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/...

[blacktopautoparts]

I totally agree with you on the PL rates. I have items on my account where the suggested ad rates are in the 10-15% ad rate. I have a hard time believing that some of these items are at those rates. I know that a lot is **bleep** because when you sell 3 of the same items with some kind of variation as lets say color and all 3 have different suggested ad rates you know these numbers are being pulled out of the sky.

[nuclearomen]

---

@lawnmowerpartsstore2 wrote:

If you think about it, Ebay stock price over the last year went from 72.87 a share down to 42.00 as of today. Their going over to their cash cows and saying: you will pay this or your store will fall into the black hole. Thats my opinion looking from the outside in from a Business point of view. In other words: The seller has no choice if they want to make a living on Ebay and Ebay knows it.

---

sure, and when that stock hit like $10 or less a share, that's when we buy, it has to come back up from that point, the board won't let things go much more after that and changes will happen...time to make my $$ back from these clowns. 

[nuclearomen]

---

@blacktopautoparts wrote:

I totally agree with you on the PL rates. I have items on my account where the suggested ad rates are in the 10-15% ad rate. I have a hard time believing that some of these items are at those rates. I know that a lot is **bleep** because when you sell 3 of the same items with some kind of variation as lets say color and all 3 have different suggested ad rates you know these numbers are being pulled out of the sky.

---

@blacktopautoparts Exactly! and they always have been. How items that only one or couple have on ebay, with no past sales history is demanding 8-11% suggested rates??? lol bull! I maybe not genius, but not that dumb! 

[femmefan1946]

About stock prices.

First they have very little to do with the profitability of the company. The GameStop saga showed that to those who did not already know.

Second, there are two ways of making money on stocks.

One is to buy when it goes low and sell when it rises, making your money because the stock is volatile. This is AZ 's stock, which is high value even though the company is losing money again as usual.

The other , which eBay started doing in 2019, is to pay stockholders dividends based on company profits.

And eBay has been profitable every year since 2009 (and earlier but I couldn't find any charts).https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EBAY/ebay/gross-profit

EBay isn't a stock to buy and sell. EBay is a stock to hold and collect your dividends.

What's tricky is that most financial papers don't care if a company is profitable or not. They only want to know if the stock price is up or down because their audience is the guy making a commission on every one of those trades.

It benefits them to print scare stories that drive stock prices up or down, because they make their money on the trades, not on the business.

None of which says that eBay is well-run or a good place to buy and sell or is becoming more profitable as time goes by.  YMMV.

[lawnmowerpartsstore2]

Thanks for the education 🙂

[play.tr]

They doing something about item specifics, I ended some items and re-listed them, on some of them item specifics disappeared only add custom item specific option was there. After reload page they returned to normal. 

[play.tr]

Also suggested ad rates aren't stable. They change very rapidly.

[blacktopautoparts]

I have gone back now to read about 3-4 weeks worth of posts in this thread to get an idea of what has been going on. I noticed that a few people on here mentioned back towards the end of August that their emails from eBay when a sale occurs had changed. This past week, the emails that I receive when an item sells finally changed on my end and though it was something they just implemented this past week. It appears now that this has been ongoing for the last month as they continue to roll out these changes in waves.

My sales have been all over the place since the beginning of the month, but didn't really start to get very bad till last weekend. This weekend sales have been very bad and pretty much have been cut in half which is scary considering what we have been used to selling. I have done so much tweaking of listings and my PL + Promotions this weekend, that nothing seems to be helping here at all. I have this feeling that once our accounts are in this state of flux where they are tweaking stuff, we are screwed. I have noticed this trend year after year. They continue to love to also make these kinds of changes in Q4 of all the periods that they can make changes. Also people can't forget that on 9/20/22 there will be more CATEGORY CHANGES and will mean some changes to ITEM SPECIFICS. I guess they didn't learn their lesson from last Fall with the debacle on the massive category changes.

What I don't understand is that when you have selling accounts like ours that sells quite a bit, why disrupt the apple cart considering if we don't get sales eBay makes no money.

eBay Open is coming up and I hope that they do get backlash for a lot of this crapshow that they have created here. I see on other threads via Social Media of people complaining just like we are.

Don't get me started on the suggested ad rates, they are the worst and not sure where those numbers are getting pulled from. I do feel like they are just made up based on factors with your respective account and has nothing to do with a user selling the same item as you are.

[nuclearomen]

---

@blacktopautoparts wrote:

eBay Open is coming up and I hope that they do get backlash for a lot of this crapshow that they have created here. I see on other threads via Social Media of people complaining just like we are.

---

i'm not doing the open this year, did last year was complete waste of time and effort - slight chance they some "improvements" to it but in general is a large chat room scrolling 300 times a min while watching video live stream of whatever goff talking blah blah blah...and then it ends, and scrolling continues... I'm sure they will get a constant flow of complaints, last year was pretty much all that people were typing. Got better things to do then sit on ebay open all day. 

[blacktopautoparts]

I don't blame you, and last year when I attended and was in a breakout room, I felt like my feedback was me talking to a wall.

This is an interesting video with some of the issues that we are all experiencing and he has done some testing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6qFslDajIo

[nuclearomen]

---

@blacktopautoparts wrote:

I don't blame you, and last year when I attended and was in a breakout room, I felt like my feedback was me talking to a wall.

This is an interesting video with some of the issues that we are all experiencing and he has done some testing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6qFslDajIo

---

@blacktopautoparts I'll check the vid later today when have some time... Today is Day 9 No Ebay Sales

[blacktopautoparts]

I am sorry to hear that and looking through your store you do have some really cool stuff that you sell. To see our sales get cut 50-60+ percent is insane for everything we do on our end to maintain our account.

[play.tr]

Why wouldn't you consider ship to outside of United States ? I didn't mean to there's no problem on eBay, but I can't understand why Americans are so afraid of international shipping.

[nuclearomen]

---

@play.tr wrote:

Why wouldn't you consider ship to outside of United States ? I didn't mean to there's no problem on eBay, but I can't understand why Americans are so afraid of international shipping.

---

I do ship overseas - but not on ebay - lol, no thank you. 

[nuclearomen]

I had sale today - 1 whole sale - for a discounted vinyl (jacket damage) but idk a sale is a sale i guess... I don't have ton and ton of stuff on ebay - on purpose - hard enough to manage 240 i have now with all the crud I had had to do with listings and PLs just get a sale - can't imagine tending to thousands of listings all the time. And all that stuff shouldn't even need to be tinkered with all the time - this company just makes things worse and worse and nothing operates right. Well, guess it's good example to teach if you teach internet website design as prime example what not to do in web design and function. 

Anyways... thanks, well, I know i sell in a very niche category for music... but that's what I do, done for years and years - always tell people sell what you know, Are knowledgeable about  passionate about - don't worry about money or getting rich quick just to sell "popular" items - won't happen anyways.