Let me preface this by saying I understand that there is not universal acceptance that eBay throttles their sellers; I respect the opinion of those people who feel they do not and hope that they will do me the courtesy of respecting mine and to please not turn this post into a debate about whether or not eBay throttles sellers, to what extent they do, how or why they would do such etc. I do not mean for this to come off as rude, I just would like this thread to stay on point and be an ongoing discussion amongst sellers who believe eBay does throttle us with tips on how to best deal and position ourselves in such an environment.
With that being said, I have a particular listing that up until 2 weeks ago, over the prior 3 months I had sold a whopping total of 5 of these items. About 2 weeks ago I managed to sell 3 in a 2 day period to different buyers. Over the course of the next 2 weeks I sold 19...about 4x the amount in two weeks then I had sold in the prior 3 months!!! This is not an exogenous event, I have seen these types of patterns so many times that I can not possibly think it is an exogenous coincidence.
It seems very obvious to me that if you want sales, you need visibility for your listings. In order to get visibility for your listings you need sales. A classic chicken vs. eg scenario. eBay buries the listings of items that don't sell and give enhanced visibility to those that do. I usually do a few things to circumvent this sort of throttling. (This example above is one of the instances where I did nothing to the listing as an attempt to illustrate my point about eBay throttling. ) But I usually:
1) When an item that doesn't have any sales within a 2-3 week period, I will usually cancel the listing. Instead of "re-listing" I will "sell similar." This way it appears as a new listing.
2) If my sales for a particular item that I have many of are slow, I will run a sale for a 3-4 day period droping the price to pretty much break even after I factor in my shipping, fees etc. While I normally don't like to work for free this way, sometimes dropping the price will drastically will ignite sells over a short time and over the next 4 days I may sell 5 or 6. While it is true that I may not have made any profits, however I:
A) reduce inventory
B) Now have several sales that might help generate more product visibility...so if I originally had it priced at $30 when it wasn't selling and lowered the price to breakeven at $18, now it might start to sell a little more regularly at $24 now that I have a little bit of a track record.
I'd love to hear from other sellers who believe eBay throttles on what they do to deal with it. Again, for those that don't believe in eBay throttling I respect your opinion but I ask that you please not discuss that here. I would be happy to discuss this issue if you would like to start a new post. I would like this thread to stay on topic and be a forum for sellers on how to best position our listings to cope with throttling. It would be quite difficult to add value to this topic if one doesn't believe in eBay throttling to begin with. So again, I hope my desire to stay on point will be respected.
