Inconsistent traffic and sales on ebay

[bamkapow]

Hi,

Just wondering if it is only me or do others find that the amount of traffic they recieve and the amount of items they sell varies wildly from month to month or even week to week.

For example last month I had a pretty good month, sold a decent amount of items, i was trending up slowly. Then this month, nothing sold until only last week. Traffic is down to only a few looks a day! It is crazy, I feel a little helpless when trying to operate here. 

My product is good, well priced, I ship fast and have 100% feedback. It is perplexing.

Does anyone else have the same issues as I describe, if so how did you get around them? 

Cheers,

Ken.

[resonance35]

Yes I am the same great sales last month after a horror two months than again this month hardly anything at all, I have decided to have a rest for the next week or so because somethimes its just not worth all the effort. I have also noticed that I have been getting buyers who say they have not received their items but when I check their tracking number it has been delivered, some people think you forget to keep the receipts from the PO. I have a few loyal customers but I suppose there are always people out there who think they can beat the system and try to get something for nothing

[clarry100]

Hi Ken,

For what its worth here is a snippet of our story.

We have two ebay stores both selling nearly identical items. Baby Headbands and Accessories.

The listings are all nearly identical.

One store has slightly worse FB and defects than the other. 

Yet the store with the worst rating has been steadily improving in sales over the past couple of weeks while the better one has been declining. Today not a single sale on one while the other store had about 20 sales.

We have also noticed that the search rankings of the better selling store are way higher than the other.

So it seems very clear to us that if your search rankings in Best Match are down for whatever reason so to will be your sales. Buyers in our particular category seem to use Best Match search.

We don't know of any way we could improve our search rankings other than by selling more items but we can't sell more when the rankings are way down. Chicken and egg here!

So I guess we just have to ride it out and hope something bumps the under-performing store up in the rankings a bit.

We too are at a loss to understand what is happening and what (if anything) we can do about it.

[bamkapow]

Thanks for the replies guys, at least it is not me. Perhaps I should start looking at indexing my ebay items on google via G+, perhaps that will help.

It is frustrating, at least I know there are others out there that are finding the same symptoms.

It feels like it really is not a level playing field out there.

[egglesdtp]

I also found last month's sales exceeded this month's, but both have been better than I ever used to be, with nearly triple the sales I was getting in the early months of this year. I am convinced there are 3 parts to this:

(1) having lots of listings (in the 100s if possible)

(2) having listings up for extended periods (up to one month)

(3) having items in a broad range of categories (mine are distributed over 11 major categories)

I know (1) is entirely due to the offers of 150 free listings, whereas I only used to have 40.

I know (2) is due to the three free relists

I know (3) is due to my own hard work.

[dylan11235813]

The same here.

I have a theory that when buyers start giving bad ratings that ebay actually start lifting tha ranking of listings in the assumption that a seller will perform even worse under a greater load. And visa-versa.

Just to add to the inconsistancies I find that I will have more sales in one state one day and more in a different. For example just over the last week I have sold more to SA  than the entire year. Only a small sample so it isn;t really representative but it does seem a bit off.

The bulk of my sales are usually to QLD or NSW but it has changed now. I don;t know what goes on in the NT but in 3 years I have only ever had about 10 sales.

Call me crazy if you want, ebay made me like this.

[clarry100]

LOL. Based on your theory perhaps we ought to deliberately get a bad defect rating on the store that is performing badly and see what happens.

It's funny you should mention that Dylan...

On the store that has been declining we had a bad buyer experience a little while back where we were clearly scammed and reported the buyer. We got a couple of NEGs for arguing the toss with the buyer. But in the end both PayPal and ebay supported us even tho we only used regular mail. Ended up getting the NEGs and the defects removed to restore our good track history. PayPal did not take our money to refund the buyer either.

And ya know its since then that this store has been in steady decline. Almost looks like we are being punished for being so brash as to accuse a buyer of doing the wrong thing.

We have another clear case of a scamming buyer on the other store ID now who we argued with again and suffered some NEGs for it. Have just started negotiations with ebay and paypal again to get it all cleared and restored.

I think we will have to stop calling out buyers when there is clear evidence of a scammer. It just causes us too much hassle to fight with them. But I have this strong belief they cannot be allowed to simply get away with it. They will just keep doing it to other buyers. So I guess I'm a bit of a crusader but suffer injuries in doing so for the better good.

[dylan11235813]

I have found if a dispute is opened with paypal or I open an unpaid item disputes that sales will drop. I usually give buyers a fair amount of time to pay or if they want to cancel I accept, not anymore though.

Since last week sales have been down. Baybe it is just a fluctuation in sales, or ebays site is glitchy (is it not ever), or because I opened 3 non paying item disputes at the end of a good week. The day after I opened the disputes sales dropped.

Usually when ebay do their thing on the 20th sales seem to drop also.

[phorum_junkie*]

There is only one thing predictable about ebay and that is that it is unpredictable. I don't take much notice of fluctuations over short periods. As I only sell for six months of the year it is very easy to check my sell through rate for that period and it is usually pretty much the same percentage year to year however looking back on individual months or weeks they are wildly fluctuating. 

[ms_aussie]

As soon as I see that a parcel has been delivered in tracking I send an email the buyer telling them that I can see the parcel has been delivered and hope they enjoy their new purchase. I usually get a cheery email in return thanking me for my great service. Surely they wouldn't try anything funny after that.