eBay

urosh69 · ‎06-03-2019

In last 3 months I noticed huge decline in traffic over the night. It dropped down from 250.000 monthly impressions to 30.000 and sales dropped down from 50 to 5. I do follow all eBay rules, called eBay 3 times and every time i get different answer with no solution. One of them even act like she is doing something but no success.

I sell same products on other places and have no problems there - sells and traffic are steady.

After almost 5 years here on eBay I don't know what is going on but it looks like eBay puts me on standby without any reason.

It looks like eBay Help Center and eBay itself doesn't care about sellers as it did before.

Does anyone had the same problem and what are possible solutions?

Maybe it's time to close the store here since it is waist of time and money at the moment.

blacktopautoparts · ‎06-03-2019

It's like a lot of us in eBay motors/Parts & Accessories have been affected. Not sure what has changed. My sales numbers are all over the place each day with no consistency. Hopefully they get their issues straightened out this month because it will suck if this continues.

blacktopautoparts · ‎06-03-2019

It's like a lot of us in eBay motors have been affected. Not sure what has changed. My sales numbers are all over the place each day with no consistency. Hopefully they get their issues straightened out this month because it will suck if this continues.

popeye3165 · ‎06-04-2019

There are BIG changes going on with eCommerce the internet is going the way of Main Street America all big corporations or franchises few if any mom and pop shops. Oh yea almost everything is made in China.

Good luck to ALL the small sellers out there!

tusculumwildman · ‎06-04-2019

My sales in April and May are down 45% from the previous month and nearly the same from the same time period last year according to EBay's own stats. I'm losing money right now by selling on Ebay. It sux! Ebay needs to get its shat together before I go to Amazon and start selling.

I can tell you what is hurting my sales also, this new thing Ebay did 2 months ago where they made all 30 days fixed price auctions automatically relist until it is sold. That's screwed my sales because I don't want Ebay or anyone telling me when to list my stuff, so I'm having to go in and UNlist all my items 4 or 5 hours before they are supposed to end. This causes me potential sales that would occur in the last few hours, and causes Ebay to lose the fees associated with those sales. I can't afford to list more than the 1,000 items each month that I get "free" with my Ebay subscription, so that's why I have to end those fixed priced ones early. Otherwise I'd be paying for an extra 2,500 items per month and with the lousy sales the past 2 months, I would be losing more money than I am losing now. We as sellers need to revolt and force Ebay to allow our 30 days auctions to end as they always have. For those who want them to auto renew each month, that option was already there on Ebay before they started this **bleep**!!!

Shape up Ebay, or I will be shipping out!

wildman

tusculumwildman · ‎06-04-2019

That GTC **bleep** is for the birds! I spend more time now going and ENDING my listings early and worrying about that, than I do listing items it seems. I don't want Ebay forcing me to auto relist my stuff! I like to group certain items together as I feel the mood, and either raise or lower the prices at one time. Can't do that now that Ebay forces all 30 day auctions to auto relist. For instance, I may get all the football items and list at once and maybe take off 10% or something like that.

That was one of the worst things Ebay has done to sellers since that bullshat when they started taking 10% to 15% of our Shipping charge! It's awful, and Ebay needs to give each seller the option to opt out of GTC and go back to normal 30 days auctions that end when they end!

telecom75 · ‎06-04-2019

Ebay has been doing some strange stuff with their categories. In the past, if you entered what you were looking for in search, it would default search under all categories, now, for some items, it will default search to a specific category, if the category is not the one you listed under, you are SOL and your item won't show up.

I am still trying to get over the stupidity of GTC, then you add the category stupidity to the mix, and it makes you wonder what in the world Ebay is thinking. It is clear that with GTC they were hoping to get more sellers to pay for promotions to have their items stand out, but there is only so much blood you can squeeze out of a corpse. Professional sellers are having a hard enough time competing against "one-timers" and now, they have to pay promotional fees on top of everything else, for a lot of sellers this is just not sustainable.

This may not effect Ebay short term due to increased revenue from promotions, but long term, they are killing their golden goose. I would love to see the breakdown in revenue from commissions (as opposed to promotions) on their next earning report. I would have a hard time believing those numbers aren't down.

jewelbiz · ‎06-04-2019

EBay has jumped the shark!

That’s it + now going way of big 🦖 dinosaurs 🦕

Plus the thrill is gone....

redline_auto_llc · ‎06-04-2019

That's a good point. I used to get excited about selling on eBay. Now it's a painful process. We're not making enough money here to justify the effort, and the amount of stress I get from hearing the harp notification on my phone is taking years off my life. It stopped being fun to sell here years ago.

beez5720 · ‎06-04-2019

Well, the first thing I noticed is lack of advertisement at optimal times. Did not see one ebay ad during the Superbowl (someone correct me if I am wrong, please).

Also, when ebay does a major platform change (such as last year's search engine modification and this years GTC enFORCEment), it has a profound affect on listing visibility. It's like starting all over again, even when that listing has a long and successful history of sales.

You will not get definitive answers from eBay's customer service, they are not high enough on the ladder to be privy to high-managerial information that could explain these sudden drops in sales and visibility across the board.

zamo-zuan · ‎06-04-2019

@tunicaslot wrote:
@zamo-zuan wrote:
@tunicaslot wrote:
My good friend Z who's no longer with us on these boards would drive me nuts always praising Ebay and the sales he received … but he was in a niche category - so didn't suffer problems that many of us did. All of a sudden - all the complaints we had started happening to him ( and no it wasn't the rest of us! ) - but then he understood.

I still talk to him on other forums and while he's still selling here - and is grateful for what sales he makes - he now sees - the bad and the good. You can love a platform and hate it at the same time. It's called being realistic - just because you aren't experiencing the problems others are doesn't mean it isn't happening or it won't happen to you.

I'll be the first to say when a poster is blaming Ebay and I know for a fact that the person's anger is directed at the wrong person.
Completely agree, especially with the highlighted part.

After the last year I've seen all types of sellers face these issues. It's at the point where nobody is safe. Not even in sustainable categories that are not oversaturated or niche.

Reality is that top sellers are dropping (even in markets that are up). Niche sellers are dropping. GMV is dropping. Overall sales are dropping.

I just wonder when the point comes where eBay will begin to take drastic measures on marketplace health. It seems for the moment they're content with their company health being sustainable as they profit off of sellers demise. But eBay is a marketplace, and having their marketplace healthy again is the only way they will truly be sustainable long-term.

The question shouldn't even be if anyone here is for or against eBay. All of us sellers must be "for eBay" because our success depends on it. That's the reason we must have our voices be heard, as eBay's failure is inadvertently affecting all of us facing these issues.
And I was one of the ones for the longest time that made excuses for Ebay as I didn't have the problems others did - so I apologize. Jason did the same a month or two ago. Regardless if they are not experiencing problems now themselves - sellers have to keep an open mind that not all sellers are whiners and the lack of sales is their fault. Everyone can make improvements - but there is no fixing Ebay until the powers that be decide to fix it.

My seller hub is goofy too. I posted about the drop in sales for my 90 day lookback the other day - and after posting the number shown to me in seller hub started to think that I must have sold a bunch of high value items I forgot about as so few sales a month wouldn't generate the money I did make. When I actually look at my items and filter to sold - it shows twice the amt of sold items for a 90 day period than is shown to me in Seller's Hub

Sellers hub has had a bug for over a year now where the "31 day" measurements are actually less than 31 days. If you the Performance > Summary page you can find out what day it's measuring on the "Traffic" graph. Often it's not actually 31 days, and counts down 1 day lower each day. Crazy that this bug STILL has not been fixed.

@redline_auto_llc wrote:
Since Zamo started the posting charts trend, here we go. I can count on one hand the number of days in 2019 we had zero sales before mid May. Usually we'd approach or hit that second grey bar Zamo was talking about. Things slowed down dramatically on May 1st- as if a switch had been flipped. Things coasted a bit until the last week of May, and now we're lucky to break $100 in sales a day - and let me tell you, $100 a day gross isn't gonna pay the bills.

It's become my mantra at this point- eBay is the best option I have on the table, and the second something (anything) else comes along I'll be all over it. This isn't sustainable.

@blacktopautoparts wrote:
It's like a lot of us in eBay motors have been affected. Not sure what has changed. My sales numbers are all over the place each day with no consistency. Hopefully they get their issues straightened out this month because it will suck if this continues.

It's hard to tell exactly what they did, but it seems in many cases "impressions" are still coming through. But "placement" on the search page has been extremely random... Even if we search with text specific to our items product identifiers with phrases or product codes that don't appear on competitors, we don't have strong placement.

zamo-zuan · ‎06-04-2019

@beez5720 wrote:
Well, the first thing I noticed is lack of advertisement at optimal times. Did not see one ebay ad during the Superbowl (someone correct me if I am wrong, please).

Also, when ebay does a major platform change (such as last year's search engine modification and this years GTC enFORCEment), it has a profound affect on listing visibility. It's like starting all over again, even when that listing has a long and successful history of sales.

You will not get definitive answers from eBay's customer service, they are not high enough on the ladder to be privy to high-managerial information that could explain these sudden drops in sales and visibility across the board.

Even the category managers, which are much higher on the ladder, have no idea.

There's probably less people in the company who know truly are kept up to date on the search functionality than you can count on one hand.

esg-enterprises · ‎06-04-2019

Zamo,

I generally average 5-600 per day on my main account, a good day 2-3x times that, and of course less at times, common sense.

I have had one day in the past 17 that I have reached 500, and my other accounts little or usually nothing.

You have great insight, is ebay now broken beyond repair? and if so someone will have to see the huge void and fill it, right?

I love doing what I do but I am becoming very concerned this could get much worse, and managed payments has not even begun.

esg-enterprises · ‎06-04-2019

Great post.

esg-enterprises · ‎06-04-2019

I sell mainly ebay motors as well.

I am also a car guy, my dad is, many of my friends are. We have projects we work on, for years ebay was the place to go. Now many I know rarely, if ever, look on ebay because they have made it so difficult to find specific items.

I rarely ever buy anything on ebay anymore because I can never just browse with out being inundated with unrelated items.

Up until a couple years ago I would enter a search, NOS 1999 Camaro, NOS 1966 Chevelle, NOS 73-87 Chevy Truck, I would browse and buy items, now I get page after page of dollar store junk.

I drive mostly GM vehicles and like to use Genuine parts, its almost impossible to select just that stuff.

I talk to guys all the time who voice the same frustration, many of the sellers I purchased from are gone, they brought great, unique items to the marketplace.

I know its not all the problem but some of what I see. Its frustrating to see a platform we love ruined like this.

20 years ago ebay was killing the flea markets, now many are going back out of necessity.