slow sales / list more

[keziak]

My sales dropped over the past couple of months and my listing did also. Meanwhile I deleted a lot of books for losing value or just listed too long.  So my inventory is low.

My listing has suffered due to the ebay book catalog being wrong most of the time where it comes to the category.  I've given up fighting it ( and slowly creating listings from scratch) and will accept the category because I can no longer change it. My main concern is that when I relist I will be denied due to....wrong category. That was happening earlier this year.

[bigmotormania]

I've noticed that it keeps trying to change my category when I am listing. For instance, I will list a BMW motorcycle part, under motorcycle parts, but when I finish the listing and click revise (I do this to double check everything before the listing goes live) it will be listed under car parts.

This happened a few times and I ended up going through and checking the categories on every single listing. Fortunately only a couple were like that. But categories are pretty important so if you can't even list under your category then that really messes with your sales.

As for low sales, things seem to be going bad for a lot of people, myself included, who went from 15-20 ish sales a month to like 5-7 sales a month, not sure what's causing it, may just be the economy, dunno. All I know is it's going good for some people in certain categories with a very specific type of customer that will have need for the products that they sell on a general basis, a lot of other categories, books for example, as well as things like expensive motorcycle jackets and cosmetic parts, not so much. 

[keziak]

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@bigmotormania wrote:

I've noticed that it keeps trying to change my category when I am listing. For instance, I will list a BMW motorcycle part, under motorcycle parts, but when I finish the listing and click revise (I do this to double check everything before the listing goes live) it will be listed under car parts.

This happened a few times and I ended up going through and checking the categories on every single listing. Fortunately only a couple were like that. But categories are pretty important so if you can't even list under your category then that really messes with your sales.

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I've given that a lot of thought (how important the category). I even polled customers a few years ago about how they found my books. It was all keyword searching or searching for a specific book. I asked a lot of people and not one said category browsing. 

Having said that, people might use the category to limit search results if they get too many.  Hard to say.