I watch view traffic like a hawk. In times that I am flooded with sales, I do not have time to pay attention to these things. Lack of a flood of sales provides plenty of time to look at the data and try to figure out why. The economic downturn of the past several years, free falling consumer confidence, a wall of inflation, lack of expendable income, public anticipation of future doom...
I do not let listings ride with "good-til-cancelled". I end the listings before they auto renew, and manually relist them. The original formula from 30 years ago served me the best, and is my continuing strategy. I have factual proof that my listings get looked at, because when they are ended manually in a regular monthly cycle, I receive a message from Ebay members, asking if the item is still available and where the new listing can be found. Some clicked to watch. Some bookmarked the page. And I get sales of those items quickly after they are relisted, after responding with the link to the new listing.
I mention this because it is not possible for the view counts of any of my listings to have views older than 30 days, that would drop off when no longer counted in the total.
In March and April, I noticed the last 5-10 listings placed each evening would get 10-20 views within the first hour of being active, while the rest remained unnoticed with zero views, until the count increased gradually as days went by, as normal. But the items receiving the jump immediately after being listed usually did not match traffic count with increased sales.
I had to turn my store off due to a power outage this week. In the past, using the vacation settings has negatively impacted sales and traffic after the store is turned back on. This time, that event has intersected with this change in page view count policy. View count remains zero across the board, but buyers continue contacting me and the previous level of sales resumed immediately.
I have items that are clicked to watch with zero page views on my Seller Hub Active Listings page.
I look at my own listing page, and after doing so, the view count on my Seller Hub Active Listings page remains at zero. In the past, viewing my own page would increase the count by one, the first view and not after that.
I have items that _sold_, which have zero page views on my Seller Hub Active Listings page. That's not possible. The item listing page has to be accessed by a human user and active member, at least one time, for the item to sell. Bots are not buying my products.
I have read comments that "Oh, all your previous traffic was bots.". The suggestion being that is the explanation from Ebay, the Seller Update, etc.
That would indicate falsification of the data in order to commit fraud. The seller pays for the service of putting the listing out there and making it available to look at. If the current page count data is not an error (which has happened on occasion previously, and always returned to normal after a glitch has been fixed), it would indicate that there has been fraud in the charging of store subscription fees for services that had not been rendered.
Hoping the glitch is resolved. Unwilling to accept that bots are purchasing and paying for the products that I am shipping.
