Sudden drop in sales May 2022

[partfinds]

Please, report here if you recently within a week or so experienced sudden drop in sales. We can then ask Velvet to pass it on to technical team for review of the accounts. https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Updates-are-happening-to-some-item-specifics-and-category/m-p/...

[nuclearomen]

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@lawnmowerpartsstore2 wrote:

I wonder what the next update has in store for sellers ?

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whatever it does, there will be dread 

[bitbeat]

my sales report shows my sales down 42% for the last 30 days. something screwy goin' on.

[paraquip]

This is the longest running page about sudden drop in ebay sales....so I'm going to stick to it.

It seems that I am approaching the bottom of my sales loss since July 1 2002...the net sales loss I am looking at is 54%....sales have improved somewhat which is why it's only 54% down.......if I looked at August sales I was down as much as 90%

That being said......I have had 2 $1000+ sales days since July 1.   So that average is 97% down  over/under $1000 in sales.

I'm trying to unpack this with solid metrics....... Ebay advertising down 26%, 12% Q2 Seller loss, 54M less buyers in Q2, slowing economy, ebay code errors.   Q3 as far as I can see will be much worse. Walmart has now exceeded Ebay in terms of traffic, Etsy is closing in on Ebay in terms of website traffic (let that sink in).  Sellers are trying out other platforns and website specific classifieds are starting to grow again.

Ebay has suffered a large integrity loss with both sellers and buyers. Their 3rd party support people make a habit out of telling you bald face lies and things they are going to do that simply never happen.

IMHO the way the My Space was taken over by Facebook....I do believe that ebay will be overtaken by a huge rash of boutique selling platforms similar to Etsy, Poshmark etc etc.

Lastly the biggest management mistake that Ebay made was trying to be like amazon.  What they did not realize is that the Amazon business model is "Logistics" not so much "product sales"

HK

[ci1000]

Factoring in the economy, seasonal buying, eBay's loss of sellers, eBay's bad quarterly reports, eBay wanting to be like Amazon, Etsy wanting to be like eBay or Amazon or anything that would work to bring up their sales (I also sell on Etsy) and the downfall of eBay which has been predicted for the past 12 years.

I don't think eBay wants to be a boutique selling venue like Etsy or Posh-mark.  Sorry... that just doesn't make sense as a viable business model.

So, my BIG question is WHY did May, June and July go from bad to worse in comparison to my normal selling model?  and then WHY did I have a normal month of sales for August?  WHY in comparison to August of 2021 are my sales for August of 2022 up?

WHY are my September sales back in the tank now?  What has changed that would affect all of the above? That is the question!!

There is something wrong with eBay that is systemic and they need to fix it NOW!

[paraquip]

Honestly Ebay does play in the Boutique game you would just never really know it.

Etsy owns a company called Reverb that trades music equipment and classic guitars...... Ebay used to be the king of that category until Reverb came along..... few selling fees, exclusively US tech support, and equitable dispute process and basically took what what everybody was complaining about ebay and fixed it.

Ebay only charges I believe 6% for guitars now based on the epic spanking Reverb put on them and they never recovered that category no matter how hard they tried.    This is where a lot of the competitive traffic to Ebay comes from.

There are quite a few platforms that are fixing what is wrong with ebay and pounding that category.

For the category that I sell in......if gunbroker were to get their act together they would put serious hurting on Ebay's sporting good category which also drives a lot of traffic to Ebay

I'm not really calling Ebay's demise but at some point the platform will become less relevant.   Certainly Facebook Marketplace and Offer Up have put a near end to Ebay's local sales (another missed opportunity by Ebay).

Yes there is something wrong with Ebay that is systemic......certainly in the way the coding of the website is/was done that's affecting sales in a major way.   But a large contributor to the problem is the flat out denial of the problem....... admitting there is an issue is the first step to recovery.....they have not hit rock bottom yet but it's coming

HK

[nuclearomen]

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@ci1000 wrote:

There is something wrong with eBay that is systemic and they need to fix it NOW!

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been saying this for quite awhile, and i think reason why sales partially return in August is cause they did "fix" something within, but now appears they are ditching again... which leads me to suspect they did something again...maybe for seller update...most of this seems to me to be issues within the PL's mechanics/algorithm's, when they are working right sales come in, many times 2-3-4 right after another, then death rears it's head again.  

[nuclearomen]

well - as for coming seller update - looks like they rolled out another new listing tool and made it mandatory - i cannot opt out now - just saying - another thing ebay has been told endlessly about with complaints but alas, they don't listen.

[ladyindecadence]

They definitely fixed something around the 12th of August  and broke it again about the 1st of September. August is traditionally one of my slowest months. However this year between the 12th and the 1st I sold almost as much as I did in the entire months of May and June combined. Which made August the best month Ive had this year. This is something that has never happened before.  My best months are generally October through May.  This May was the worst month Ive had in 4 years.

[lawnmowerpartsstore2]

Everyday on Ebay is like an Adventure 😄

[nuclearomen]

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@lawnmowerpartsstore2 wrote:

Everyday on Ebay is like an Adventure 😄

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yup...the adventure of grief and misery... starting to think they are just doing it for those very purposes, like they all had huge company meeting and decided best ways to make their sellers miserable. Course it makes no sense, as they in the process loose buyers also...but i guess they were willing to take the gamble. 

[nuclearomen]

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@ladyindecadence wrote:

They definitely fixed something around the 12th of August  and broke it again about the 1st of September. August is traditionally one of my slowest months. However this year between the 12th and the 1st I sold almost as much as I did in the entire months of May and June combined. Which made August the best month Ive had this year. This is something that has never happened before.  My best months are generally October through May.  This May was the worst month Ive had in 4 years.

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indeed they did, it had also helped with site visibility and search results...don't know if that has gone bad again but something was definitely changed in the mechanics of PLs. I did a new campaign and the numbers while aren't hitting exactly where they were Aug, have come up to about 20k now since started new one the other day...still watching it, see what happens through the weekend. 

[ci1000]

Okay, the good news is that I have had a few sales.  Not a lot but at least something.  The bad news is that I have nothing but zeros in my views column and my store is whacked out.  The other weird thing is that watchers fade in and out.  One minute they're there and then their gone and then they come back again. What the heck?

In regards to my store; buyers can no longer search by category... the drop down category list is gone and normally you can go down to the bottom of the opening page and there used to be a bar that said "see all".  That's gone too.

What's going on now!!! 

[gotta-have-it-collectables]

Agreed! Why are OUR Listings not on our pages? We do pay for them with our store, fvf and now PL fees. This does need to be addressed. Thanks

[orlando_artist]

That's a shame. Yes shipping is a bear anymore. What I tend to do with large packages is ship through FedEx. The FedEx discount on ebay are excellent. Find its commonly half of what I'd pay if I took it into FedEx in person. But for small/avg weight and dimensions, I just about always go with USPS. You're thinking about the problem creatively and making it work, even as you're *sigh* breaking up a collectable and complete set to do it. We do what you must.

Even on smalls anymore like a mug that needs to be delicately packed, costs like $12+ on average for Priority, unless you get crafty and learn to get it in a flat rate bubble envelope. And even that's a little over $9 anymore. What, just a couple years back it was still under 8, wasnt it? USPS has a lot of financial issues, typical of gov run anything, but their instance that Increased Volume is a burden and requires higher fees, is ridiculous. They're necessary public service, seeing exceptional and rising growth, and complaining about it. What for profit corporation would see it that way? But I digress. 

I think someone like Amazon should consider branching off into a for-profit nationwide parcel shipper. Show USPS how it's done. USPS complains of Increasing Volume, and requires more money. That's a dumb thing to complain about. I think USPS is a lost cause, and more (private) competition is the answer. But what do I know. 

[orlando_artist]

Why would a behemoth merchant site like Amazon have any part of their for-profit enterprise subsidized? Sure does suck that the world doesn't actually operate on ethics, transparency, reason and accountability etc.