Regards,
Prior to the GTC mandate in March Auction and Fixed Priced sales were about the same (54% Auction and 46% Fixed Price). Now its 1 in 4 sales are GTC and that's on the good account. The account eBay basically killed off with GTC despite the regular PL Campaign is being rebuilt and that was started August 1 ... but thru today its 1 in 7 GTC sales ...
Pretty pathetic don't you think? While I am sure results will vary depending on what folks sell the sad part is nothing different was done on either account and GTC sales just simply dropped. Maybe we'll all be surprised if on the Summer or Fall update they announce they are "Bringing back Fixed Priced listing formats" with different durations!"
@myjunqueyourtreasure wrote:
They did say it was going to "get worse before it gets better".
Actually they said they would address issues in June if things did not work ...
@orangehound wrote:
@mr_lincoln wrote:Prior to the GTC mandate in March Auction and Fixed Priced sales were about the same (54% Auction and 46% Fixed Price). Now its 1 in 4 sales are GTC and that's on the good account. The account eBay basically killed off with GTC despite the regular PL Campaign is being rebuilt and that was started August 1 ... but thru today its 1 in 7 GTC sales ...
Pretty pathetic don't you think? While I am sure results will vary depending on what folks sell the sad part is nothing different was done on either account and GTC sales just simply dropped.
Since eBay sales overall are only slightly down, and I see no reason why your market segment would see such a dramatic "fall-off-the-cliff" that you are describing, then logic would tell us that other sellers are getting the sales that you used to get. Thus, the questions that you should ask ...
- Which kinds of sellers are experiencing increased sales after the forced GTC change?
- What are other sellers doing so that they get those sales you once got?
While I understand the concept the issue is simple, I did nothing different once GTC went in to effect. If one subscribes to the theory that "sales begot sales", as some do here, then my sales should not have changed since things were selling prior to the GTC mandate. Here's the other mystery, especially on the other account ... it wasn't JUST GTCs that dropped off, it was Auctions too. As @myjunqueyourtreasure mentioned, they (eBay) said it would get worse before it got better ... okay, while I can accept that statement I can not accept it taking more then 3 months to turn around again, which again it didn't and hasn't ... and we are now in the latter part of month 5 of GTC. If people can not see items then they can not consider purchasing them, that's about the only explanation I can come up with which points to the search algorithms ... which I assumed they would tweak, but obviously either they did not or they tworked them instead of tweaked them.
In any event, I will continue to work at improving sales on eBay ... I've tried ending GTCs just before they end then Relisting via Sell Similar but that has had little effect, I've let them simply relist on their own for several months so the Views and Watched counts increased but that has had little or no effect. I just started the quarterly PL Campaign and hope to see some positive results by month's end.
@orangehound wrote:Put another way, eBay's algorithm likes to spread the sales around between sellers ... this can be great for moderate sellers as it helps them compete against larger, more established accounts. But, yeah, it is a glass ceiling for growth.
Chinese sellers know this, which is why they run multiple parallel accounts with the exact same products. (If I were in your shoes, that's probably how I would go).
It does seem to be spreading sales, but I don't think they're being spread to "anyone". One thing that does seem to be the case is a lot of correlation with the spread of sales, is with the lack of quality control on eBay lately.
If sellers are being punished as we're told they were since the Spring update for all the things that are violations, such as shipping locations, then how come sellers we purchase from who ship from China, or violate these policies, are still appearing ranked among everyone else in search? Despite their feedback being low and not being able to sustain TRS. We can't see their full metrics, but we can tell from this that they are without a doubt low.
Regarding moderate sellers, the trickle down effects of top seller market share dropping hurts them too. If the 10th place seller in a category was previously making 100k/month... and now they're at 70k/month... that means the bar for "moderate sellers" dropped as well.
From all the issues you see with other sellers, it seems moderate sellers, even ones that been around for 20+ years and have the know-how of how to sell on here, are dropping too.
Freeing up such a huge part of the market share should mean that moderate sellers are seeing huge gains... so the question is why isn't this the case? And how is the lack of quality control during this time linked to it?
Prevalence of China sellers, non-TRS, lack of quality control, lack of punishment for policy violations, promoting sellers with bad metrics/feedback.... What is the common denominator? Fees. The only way that these things really add up together, is if the intention of the current system is to take advantage of the increased fees for those very things.
That said, a survey to discover what exactly is working well would definitely be helpful to understand what is going on with a clearer picture.
@orangehound wrote:Were your fixed-price listings in a GTC format before it was forced on everyone, or did you constantly create new listings?
- If the latter, then your products are now lumped in with all the other (existing) GTC listings. Constantly creating new listings with a fixed end date gave a boost to visibility when they start and end.
- If the former, then I don't know what to say. My accounts (which always used GTC) got a slight boost when the GTC mandate began.
I have a question regarding this. A slight boost I can understand. But have you not seen increased volatility since GTC began?
That's one thing that has been without a doubt easy to observe for us. Things have went back and forth from being "normal" to "sudden improvements" to "sudden drops" every few weeks. I've also shared sales charts with a number of other sellers, and the pattern of a "rollercoaster" with high peaks and drastic declines has appeared pretty consistently. But most of these sellers have been larger ones.
Even looking at the impressions graph, it's clear eBay has either been having tech issues, or "experimenting" with things that are causing a ridiculous amount of volatility. Example:
On that time frame, impressions substantially went up, click through went down substantially, conversion rate went up. Indications that imply we were showing up in searches that did NOT match our products
BTW, I have no idea about how large you are as a seller, so please don't get the impression that I'm implying anything! 🙂 I'm just curious if the volatility is hitting people who are still seeing decent performance relative to before.
