@inhawaii wrote:
@soh.maryl wrote:
Yes, I think we're still waiting to hear from someone who contacted eBay about slow sales and found that it made a difference.
"Sorry sir, we accidentally turned your switch OFF. We turned it back ON. You should be good to go."
Well I can tell you at Amastone's they do, it's called surfacing. Enterprise eCommerce are distributed systems and back in the day when I'd coded a re-pricer for over there you could literally see it. The re-pricer used their Applications Progamming Interface (API) to get competitor results however, they started limiting how much data would be returned per SKU. So I altered the re-pricer to also scrape right from the web page. The entire re-pricer Automated Internet Explorer basically. Even when changing prices instead of it uploading to their servers it changed the prices just like I might by hand manually. That made for instant results versus waiting for their servers to process an upload file.
Within a day perhaps two of finishing the page scraping engine the anomalies appeared and with that I bought into a proxy server service so as I could connect from numerous countries and US locations and sure as can be. There it was. So with that the question becomes why?
Well Amazon's retailer and there were numerous reasons from control of how much 3P sellers sales represent of total hard good revenues. Back then it was about 32% thereabouts, you can imagine for example it being say 60% where it is now with FBA and such but they've many more revenue engines, Amazon Web Services, Streaming services, on and on. Imagine had it been 60% back before all that and those sellers deciding to riot, form a union, go on strike whatever. Very dangerous basically.
Another reason was to satisfy larger enterprise entities sales especially into the holiday season. We'd saw that every single year selling there. Back then PC Software was "the in" thing as console games were in their infancy not the high power machines of today. Since we dealt 98% in delisted titles we again saw really big surfacing go on, understandable... Amazon needed satisfy the publishers and big distributors long before us and cherry picking they didn't do. That is to say over the holidays might see really popular delisted titles become front line again as "Budget" titles. So we've got the originals, same thing, with box, manuals, all nice retail sealed and the Budget stuff come with manuals on the CD Media in cheap packaging for $10-$20, ours were still cheaper but sales just dry right up and the re-pricer literally show it. They'd the nation segmented by markets and as needed sub-segmented from there. For example Southern California and we'd see that our listing(s) not show up at all out there.
All large businesses tend need control revenues for many reasons and I get that, same thing used to happen at the Onsale Supersites with PC's, Laptops and Consumer Electronics. If you're that entity do you want make sure that Gateway and Compaq Computers are satisfied with sales especially over the holidays or have some privateers impacting those corporations sales to point they go, "Huh? Worth it?"
Back in the day the term at Amazon was "Anchor Tenants" whom also tended to "win" the "Buy Box" which Amazon now faces some lawsuits over.
At eBay can speculate any number of things but indeed the economics of consumers are impacting the holidays and will. Anybody who reads financial information is well aware and I can assure the bean counters at eBay are well aware. We can all guess as to how eBay directionally is going to or is responding to this years holiday season as the place has more competition FOR THE DOLLAR this year than perhaps ANY in it's history.
Now unfortunately war has broken out in The Middle East and the concerns of that spilling over borders is quite real and also impacts global economics. Remember what War and prospects of escalation do to economics, can see that in World War II and NOW economics are very different as those who get along do so in large respect by that of the wealthy. They worry, how is this potentially going to impact my business, investments on and on and that trickles down into worker concerns. Maybe no raise next year, maybe this, maybe that, maybe prices going to fly up again in commodities etc. Point being folks tend to think as individuals we are compartmentalized in our daily living when in fact, that's a complete fallacy. It was a complete fallacy back in time throughout civilization be that Alexanders conquests, Rome, American Revolution, on and on... The average persons life is impacted by global events but the threads to the hows and why's they don't care know, learn or for that matter can do anything about or can they?
Really they can but don't tend to. For example, fictional, lets say every adult American, Canadian, Australian, German, Englishman, Frenchmen, Italian on and on forked over $250 bucks towards Ukraine's war. Impactor! Lets say there's a billion free nation people who gift, that's 250 billion dollars. Let's say the do so twice a year. Of course that's a VAST simplification.
My sales are way off, 50% of what they were and not a thing I can do about it except seek other operations. I've plenty of stuff for a handful of operations but whichever is going to do best is where the best of is going to end up and that process is happening. Many titles I have I've many of and if they peddle better someplace else, eventually what's here goes there.
I'm a big fan of eBay having defended many an outlandish statement(s) in these forums with actual realities, I prefer mutually beneficial relationships to those not but whatever all the factors are adrift in sales here little option is left but to seek more productive pastures.
