What's occuring is a perfect storm and not to be negative, but it's going to get much worse.
The entire bot view situation occured at the beginning of the summer slow down, coupled with a dwindling economy.
Now, as the economy worsens, those sellers that don't have a strong repeat custom base are going to get hit the worst.
We're (Ebay sellers) facing a slew of problems. There is an excess of product (too many sellers) and a not enough buyers, increasing inflation, an all time high credit card debt; and a tidal wave of sellers dropping product at rock bottom prices just to pay business expenses and costs of living.
There is no way your average seller can compete with this while trying to make a profit. Sure, there are ebbs and flows where you can make a buck.
But, unless you're willing to drop prices, cut shipping costs, and promote at astronomical rates its going to be a tough sale. I don't believe the holidays are going to be much better either.
Look at the screenshot below of what a suggested promotion rate for an item I was listing in World Postal History, Stamps>Postal History> World
Now, whether the promotional ad rates are "made up" or have an exact formula, doesn't matter. The fact is there is a massive amount of product at extremely low prices. To the point that one would need to promote at a very high rate just to be seen.
If I search airmail cover by USA only, I get 90,000 items, if I search by world, I get 110,000 items.
If I search the category stamps by world, the system returns 11+ million results. I get 530,000 results if I search only US Stamps.
1930 US Stamps returns 58,000 plus results.
I also searched many other non-stamp categories
Unless you're close too the top of searches or you have a good repeat customer base, expect the sales drought to continue or worsen...meaning even the trickle of sales will cease.
