@rimtrim wrote:
That's an interesting observation about the organic traffic dropping along with the promoted traffic. For one thing, it suggests you're getting most of your traffic from people who are actually searching on eBay, rather than coming in from Google or wherever directly to your listing. I doubt Google knows or cares which eBay listings have paid promotions, but eBay itself would be free to manipulate your search placement within its own results.
I've noticed that sometimes if I list a fairly popular item where I have competition on eBay, and I don't use any promotions, it sits with minimal views for several days, and then suddenly the views start ticking up and the item sells. I theorize this is because Google has picked up the listing and these viewers are coming in from Google results.
On parts compatibility...That's a feature that I use and like, but it could use a lot of work. I haven't noticed the glitch you're talking about, but I checked out that listing and I do see it. Do you have any indication of whether the bug is tied to specific vehicles, or to specific listings?
The one big thing I would love to see with parts compatibility (this is probably my #1 request for eBay right now) is the ability to easily export a compatibility list to save it as an archive, then import it later when creating a new listing. I have some very complex parts compatibility lists that took hours of research and data entry to create. Because I sell used items and not bulk-purchased new items, I may sell out of an item and not have it again for months or years. By then, the old listing has expired out and I have to start all over.
I do save my parts compatibility lists using old-fashioned copy/paste methods, just saving them as text files, because at least that means I only have to do the data entry again rather than losing all the information. I have a few hundred of these lists saved right now, and I'm always adding more. I'd really like to be able to simply push a button in the listing tool and pull a compatibility list in from a text file, the same way I can upload a photo. If you know a way to do this, I'd love to hear it!
Finally, on the China sellers and fake products...Particularly in my category, there are huge numbers of items with unauthorized trademarked emblems stuck on, and many are listed in a deceptive way. I don't even really mind that stuff being on eBay as long as customers are clearly told that it's not the same as the genuine items that I sell. But nothing seems to be done to police it, so I just have to dance around the issue by noting which parts are widely available as knock-offs and focusing on the ones that aren't.
Yep, not too much comes from Google ad's. And eBay actually does manipulate the placement with their results. One thing that has happened for years, we go through our ads that appear on Google, and often times one of the listings that claims to be for one of our items will take us to a COMPETITORS item. Meaning whatever item is linked on Google is just kind of a "reference" and not a link to the actual listing, and can sometimes be a "similar" item.
It's funny you mention the views on an item. There's ways you could play with that and that I've tested. If you're in any off-eBay groups and find an item that hasn't been getting any traffic, try sending it to the group and having a bunch of friends check it out. That sudden burst in traffic will encourage eBay to send even more traffic to it. It seems the algorithm thinks there's sudden interest in the item and sends more people. Doing this has "woken up" some listings that have fell off for months/years and restored them to getting traffic.
The part compatibility issue is actually tied to whatever they did when they updated their vehicle system. So if you look closely, the item in the chart selection does NOT match the item in the search for Engine. One of them has "Cubic Inches" the other does not. Problem is, the create listing/revise page engines do NOT match the view page/search engines in the dropdown. So we can't just remove the vehicles and re-add, no matter what we do, the info doesn't match. EBay messed up their catalog migration, apparently.
There's other issues with vehicle fitment, too. Certain vehicles on the list could be just straight up invalid (which is hard to notice on the site itself, but using our in-house software, we can see just how many items on the list are invalid, and it seems completely random).
Yup, the compatibility charts definitely need work! Especially because the eBay tool doesn't just go by model/year/engine and also gets in depth in to trim. It requires *so many* vehicles at times and it's a huge amount of data/work to support.
Regarding China, yeah, a lot of the changes over the years have allowed China to take advantage more and more. For awhile, the system heavily favored cheaper items so they appeared on top. Nowadays price isn't as important, but they now allow non-TRS sellers to appear on the top of search results, they don't factor metrics/feedback in to search, and it seems even delivery time isn't much of a factor in the current algorithm. So China can appear on top despite giving poor service/shipping times.
