Slowdown

[ae-auto-parts-llc]

Is anyone else's eBay sales chart go all the way down? I used to make at least 1500-2000 a day and now barely making 300-600 this is the 3rd day that it's like this and eBay can't provide any answers I'm posting every day nonstop have a sale and promoting my listings with no cap. my store is at a 100 percent no defects or any negative reviews. I just don't understand what the issue can be. Any idea?

[dbfolks166mt]

Seems kind of like an economy issue. My sales are down from pandemic levels but to be fair I sell things people don't need  but rather want and people are short of cash now and not buying as much. I've seen it before, I expect it will get better but it will happen again. Shopped at a Sears or K-Mart lately? Retail is retail.

No but I shop at Target, Wal-Mart, Hone Depot, Lowes and a number of other retail stores on a weekly basis. I also order items from Amazon about once a month. 

[domin-tomas]

So far I made about 25% of what I used make at this time back 3 years ago. Thank god for my web site and other platforms to sell or I would be bankrupt.

[domin-tomas]

My sales have been on a decline for years now. Every year I would put more up more items  and sales would be in decline. Now that the economy is so, so ebay is showing there problems while other platforms are still selling. I have sold more on smaller platforms then on here, that's saying something. I came on ebay to sell hoping that they would be my success story. I still hope for it but not holding my breath.

[baantiques]

Plus many if not most of the items I have are rare/hard to find.  That doesn't mean they will sell, there also might be low demand, but it's not like there is a lot of comparison to be done when I'm the only one who has one for sale.   I do vet all my items with some basic research before listing, so I'm not listing dead things usually.  

I have been doing some more poking around, I noticed that 2/3 of my listings were set for Paypal as the preferred method, so I fixed that.  Not expecting much but you never know.   Also trying to fix a good number of listings that are set for 15 day handling rather than my normal 3.  Can't figure out how to do it in bulk and Inkfrog isn't carrying the change over automatically.

I'm trying.  Hopefully I'll get this straightened out soon.  I've got enough savings built up to last 6 months if I'm careful with it so I have some time. 

[norskmediashop]

dead flat, the negative red numbers are all over the account, and we got an email from ebay saying were about to lose top rated status because of lack of sales,,,(so nice of them),,,,,despite all the complaints about ebays search we ran some tests with it and things appear to be coming up okay....but I think its Google, tried on 3 different friends phones and there was no google connection to the internet, but connections worked find if you didnt use google. Could that be it? if google is down or out...then this seems to be the culprit......anyone have any info how all that works? other platforms today seem turned off too and its usually just ebay thats off. theres something going on,,not the economy. 

[herway]

Yes, I had a big slowdown, started on the 22nd of October. I have been doing quite well up until then. Sales are down about around 50% for me. 

I just started selling on 2 other sites as well, results are poor there too.

I am giving it one more week to turn around and then I am going to sign up to be a personal shopper on one of the app. I have no choice....bills must be paid. Sad.

[baantiques]

OK, so I did a couple of things today.  I did a bunk edit of everything and noticed that I had some issues with my shipping policies which I think I've fixed.  I also noticed that my payment was set to Paypal on about 2/3 of my listings so I changed that to managed payments.  I never noticed that because I've always gotten paid through managed payments.  

I don't know if this is connected to that but I sold $175 today, which more than doubled my sales for the week.  It's a start.  I took a look at my impressions/views for today compared to yesterday and my impressions on large number of items went up and the click through rate also went up.  Too early to tell if it was a result of the changes I made but I'm going to keep working on improving things based on the listings quality report.  Encouraging results so far.

[the-hook-and-the-loop]

You haven't heard?

Ebay died of self-inflicted wounds.

[baantiques]

Another update, I was looking over the data again, this time sales data for the month of October.   I compared the first half to the second half.  I found a couple of interesting things.  Sales overall were down 55% between the first and second halves of the month.  Promoted listings were down 72%.  Best offer sales initiated by me and auctions were both down 100%. So no seller initiated offers and no auction sales since the sales drop.   I checked and I do have best offer on most of my listings.   Auctions are usually 10-20% of my sales, so that's pretty significant.   The other thing I noticed is that while the total number of buyers is only down 10%, the average price per item sold is down 40%.  

So, I would say this points toward people are simply not spending as much.  I have noticed that more people are sending dumb lowball offers these days. I would also say that maybe I'm not getting as much exposure with PL as I was getting before.   

[baantiques]

I don't know about you guys, but the last five days have been improving steadily.  I have no idea what, if any, effect all the things I did had on that. 

For 10/27-10/31:

Sales up 163%

Net sales up 272%

Average sale amount up 50%

Views up 45%

Impressions up 117%

Numbers look impressive, but I'm still down over 30% on views and over 50% on sales compared to the first half of the month, and while views and impressions this month are down only 13% compared to last month, sales are still down 50%.

A lot of ground to cover yet. 

[reallynicestamps]

Three days isn't useful as a comp.

How were your sales in October 2019? October 2018?

The pandemic surge in online buying make 2020 and 2021 difficult to use as comps.

You can compare apples and oranges, they are both fruit, may contain seeds, supply Vitamin C, but it would be more accurate to compare Granny Smiths with Macintosh' or Fujis.

[baantiques]

Beats sitting around wringing your hands and crying.

I'm just sharing what I'm doing to try to get through this,  If you aren't interested, just keep scrollin'

[snoopwiz]

Nothing more than the ebb and flow of retail.  Your sales seem to be back in full swing after the day or so lull. Congrats, you are rockin it. 

[baantiques]

So far so good.  Too early to celebrate just yet, but at the very least I have some motivation now.  I've made some improvements to my listing process.  I think I was getting a little lazy before.  I guess something like this is good for a little introspection.  Still down over 40% from the previous 30 day period but that's a lot better than 95%.

I'm still way off from where I'd like to be.  Even so far this year I'm only just barely making enough to cover selling and living expenses with nothing left to put back into new inventory.   From where I am at now that's a pretty big hill to climb.

But I dunno, if anyone is reading my posts and trying things, let's compare notes.

[baantiques]

Things are continuing to improve.  In addition to all the adjustments to my existing listings, I've added a bunch of new stuff, increasing my existing listings from 700 to over 900.  I also changed my PL campaign to the sliding scale suggested rate with a maximum cap.  In the last 3 days, views have tripled from what they were 30 days ago.  Sales are way up, but still down 20% over the first half of October and 35% over the previous 31 day period.  Thats better than 95%.