What happened to....................?

[sakic92710]

What happened to being able to sell $400, 500, 600, 700+ a week on eBay????  Now I struggle to get $400 per month!!  It's been going on for a year now!  It's funny that the timing of this is when eBay decides to change EVERYTHING about their site.  I am well aware some people are doing fantastic or the same as always.  From the community board, it is easy to see there are also 1000s affected by every change.   I wish I felt confident that posting 2500+ items would solve that issue.  I prefer not to waste my time if it is a defeating effort.  Anyone try that plan & see it succeed for you?

[hachumi]

It's pay to play now.  You have to promote your items or they don't get seen very much.  My sales have went up but my profit is down.  I have promoted all items.  I send out offers to every watcher.  It seems the more I interact with eBay the more activity I get, when I relist a few things or lower prices or even ship it seems to generate more business, and of course take more time.  When I added a few things a week and just waited for people to buy, it was a lot slower. Now it seems it's more time spent for less profit, but eBay makes more.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@sakic92710 Well, not doing it doesn't seem to be working very well, does it?  Might work, might be a waste of time. But it's Q4, so it's probably the best time of year to do it if you are going to do it. 

[reallynicestamps]

There was a pandemic surge in online buying during 2020 and 2021.  This ended abruptly in January 2022.

AZ has gone back to its former status as a money-losing business. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/amazon-posts-2b-loss-still-beats-wall-stree...

EBay as a company is still profitable, and paying dividends to its shareholders, and but saw sales decrease in 2022. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EBAY/ebay/revenue

There are thousands affected by every change.  But those who are losing sales have the time to come here. Those who are selling well are too busy packing, shipping, and sourcing new product to post.

I do see more sales when I have new product. But it's not necessarily the new product that sells. Those listings bring in the punters, as do Promoted Listings, but the trick is to keep them looking at your stuff, even if they decide against the original item.

I use my Descriptions.

They are fairly lengthy.   I use a colour background, nothing fancy, but I believe it can be noticed on a phone where a plain white background might not.  There is some information in the description that is not already covered by Item Specifics.

I use a lot of Item Specifics.

I'm not sure if customers use them, but they are supposed to help with SEO's, which seems to basically be Google. 

We don't see Views from bots and AIs any more. They still exist, eBay says, but we now only see the more useful human Views and those only from the past 30 days. 

In any case,  a Viewer is not a Buyer.

And almost everything is Fixed Price with Best Offer enabled and parameters set for acceptable/not acceptable, to save effort.

My business is basically set up to clear the remaining stock of our B&M stamp business now that we are retired. We did more than $400-$500 a week when we were active, but we did even more in the shop and on our, now closed, website.

[silverstatetreasureboxes]

@sakic92710 

How about you? Are you doing any better? Your last post had me worried about you, how's your flea market doing also? 

[mtgraves7984]

Admittedly, a casual seller here. When I started selling (I had some great OOAK items), I was able to sell 25+ items the first month, $250+ the second month... then wait simply the 90-day period to become TRS. That status was lost June of this year... for less than 100 transactions (only 98) in the rolling calendar year.

Just checked my Dashboard... today I'm at 85, but now I'm barely over the $1000/month metric, so it's the next to go. 😣    TRS really wasn't 'all that', but was able to maintain for a decade-and-a-half; the downfall happened only this year and last.

Lucky for me that I'm a casual seller. The decrease in my workload seems proportionate to the increase in my age. 😂

[sakic92710]

All I know is my listings total over $10,500 (shipping price included) & I cannot sell between $60-100 a day?!  $100 = 1%.  Greatly disappointing!

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@sakic92710  And there's no mathematical progression in online selling. So, even if you average $100/day with $10,000 of inventory, that doesn't mean you will average $200/day with $20,000 of inventory.

I stand by what I said: You obviously aren't happy with the sales you are getting now, and Q4 is---for many, not all, sellers---the best time of year to sell---it is likely that more listings will result in more sales. If you already own the inventory, your investment is primarily time (I would assume) , so if you don't have to go out and source and spend money on more inventory, why not spend time listing? (Another alternative, of course, is to try multi channel listing, but since you are talking only about ebay, that's what I'm sticking with.

Of course, it can also help if you try some of ebay's marketing tools: coded coupons, sales, store newsletters, Promoted listings, etc....but you didn't mention those, and I don't know if you are already using some of that or not.

[simba6]

Well a lot of spending money is now going to inflation.  Along with shrinking items as the supermarket.

[katzrul15]

---

@simba6 wrote:

Well a lot of spending money is now going to inflation.  Along with shrinking items as the supermarket.

---

Lots of news reports here also about B&M stores whose sales are WAY down right now and they are pushing, pushing, PUSHING sales and inventory for the Holidays EARLY - they are afraid they will be stuck with it!

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@sakic92710  I gather you sell mostly sports related stuff, but, to state the obvious, if you have anything Halloween , Fall/Winter, or Christmas, you might as well list it. 

[sakic92710]

Hello.  Thank you for your concern.  Some things are turning around so, I hope there will be some improvement.  After several months of low traffic at the market, I sold out my booths & now will just fill a showcase in my friend's booths & help him with sales.