free." I then moved all listings to the First Class policy. It still isn't right, but at least all of my listings now show "Fast N Free" 

[mam98031]

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@whitezoner wrote:

After many calls to customer service amounting to numerous wasted hours, the excessive delivery times problem still isn't resolved. I gave up on customer service and tried a few adjustments on my own. I created 2 brand new shipping policies. One policy for Priority and one for First Class with same day handling on both. I also omitted international shipping from both policies. Then I reassigned all listings to the corresponding new policies and deleted all of the old shipping policies. Within an hour all of my listings were back to "Fast N Free".  However, the expedited listings soon reverted back to long estimated delivery times while the First Class listings remained "Fast N Free." I then moved all listings to the First Class policy. It still isn't right, but at least all of my listings now show "Fast N Free" 

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What a mess and what a whole lot of work for you.  I'd tag this thread, but I don't think it would do any good.

If you use social media, I would suggest you post on Facebook.  I've heard good things about the CSRs there, maybe that would help.  Heck you could just copy and paste the above paragraph with maybe a little editing and see what they say to you.

I am deeply sorry you are experiencing this.  It has got to be beyond frustrating for you.

https://twitter.com/askebay?lang=en

https://www.facebook.com/eBayForBusiness/

It's important to be aware of where you post a question on Ebay’s Facebook page.  A comment on one of Ebay’s marketing posts won't be answered, but comments posted directly on Ebay’s page will.

[tauste-l3w1hspx]

We have three stores and two of them-have not had any sales in a few days. The other one slowed down drastically. It usually sale 6-10 daily to 10 items for the week. This started in November and is still going on 12/5/19

[hlmacdon]

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@zamo-zuan wrote:

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2) We discovered issues with our items not appearing properly in Puerto Rico a couple weeks back. PR is setup properly in our shipping settings, but it is NOT showing up in our listings! 

Puerto Rico is setup both as a separate international country and within the United States geozone in eBay's database. I've had some issues with that breaking certain ebay features. Of the top of my head it caused issues with listing visibility as well as breaking any updates to exclude shipping locations unless both were set to the same status, ie both active (ie US and PR enabled).