What's ebay doing to help the absolutely terrible recent dive in sales/ views?

[randyshotrods]

Seems alot of us have recently been affected by the new update that removed bots and somehow chased away a bunch of Real buyers,  unless those bots were buying as well.

We kind of figured out the problem or atleast what might have caused the recent nose dive.  

I'm wondering what is ebay doing to help steer customers back?  Maybe some advertising,  or better yet a little incentive like those ebay bucks that seem to have gone the way of the Dodo bird. 

I've seen alot of talk of what has happened and it's been well over a week since we all got hammered, so what can we expect to see to fix the problem and drive sales back?  I'm starting to see less listings as well.  I think that's genuine.  I'm about ready to pull the plug for a short time rather than Hemorrhage rare material I have never had and never will again for .99-2.99 each.  

If enough sellers contract or stop entirely the site will fail.   Less views and desire to even visit if they never have anything new or unusual to offer.  See the slope we are on.  You are still near the top, but you are losing traction fast.  DO SOMETHING!

[randyshotrods]

Maybe it's not even advertising but fixing whatever removed my items form google searches.  That would be a good start. 

If it is advertising maybe try places where people that don't normally use ebay would shop.  Maybe the promotion of ebay bucks and a direct market approach would work better.  

Why did they get rid of it?  Why is it pretty much never offered any more.  If you are giving a customer off 3 to 5 percent of an item,  but still collecting a commission on shipping and sales tax (two things not discounted) you are still making a darn good commission.  The philosophy of trying to catch every dime you drop while people are trying to throw piles of money at you that you miss because you were so concerned with the dime,  will eventually kill your business. 

Almost seems like someone is trying to drive business away.  Lots of site issues that take forever to get resolved that effect not only me but my customers.  Because I can't invoice a customer means that I'm, unhappy and my customer is frustrated and says well I'll just go elsewhere or not buy this non essential item. I've heard it directly from them. 

Give a few sellers free reign to make suggestions and you will most likely have a much better site in the end.

[ladyindecadence]

The biggest problem with ebay is the way the search ranks listings. And how those listings are displayed. By default it is best match which is calculated with an unknown propriety algorithm. Best match works great if I come here to search for some kind of brand new item where the seller has a large quantity available. Best match will often show the best listing of that item with the best price / shipping handling time. The algorithm learns that this particular listing is the best to display based on customer interaction and sell through rate with that listing. This is fantastic for someone that knows exactly what they are looking for. And works very well for brand new products with multiple quantities.

However you also have a large antiques and collectable market on ebay and buyers in those categories often like to just browse whats available to see what might interest them. The best match algorithm doesn't have much data in the form of customer interaction and sell through rate with quantity 1 items to use to rank the items in search so it likely has to default to almost just randomly showing items that match the key words searched or some other unknown sorting criteria.

Until ebay comes to understand that a one size fits all search algorithm doesn't work well when your site has two distinctly different markets with very different business models. It will continue to become more clear with every update that they care very little about the used item market on their site, as I believe it only represents 15% of items sold on the site now. So in the future I expect most updates to continue being tailored to big business selling new items and doing huge volumes of sales.

[stainlessenginecovers]

Best Match does NOT show the cheapest or the fastest or the best. Not sure where you get that from

You input keywords

Once listing shows (in best match)

I then click 'Buy It Now' (as I'm not into auctions, waiting etc.)

I then click 'price with shipping lowest first'

Just about everybody does it this way. 

Now out of the 400 XYZs' I can see the lowest price, with shipping. Then click on the top one, and only if a low numbered seller, move on to the next or next. 

I'd rather pay $52 from a 40550 seller than $48 from a seller with 80. 

[the-hook-and-the-loop]

I think their hands are full with their stock crashing.

[the-hook-and-the-loop]

The stock was at $80 a few months ago, now it's $40.

[herbaearth]

I believe the real question is how many buyers have been systematically removed. I would like to think there is still 100+ million customers on ebay. It went from 180 million customers to 150 million, and with the removal of search engine bots and the whittling down of profits for sellers(which equals to less buyers), the estimate of unique daily active customers could be less than 100 million active buyers in reality.

The fact that community shills keep pushing a "everything is fine" narrative, when a ton of veteran sellers who know the in's and out's of the business are complaining about real facts, tells me it's an internal issue. If using AI and a new "product forward" algorithm model is the problem, then it's the programmers messing things up.

I'm a quantitative trader, so this topic is very important to me.

[member3614897]

Pretty much nothing but leaving it up to the robots. I have been a member for twenty years with 100% rating.

My philosophy is no sale is final if the buyer isnt happy. This time I was the buyer and the seller is a jerk. Ebay turned it's back on me because I checked the WRONG selection for a refund! when I appealed it was tuff **bleep**. Door slammed. So I had to take matters outside the realm of their endless rules we have to look up ourselves or finally get a human who regurgitates the same crap. Done with FEEbay.  Once the company was sold it was a rapid drop to the bottom.  Their platform is dated and not worth the hassle or lack of support.