Anyone Else Noticed Drop Off In Sales Since New Top Rated Seller Program?

[arlottstreetstation]

Has anyone else noticed a drop in sales since the new program took effect? Only about 1/4 to 1/3 of my listings qualify for the new Premium Seller because I can't offer Free Post due the cost. I've noticed a pretty BIG drop in sales which I put down to my items now being virtually invisable. If this keeps up it won't be worth it anymore.

[davewil1964]

All mine are BIN, GTC. That is the point of having a store, surely?

[crazy-technology]

all of the sellers suffer the same problems 

[buttonsvintageandnewstore]

Yes, you definitely want them to be Good till Cancelled, but so frustrating. This is the last email I have received from them, I have just emailed them again ... they are saying that the duration of the other persons auction is less, but really it's not, I only had a couple of days left and they had five days, though the difference being mine was Good till Cancelled.

Hi buttonsvintageandnewstore,

Thanks for contacting us back.

I have checked the items you've given and the difference I see between these items are their price and their duration. The price of the pink button is lesser. The duration as well is lesser as your item is Good Til Cancelled. However as what James' said, we can't really pinpoint as to what are the factors that make a certain item located higher than you as our Best Match ranking is too complicated.

It filters a lot of factors to arrive an arrange with your search. We suggest you check your items and work on those factors that you can control.

Thank you for choosing eBay.

Warm regards,

[rainajewels2010]

Yes dramatic drop this week for no reason. Im still listing the same things with the same terms, haven't adjusted my listing for Premium seller. Im starting to wonder if its worth to sell on ebay anymore. 

[thecatspjs]

Ditto  !!

Big slump indeed.  Very concerning.  I had not really recovered from decline from glitch night forward on any ID.

Wondering if overall ebay is not doing so well generally .... given free voucher giveaways etc  

Not sure I would put it down to just to introduction of Top Rated Program Plus

[daniellebradydesigns]

I received a response from eBay regarding this issue.

"I checked your sales records and I am not seeing that there is a significant drop."

Apparently eBay doesn't think that going from $300 - $500 a week in sales, down to $6 is a significant drop. Seriously?

Mind you, I can't get access to sales reports, nor traffic reports without some sort of error message. Eg. 'this page has been removed'. Which I questioned and got a generic response on how to subscribe to sales reports. I'm already subscribed, I can't access the pages. 

[grampian_girl]

Me too even with free postage on everything

[sellalldavid]

I have noticed a drop in sales this last 10 days and each day is getting worse.  I have been selling on E-Bay for the last 4 years and this is the worst week I have ever had. Hope things improve soon.

[global-coins-collectables]

My sales are down and I haven't made the mods to get my listings higher.

The reason is I refuse to give ebay any more of my profit than I need to.

eBay take a percentage of the sale but that doesn't include the postage fee. If we adjust our pricing to include "free post" they get to charge on that too!

[clarry100]

We have two eBay stores both selling in the baby headbands & accessories area. As of about 17th Sept we noticed a huge reduction in activity & sales. Estimate we are down about 45% in sales volume in the past 2-weeks. And at that stage we had not changed anything about our listings. All of our BIN listings are now 100% compliant with the new TRS+ requirements but still we are not getting visibility. We used to get 10 or so listings in the top 100 of best match now we are seeing our first listing down around 300+. 

What we are finding in our category is that there are a huge number of Chinese sellers swamping the top 100 listings. And they mostly do not comply with TRS+. So changing our listings seems to have been pointless. We are getting ZERO benefits.

Many emails to/from eBay in the past week about this have resulted in nothing but rhetoric (??) and saying we have to improve our listings in comparison to our competition.

This is supposed to be eBay Australia so I think they should change the default search filter to Australia ONLY to remove these O/S sellers from the results and give us Aussie sellers the preference. After all, our profits stay in Australia and not O/S.

We are now studying other online selling options including setting up our own website and using the enormous fees (abbout 19% of sales overall between ebay/PayPal) to place ads on Google Advertising.

So we will dump eBay as soon as we can get other options working well enuff.

Any thoughts on all this ppl?