@linus.hux72fe wrote:
Upthread or another thread someone likened bot views with the unmasking of the Wizard of Oz. That's quite appropriate.
People assumed views meant people were interested in their item for sale. It was psychological reassurance that gave hope.
Many bought in to the reports from ebay about the number of new and existing shoppers. Without bots the mask is off and people's psyche is having to grasp a different reality.
This should come as no surprise though. The clues were all there. The shift to focusing on promoted listings. The source of revenue reports showing growth came from additional seller fees like promoted listings. The general pullback in advertising. Even the guest checkout numbers. On another thread I gave the example that the traveling nurses I work with used guest checkout consistently to purchase items when we were traveling rather than their at home accounts. Ebay then counted them as new users because they used new addresses, new email accounts and there new payroll debit cards. But they weren't new users.
What if the lack of sales problem is not that Ebay no longer counts bots? What if the truth is that summers are slower, sellers became accustomed to abnormally high sales during Covid, and Ebay is an older platform that has lost appeal or stagnated for a variety of reasons including continuous changes that produce unintended consequences, a myriad of glitches, lack of advertising, and often times poor search results. (On that note yesterday I was searching for a Moroccan Safi Porcelain bowl and the results included Lysol Toilet Bowl cleaner as the top 3 returns). And before someone tells me the "correct" way to search, I'll say most people arent interested in checking box after box, going to item specifics and checking more boxes, click after click. I dont have to do that elsewhere and who teaches casual users the "correct" way to search? They just assume it's a hassle and waste of time so they go elsewhere.
But I do agree it's a blow to the psyche to see 0 views and o watchers. It's causing cognitive dissonance for a bunch of people. But it (Ebay changing to not counting bot views) is likely not a cause and effect direct relationship at least in my mind but just my opinion.
Yours is a well thought out and logical analysis. But there is still the possibility that ebay IT mucked up the counting of bots. I think through tech ways this may have been coded.
First step, determine its a bot... Ok say they got that right. Second step, don't count that request, how do they code that? The request still needs to complete normally and allow the bot to index the page, right? If they kick the bot out early or set some flag that renders an even slightly different response, indexing may not go well.
This could cause the bot to treat the page they were after or sub pages of that page to not be fully or properly indexed by at least some bots that don't like what they saw. That could really want us to want the bots back. Wild idea, sure... Possible cause of lower real sales and views from the sites the bots were building links from, yes.
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