It's bad. I've been maintaining sales somewhat this year, up until two weeks ago. Sales just crashed. I'm down over 90% from this time last month, and 95% over this same week last year. Last 30 days is down 45% over the previous 30 day period.
I've tried listing new things, culling old inventory, ending and selling similar, promoted listings, sales, redoing listings with new pictures, etc, everything I can think of that's worked in the past, and NOTHING has any effect. Sales just keep dropping. I cleared less than $100 this week. I see no sign this is going to turn around soon.
I figured it had to do with changes to the site that have had unintended consequences . This has happened before. I did some poking around in the traffic data to see what I could find. I'm not finished but the results so far are interesting. Over the same time periods as above, views are only down 20% generally. That means people are still clicking on my listings but are not buying. So the trick is to figure out why. If it were the economy I would expect to have seen a gradual decline but this was a crash, literally overnight. This points to something that may be allowing people to view but not purchase. Broken checkout or shopping cart? Buyers being directed elsewhere before they can purchase? I don't know. I'll keep poking around and report back with what I find. There is definitely something abnormal going on here.
There are simply too many factors to pinpoint one single cause but if you are looking at it strictly from an eBay optic I would tend to agree something is amiss based on a lot of postings on this forum. EBay's history of changes and "unintended consequences" has been long and distinguished. You sell in an area that is generally not impacted too much by the economy automotive parts are almost a need rather than a want. The one things that the pandemic resulted in was an explosion in the number of ecommerce sites and I believe buyers are doing a LOT more comparative shopping around than they used to. In addition people are returning to the B&M stores after the pandemic something Wall Street predicted awhile back.
As I mentioned my eBay sales have dropped considerably but my aggregate sales are remaining pretty constant across the multiple sites and forums I list on. It will be interesting to see eBay's 3rd quarter report which I believe is due to be released on 10 November. The last two quarterly reports showed declines in almost all important areas including GMV, active buyers and sellers.
I seldom shop on eBay these days simply because I can find the items cheaper elsewhere. I have placed several international orders for items out of western Europe that were 20-30% cheaper than what I could obtain them for on eBay even factoring in the shipping and the currency exchange fees and the delivery times have only been a few days longer than what domestic orders would have been.
