My sales as well are down 40% since May, the same story as everyone else here, and it was very sudden. And furthermore, it absolutely started on or about May 13 for me as well. Because the first few days of May were excellent, then everything crashed.
I believe that it may have something to do with Ebay's attempt to intercept "Bot traffic". I think they are flagging actual human shoppers as bots, if they browse too quickly or too much. Unfortunately these are the most skilled Ebay users, our best customers usually.
Here is what I think is specifically where the problem creeps in. When Ebay asks you to verify that you are a human with that little pick-a-photo thing, it is because they think you are a bot. I get this a lot, and sometimes I just click the photos and it goes back to normal. But sometimes Ebay seems to get stuck, and they keep repeatedly asking for verification.
Now, I thought this was just me and my luck, until I had some customers contact me and inform me that the same thing was happening to them, preventing them from buying or paying. They would just keep getting the verification request and it wouldn't take their input, it was stuck in some sort of endless loop.
It is a general rule that customers don't usually contact the seller about things like this, so if you hear from 1 or 2, the problem is probably far more common than that.
Therefore, I believe that a large portion of the sales drop may be directly due to malfunctions in Ebay's code to detect and verify bots. Rather than detecting bots, they are interfering with actual human customers, costing us hugely in sales and costing themselves potential money. If they rolled back the malfunctioning bot detection code and fixed it, our sales would probably come back.
