eBay

monstertoybox · ‎11-08-2019

Well, my main problem, as I keep mentioning, is that my sales are in the dumper. They are down by 60% and it is the holiday shopping season, will we be getting our sales rush this year? It is looking more and more like this won't be happening.

Does Ebay want to keep us here, or do they not care? I'm a good seller, don't they want good quality sellers to make their site a great place to shop? How many other sellers are having slow to no sales this season? I see the board full of them. Would love to hear from other sellers about their experiences. If you’re doing well, please share your secrets. If you’re doing poorly please add your voice to this discussion. It does help when you know you aren't alone.

I’m following all their suggestions and more, constantly tweaking and updating, trying to chase down what works here. It is very difficult, when things keep changing. We’re trying to stay at Ebay because we believe this is a great place to sell. We just would love for it to work properly.

I am trying to get my sales kick started by taking some of the great suggestion that a few of the posters have given for Ebay and ended some items, waited a few days and then relisted them using sell similar. I did do the promoted listings again, which I don’t like at all, but I’m afraid that this is a necessary evil after reading what others have said. I listed a bunch of Christmas ornaments and I’ve added more free shipping to more of my listings. Maybe I'll try to list some more stuff today. So hopefully these things will help, whenever the site starts working properly again, that is. Still waiting …

It is hard to stay motivated, when you try everything and nothing seems to help.

I did start selling on another site (and actually got a sale today, yay), but of course I'm new and don't have a seller reputation like I do here on Ebay. I would much rather stick with where I have all my history and with what I am familiar with. It would be great if Ebay would please stop changing things and concentrate on fixing things instead, so we can get back to selling. We just want to love you again Ebay. No hate here, just frustration, major frustration. I would much rather be packing up boxes then writing on this board, believe me.

monstertoybox · ‎11-12-2019

@gamersbaystore wrote:
ebay has always throttled sellers with the use of algorithms. One of the ways they do this is to dump listings that aren't priced the way ebay prefers, and by showing buyers the same identical items from other sellers when viewing listings.

Notice how ebay often often states listings are quote "Underperforming", meaning, they don't like your price and because you aren't willing to give your product away fro free, they will just remove it from search results.

More recently I noticed they are giving the bigger sellers more visibility, while canning the smaller sellers. Sellers with strong track records get more visibility today.

I noticed there are larger game sellers who charge more for shipping and their games are priced higher than mine. Yet, they're selling thousands of games a month, and I'm lucky if I get a few sales at best.

ebay makes it impossible for sellers like myself to compete with the mega sellers who have tens of thousands of feedback.

ebay doesn't want to lose those mega sellers, and its clear they're willing to trash the smaller ones to defend them.

I totally agree with this. How do we compete? The only way is to mark our items down so low we’re paying people to take them. It’s ridiculous and EBay doesn’t care.

I had a good weekend, but then Monday I only had one sale. Please leave my store on or fix whatever is going on. This time of year should be consistent sales for us (the past 9 years has proven this), anything less is manipulation or a broken website.

lostweekendshop · ‎11-12-2019

The throttling thing is overstated. If your item is in-demand/rare, it will be seen. I listed an item that is well-searched for and desired the other night and within a few hours, it had more than 100 views. Some things I listed earlier that day that are way more niche have maybe a couple dozen views days later.

It would be easy for me to say, "Look, eBay is throttling those listings, they have so few views!" But the reality is, they're simply not as popular and are very much of the "needs the right buyer" sort of widgets.

monstertoybox · ‎11-12-2019

Where I have a problem with discounting the throttling is, how can one day your items are in great demand and the next not in demand. Doesn't add up. Especially at this time of year. I can't prove it, but you can't prove it's not happening, so what we are saying, is all opinion. You can definitely say you don't feel the same as the way I do, but you can't definitively say "it's not manipulation or problems."

hilandview · ‎11-12-2019

Why are sales slower? two words SALES TAX
buyers have not gotten used to paying this on ebay sales, unexpected 4-8% added onto every price, gonna take a while for folks to accept this!

nilis13 · ‎11-12-2019

I have no idea what is going on - as I mentioned previously, my sales have never ever been so bad - if it's visibility then my items do not seem to be visible at all... I am at a complete loss as to what has happened - sales tax I feel is not an issue - buyers buy from all sites, including myself and I have been paying sales tax all along and do not find an issue with paying taxes - I have to pay at brick and mortar stores also - I call cs and they insist nothing is wrong 😞

nuclearomen · ‎11-12-2019

@hilandview wrote:
Why are sales slower? two words SALES TAX
buyers have not gotten used to paying this on ebay sales, unexpected 4-8% added onto every price, gonna take a while for folks to accept this!

no that's not why sales are slow, silly to even blame sales tax which is a tiny portion of cost to buyers. If that was the case I wouldn't have had sold items priced at $100-$150-$310 etc... in the past few weeks and that's nothing compared to what others I know have sold items for 1K and up. It's been made obviously clear many many times why sales are slow and that is between tons of ebay site issues and ebay hiding and showing listings at their leisure. When you buy things online Sales Tax have been collected for years by many sites and many sellers including ebay sellers. When you buy something off line in person your charged sales tax...no one is not going to purchase something because tax is charged, sorry, that's just ridiculous.

The great truth is there isn't one
And it only gets worse since that conclusion...
...There is something about the rigid posture of a proper, authentic blind
As if extended arms reached to pass his blindness onto others.

monstertoybox · ‎11-12-2019

I'm not sure that sales tax has too much to do with the slow sales. Every website I shop on now adds in sales tax. True, they might be used to Ebay not having it, but if they shop online for other stuff they should know it's a necessary evil.

I think if someone wants something, and they are able to find it (that's key), the small amount added for sales tax is not going to deter them from buying it (at least it wouldn't deter me). Especially if they're going to have to pay the sales tax no matter where the shop now.

pink.fish.rule · ‎11-12-2019

Exactly,
Hard to avoid it these days.

myoasisjewels · ‎11-12-2019

what deters me as a buyer from shopping on ebay is knowing how much of the money i pay for an item is going into ebays pocket..... the voice in the back of my mind always tells me to go look and find it cheaper elsewhere....

nuclearomen · ‎11-12-2019

@myoasisjewels wrote:
what deters me as a buyer from shopping on ebay is knowing how much of the money i pay for an item is going into ebays pocket..... the voice in the back of my mind always tells me to go look and find it cheaper elsewhere....

where? Amazon, you do know Amazon takes more money from their sellers then ebay does? True, and not saying your wrong, ebay / PP take their chunks of the pie, yet all platforms do as well and yeah, you can go to private company's site and order what you want from them direct... which sure everyone does from some things, I do it myself. It has been said before by many (even me in cases) that ebay should lower some of their sale percentage rates in some categories yet sellers I know on Amazon pay twice as much in some cases, especially if it's a FBA category where they charge you storage fees etc.. so idk... of course there is big difference between ebay and amazon but fee wise, ebay is the better of the two, sales wise amazon clearly moves more product. Issue I have with Amazon is everything comes destroyed like was through nuclear war. I worked for them several years back I can tell you they treat merch like garbage. They store (especially small items) in bins that are over filled and stowers just stuff what they can anywhere cause there is no empty space to put anything, in the process stuff just gets damaged.

The great truth is there isn't one
And it only gets worse since that conclusion...
...There is something about the rigid posture of a proper, authentic blind
As if extended arms reached to pass his blindness onto others.

trueartworx · ‎11-12-2019

Site seems to have lost any sort of direction. More issues appear faster then they fix any of them. They refuse take advice from established sellers to improve the dysfunctions and anti-productive features

Am being spammed daily with their special promos and unhelpful announcements.
They not doing anything yet to bring appeal to holiday sales. If anything they have us all continually fighting to make any profits as promoted trending rates now go up multiple times each day.

They seem to have us all in same trap of trying to expand and improve our listings. wasting so much time for no gains whatsoever. Also noticing more and more, buyers are becoming more needy, messaging multiple times over the smallest of transactions. Eliminating any profit, using our time.

Biggest things forever effecting me is they won't even adjust shipping rates based on variations or allow partial ounce weights on an item that weigh so little, miscalculating shipping on any overseas or paid shipping on multiple items. Combined shipping rules not working as they should either.

Trying to hang in there like the others, but they need step up and give us some incentives to stay. Doing nothing like this, just driving us away from even buying here, let alone selling.

pink.fish.rule · ‎11-12-2019

@nuclearomen wrote:
@myoasisjewels wrote:
what deters me as a buyer from shopping on ebay is knowing how much of the money i pay for an item is going into ebays pocket..... the voice in the back of my mind always tells me to go look and find it cheaper elsewhere....
where? Amazon, you do know Amazon takes more money from their sellers then ebay does? True, and not saying your wrong, ebay / PP take their chunks of the pie, yet all platforms do as well and yeah, you can go to private company's site and order what you want from them direct... which sure everyone does from some things, I do it myself. It has been said before by many (even me in cases) that ebay should lower some of their sale percentage rates in some categories yet sellers I know on Amazon pay twice as much in some cases, especially if it's a FBA category where they charge you storage fees etc.. so idk... of course there is big difference between ebay and amazon but fee wise, ebay is the better of the two, sales wise amazon clearly moves more product. Issue I have with Amazon is everything comes destroyed like was through nuclear war. I worked for them several years back I can tell you they treat merch like garbage. They store (especially small items) in bins that are over filled and stowers just stuff what they can anywhere cause there is no empty space to put anything, in the process stuff just gets damaged.

The worst part of AMZ FBA is that they will stash all 'like items' together, so a seller does't even know that what got sent to the buyer was the item they actually sent in.