WHY HAVE EBAY SALES CRASHED

[pinnacle-agencies]

With  nothing having changed on my end, I don't understand why my ebay sales have crashed ... down to about 15% of what they were before ... profit on my sales now barely cover my monthly ebay anchor store costs ... I'm now earning LESS than $1 per hour !

HELP! HELP! HELP!

[pinnacle-agencies]

I hope you are right, but human nature, greed, mismanagement and arrogance seem to dictate that human endeavour has its season and history is littered with failed mamoths.

[pinnacle-agencies]

In the final analysis, I just hope ebay staff read these forums and do something about our cumulative concerns around seriously deminishing sales ... ebay need to go back to basics.

[clarry100]

You cannot duplicate listings across IDs.

But you can sell the same item so long as it can be deemed to satisfy a different type of buyer.

The classic example is envelopes....

The same envelope can be sold in packs of 10x and in packs of 100x because some buyers will want these different quantities.

So we tend to sell on one of our IDs in lesser quantities than the other store.

But we are beginning to think as Harley has mentioned that it might be time to give that idea up.

It has been working OK up until recently tho. The one store with the more bulk quantities seems to be the lesser performing one.

But I have a feeling (no proof) that we are being throttled.

[harley_babes_hoard]

you talk about throttling, I can usually tell by a friday afternoon what sort of weekend I'm going to have. Last week no sales on friday afternoon pretty much no sales all weekend. This friday good afternoon sales and so far good weekend. It's seems to be 2 on and 1 off.

[clarry100]

Yep that's true Harley. Bad Friday usually = bad weekend now that I think about it that way.

[dazzledayz]

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@harley_babes_hoard wrote:
you talk about throttling, I can usually tell by a friday afternoon what sort of weekend I'm going to have. Last week no sales on friday afternoon pretty much no sales all weekend. This friday good afternoon sales and so far good weekend. It's seems to be 2 on and 1 off.

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If you keep an eye on your sales averages in selling manager you'll likely see that they remain remarkably constant.

My monthly figures are nearly always within a few percentage points.

I'm quite sure that the powers are just sharing out the individual category turnover so we stay in the game.

It's got to the point where I can predict how sales will go on a day to day basis by checking on these averages.

This also explains why sales come through in bursts - you sell your share and then go dark for a while.

If your sales are drying up it's probably that the listing category is enjoying low activity so there is less to share around.

A seller (on the US boards I believe) claims to have actually been told this by a CS rep when he complined about visibility issues!

If ebay isn't exactly dead it's certainly very very unwell.

[pinnacle-agencies]

Can anyone explain to me with a degree of certainty if I am correct in my understanding when carefully studying all the posts above that if you can run new listings or a few popular products or somehow get your sales up again, that they will likely stay up because the ebay systems that rank ones listings see you as a popular seller and take your offerings closer to the top in their search engine?

Having regard for the posts above I have done some experimantation and early indications seem to point that way ... a bit like getting a boat to plane ... needs heaps of grunt to get up and less grant to stay there!

[clarry100]

We certainly notice that if someone buys a larger quantity of one of our items that it will go up in the Cassini rankings and we will get a run on that item for a few days. Then it will just as quickly drop away again. This point was discussed at recent PESA and Cassini does like items that sell and they will get a boost.
Equally Google search engine does similar stuff if your own private web site gets lots of traffic and sales. Your site gets s boost in the rankings.
The trick is how to get your items noticed in the first place to get that initial traffic and sales. With Google you can pay them via Google adwords but with Cassini it's not that easy.
Some people say to cancel slow moving listings and then resist using sell similar (not just a simple relist ) as very often new listings will get a boost. There doesnot seem to be sany exact science to doing it on EBay.

[sueken4812]

Yes it used to be Sales History that got you noticed.  But now, I don't know what switch they've flicked, but Sales History is now CARP.  Things that regularly sold weekly now seem to get a look at once a month .... so instead of selling at least 4 a month, now only sell 1.

[chameleon54]

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@pinnacle-agencies wrote:

Can anyone explain to me with a degree of certainty if I am correct in my understanding when carefully studying all the posts above that if you can run new listings or a few popular products or somehow get your sales up again, that they will likely stay up because the ebay systems that rank ones listings see you as a popular seller and take your offerings closer to the top in their search engine?

Having regard for the posts above I have done some experimantation and early indications seem to point that way ... a bit like getting a boat to plane ... needs heaps of grunt to get up and less grant to stay there!

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I don't even think most ebay staff claim to now the intricacies of how ebay search results work, so all we have to go on is anecdotal evidence.

From my sales patterns over the last three months this would appear to be correct. I mainly sell one off items in my stores. I have done very little listing for three months, but the items I have listed have been excellent sellers. My sales across the board have been slightly above average INCLUDING many very old listings.

I concluded listing the "red hot" sellers four weeks ago as I had exhausted my suppliers stocks and cant source any more. My sales have drifted lower to be 40% of long term averages last week. All of my items are unique with each item only suited to a very small field of specific buyers, so the "hot sellers" where not attracting buyers who then purchased other items.

The only conclusion I can draw is that the hot sellers where lifting my rankings and visibility overall in searches. I will try to get some listings up this week and expect a lift in sales, but without the "red hot sellers" I would not expect to return to average sales without listing high numbers of new listings of average selling items.

On a slightly different path, we started a second store two years ago from scratch, zero feedback etc. We listed our best items on this store and within three months it was going like a rocket and had outsold our existing large store with high feedback scores and six times as many listings. From other forum discussions this would seem to be the exception rather than the rule, but reinforces the "popular sellers get higher rankings overall " theory. We had to go back and list some great sellers on the older existing store to kick start sales again.

The biggest problem is to find sufficient stocks of the really hot selling items. They are usually rare and highly sought after. THATS WHY they sell so well.