It is all about becoming a huge sales platform where ebay can make money on everything, just like Bezop has done with Amazon.
First, they bought paypal and banned every other form of payment. This virtually killed Western Union Bid Pay, and stopped sellers from accepting money orders or checks.
This also killed a lot of sales in the Business and Industrial categories because no one in their right mind is going to pay for a $ 10,000.00 plus excavator with a credit card because of the interest. And the sellers are not going to accept paypal or credit cards and lose the huge amount in fees from their credit card processor or all of it because of a chargeback after the machine is gone, or a SNAD through paypal 180 days after the sale. Once ebay saw the huge decline in the Business and Industrial because of their payment policy they again allow checks and money order in some of those categories. Also, at the time a lot of older people were starting to buy agriculture parts on ebay and they were not using credit or debit cards, they wanted to use the same checks they had used for years to run their farms.
I have gone 3 weeks with less than $ 500 in total sales from the the last seek of February till this past weekend when the cycle FINALLY picked up on ebay again. I had sales on our company website, plus Bonanza, Bluejay, etc. But almost nothing from ebay.
Every time I go through one of these sales drops on ebay I watch my views and watchers, and there is literally no one seeing my items. I can get on my wife computer and search my keywords from the titles on ebay and my items will literally not show up in searches, no matter what I do. Even if I search the complete title sometimes there is nothing shown in search. If it is the listing are 4th page (at 100 items per page) or further. No visibility because no one usually goes that deep.
What does show up is china junk and promoted listing, and most times their titles do not even have one SINGLE word from my search included in their title.
I have a neighbor that builds diorama's in old clock cases, radio cases, etc. Occasionally he will ask me to see if I can find one of a certain style for a build. I did a search today for "Vintage wood clock" and the first 4 pages were wall mounted fake Vintage clocks made out of resin to look like old boards with fading paint. And these clocks were NOT listed in "Vintage collectible" clocks, they were listed in new clock categories. But ebay allows it because they are promoted listing and they get a cut from every sale.
Through ebays search engine I had to go through 10 pages to find 3 clock cases. In the end, I went to PicClick and used their search engine and then I found 17 clock cases.
If ebay would quit blocking searches and manipulating the search engine then I would have constant sales to the tune of $ 130,000.00 a year on ebay like I did a few years ago. By their maniulating search I sell $ 50,000.00 a year. Oh, and search manipulation is a policy violation, so ebay is violating their own policy.
Not going to get any better. They are going to continue on this road until they become Amabay, Ebazon, Amebay, Ebamazon, or something like that.
Textiles and clothing are also saturated on ebay. My wife stopped selling a couple years ago because of that.
