Ressurecting a dead ebay account.

[chameleon54]

I posted around a month ago that one of my best performing ebay accounts has been affected by a technical fault resulting in sales and questions completely stopping. After a week or so of no sales or questions I phoned CS who ran some tests on the account and confirmed there was a problem and the account was being reffered to the technical team. It took several more days for the problem to be fixed. All up the account was out of action for 12 days.

When the problem was repaired I suspect CS technical department manually over-road ebays systems and increased my listing visibility for 24 hours in order to kick-start the account again in ebay algorythms. I had great sales the first day and questions from buyers which followed through with sales the following day.

THEN IT ALL FIZZLED OUT AGAIN................

After a few more days I phoned CS again..........several times. ..............

They confirmed the account was operating as it should and suggested I should " follow best listing practice " to achieve sales.

Yeah Right !!!!........... The account was making good sales before the problems.

Over the next eleven days I made three sales and had a couple of questions suggesting the account was fixed, but not gaining any listing visibility, due to no action on the account for the period it really was down.

I was feeling fairly despondant, thinking "sales are dead" " Ebay is stuffed " and all the other things we read here regularly. I was contemplating a good account facing terminal injury and was considering abandoning it and starting a new account.

This weekend, I decided to give it one more go to try to kick start sales again.

I deleted around 20 % of my listings ( slow movers ) and relisted them ( sell similar ) with minor changes to price or desription so that they appeared to be genuine new listings. I then went on a listing spree, listing a number of good selling items that should attract some attention. I also re-worked a number of listings, reducing prices on items that where meeting  buyer resistance and where probably over-priced.

RESULT - I have made around half a dozen sales on the account in the last twelve hours, including old listings that I did not fiddle with. I have also recieved a couple of questions on old listings.

I am a firm believer that ebays search algorythms reward account activity, especially new listings, and penalise accounts that are stagnent. This makes sense from ebays position, encouraging good sellers with popular items and forcing those with dud products and sloppy practices from the site. This little experiment seems to be a very clear indication, that this is true.

I will follow up this weekends activity by listing four or five new items on the resurrected account each day to try to maintain and rebuild sales momentum and search visibility.

So if you have an account that was making good sales, but has faded away, it may be worth going on a listing spree to increase search visibility of all items and re-invigorate the account. Reworking old listings and deleting duds may also help.

[unique_pre-driven]

I agree with your words.  I have been away for some time and are trying to get going again in ebay but, due to other influences, out of ebay I am having trouble getting listings done.  I know that when I can get some free time and work consistently hard that things will get some flow.  The seller hub tells you the underperforming listings so just some times re-doing the description, taking $1.00 off the price and adding it to postage (if you want) can bring some views.  Of course some items are just duds in ebay, doesn't mean that they are junk, they just don't work.

Good luck

[brerrabbit585]

I am a firm believer that ebays search algorythms reward account activity, especially new listings, and penalise accounts that are stagnent. This makes sense from ebays position, encouraging good sellers with popular items and forcing those with dud products and sloppy practices from the site. This little experiment seems to be a very clear indication, that this is true.

_______

Actually, it doesn't make sense because a lot of us could and would sell a lot more if they didn't bury our listings so people didn't see them. They're not only forcing dud sellers from the site, they're forcing many good sellers to go elsewhere. Our accounts only become stagnant when ebay favour other sellers over us so that we don't get any sales. Back in May I left all my best items in unsold and I sold a lot of things that I thought would never sell, which proves that ebay gave those ones more visibility while my best sellers weren't listed.

None of us are going to sell anything if we can't get seen, and some of us would sell a LOT more if we got the same sort of visibility as the favoured sellers do. I'm not talking about sellers who have the same items as everyone else but those categories where there's a lot of variety and very few items exactly the same.

Forcing us to relist and tweak listings just wastes time, and also space on their servers, so it's of no benefit to anyone (apart from hopefully getting us more sales). If we didn't have to waste time on tweaking listings we could put that time into brand new listings and sell a lot more, thus earning more fees for ebay.

I've found selling on ebay in the last year has been like a roller coaster ride - either way up high or rock bottom - and it's getting worse all the time. It's not good for the nerves and I spend as much time as I can developing sales elsewhere now. All my 'brand new' listings go elsewhere, not here.

[chameleon54]

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@brerrabbit585 wrote:

I am a firm believer that ebays search algorythms reward account activity, especially new listings, and penalise accounts that are stagnent. This makes sense from ebays position, encouraging good sellers with popular items and forcing those with dud products and sloppy practices from the site. This little experiment seems to be a very clear indication, that this is true.

_______

Actually, it doesn't make sense because a lot of us could and would sell a lot more if they didn't bury our listings so people didn't see them. They're not only forcing dud sellers from the site, they're forcing many good sellers to go elsewhere. Our accounts only become stagnant when ebay favour other sellers over us so that we don't get any sales. Back in May I left all my best items in unsold and I sold a lot of things that I thought would never sell, which proves that ebay gave those ones more visibility while my best sellers weren't listed.

None of us are going to sell anything if we can't get seen, and some of us would sell a LOT more if we got the same sort of visibility as the favoured sellers do. I'm not talking about sellers who have the same items as everyone else but those categories where there's a lot of variety and very few items exactly the same.

Forcing us to relist and tweak listings just wastes time, and also space on their servers, so it's of no benefit to anyone (apart from hopefully getting us more sales). If we didn't have to waste time on tweaking listings we could put that time into brand new listings and sell a lot more, thus earning more fees for ebay.

I've found selling on ebay in the last year has been like a roller coaster ride - either way up high or rock bottom - and it's getting worse all the time. It's not good for the nerves and I spend as much time as I can developing sales elsewhere now. All my 'brand new' listings go elsewhere, not here.

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From my experiences, your first comment regards leaving your most popular items unlisted and selling more " stale " listings would appear to be correct and is a clear indication of the mythical throttling that some sellers report. You will sell "X $$$ " each month, regardless of what you do or how popular your items are. I experienced this for several years, until I downgraded one store from featured to basic and opened a second basic store. It appears the basic stores do not get "regulated sales" to the same extent as featured and are more free flowing in sales patterns.

As to your next highlighted points, I only have 3 or 4 main competitors in my field and I do keep a bit of an eye on their sales. One in particular was around half the size of my main business a few years ago, but he has been succesful in increasing listings, sales and most importantly visibility. To be honest, he,s kicking my but now. The way he has done this is by selling quite a few of the most popular, but least profitable items. He still makes around 50-75% profit on these, but more importantly, the regular sales boost the visibility of his less popular, but more profitable items ( with 300-1000% profit margins ). He regularly ranks higher than me in searches and if we have identical items, his will sell first.

If I was still serious about ebay, I would copy what he is doing, but I am in a wind down phase with my ebay businesses, selling stored stock and not buying much in, so that after ebay fees, everything I sell is profit.  

As for forcing good sellers from the site, this is an unfortunate consequence of policy decisions made by those far removed from front line ebay. I have started a sheep grazing business as I simply could not rely on ebay for my total income. The sheep are very good at the moment and it appears we might have just jagged it right for once ( if we can get through the dry weather OK...   ) 

[brerrabbit585]

I don't know that I'm throttled even though my yearly sales don't vary a real lot across all IDs. My monthly sales can vary quite a bit and even my 6 monthly sales can vary a lot. Last year things were down by around 30% until December and then I tried a couple of different things, including relisting some items using Sell Similar and slightly changing the titles, and from the start of January my sales rocketed and brought me back to my normal yearly sales.

I find that relisting with slight changes (using SS) only works for a few weeks and then I have to do it all over again. I find it easier to have a bout of relisting and then do none again for a few weeks so I don't do them all the time, but I've decided to do two or three smaller bouts in an effort to keep the momentum going.

I'm assuming that it was doing the 'new' relists that boosted my sales but I'll be keeping a close eye on it from now on. I've noticed that less listings doesn't necessarily mean less sales. I used to have between 600 and 800 but for a while now I've only had around 450 and still got the same sales. The lower listing numbers are partly due to ebay sales but I've also taken a lot of the better items off and sold them elsewhere. I can list things here for a few years and sell nothing, then I list them elsewhere and they can be gone in a week. I'm sure that they just haven't been seen here!

I'm sure a lot of the extra 'visibility' is from our items being shown on other listings as 'similar items', but if your items are unique they're not going to be shown on other listings because they aren't similar. I think this accounts for half my listings not showing much - they're popular if they get seen because not many others sell them. My competitors mainly sell other themes, especially 'trendy', which I don't do.

[chameleon54]

Well the half a dozen sales in twelve hours was nice while it lasted...................dead as a dodo since.

So onto CS again. I have had a few chats with their technical department. It turns out ebay made major changes to their search algorythms in early August. This has resulted in a number of random accounts being affected in the same way as my account. ie suddenly died. CS did some searches and confirmed my items where virtually invisible.

Ebays tech people have been supposedly working on the problem for the past month and expect the problem will take at least another month to fix. .............Great...................... Even when ( and if ) the account is fixed, after two months of no views on listings, no sales and no questions, I have got bucklies chance of re-instating visibility in searches etc. It is looking like my reliable selling account is suffering a permenant death.

I,m just glad I branched out a couple of years ago and created another non internet income stream. If I was still relying on ebay for the bulk of my income I would be in serious trouble now. Unfortunately the site is far too unstable to form long term businesses on these days and it was due to this risk that I moved away from being a full time ebay seller.

[gumleaf_goodies]

When I first read this post, I thought my best way of getting things moving again (increasing sales) was to make lots more new listings, as sales have been dismal for quite a while. I used to consistently get 20 sales per month from each of my two IDs, but over the last couple of months, sales have been down significantly. 

So I added about 20 brand new listings to each ID - and not a whisper. Weekends used to be my best selling times, but nothing for at least the last 2 weekends, and I've sold just 3 items in total in the lat week. It's all so depressing, and provides no incentive to create new listintgs (or even 'freshen up' existing listings). 

[chameleon54]

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@gumleaf_goodies wrote:

When I first read this post, I thought my best way of getting things moving again (increasing sales) was to make lots more new listings, as sales have been dismal for quite a while. I used to consistently get 20 sales per month from each of my two IDs, but over the last couple of months, sales have been down significantly. 

So I added about 20 brand new listings to each ID - and not a whisper. Weekends used to be my best selling times, but nothing for at least the last 2 weekends, and I've sold just 3 items in total in the lat week. It's all so depressing, and provides no incentive to create new listintgs (or even 'freshen up' existing listings). 

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The listing splurge I did a week ago yielded 6 sales in 12 hours, so it did work for a short while. Unfortunately not a peep since and according to CS my listings are still way down in visibility. Like you I am feeling fairly despondant about it all and I cant really see the point in doing a lot of new listings if it is not going to get things going again.

Ebay CS did pay all of the fees on my account including commissions on the few sales I did have and promised to pay them for the next two months, but that is not a lot of help if I,m not selling anything anyway.

I will just leave the account untouched for six weeks or so, put some time into my other two selling accounts ( which are unaffected ) and spend more time on my sheep grazing business which is going very well, so long as we can stay on top of the drought.

If I cant get the account back up in around two months time I will have to abandon it and start a new selling id, or change one of the two remaining selling ID,s to fill the gap. Pity though as the sick id has quite a few followers, 100 % pos feedback and powerseller status. It was also making very reliable, consistent sales until the problems kicked in.

[digital*ghost]

If that is the case, there's likely some poor sellers out there who have no idea and will just give up on ebay all together, since ebay are certainly not ones to make public announcements about these kinds of failures, or even contact affected sellers privately. 

I tell you hwat...

This is kind of related, as it's about visibility and such, anyway.

I recently realised that not only do my items display as "used" in some areas of eBay, but they also come up as "used" in google search results.  Really not a good look for craft supplies, since "used" = "useless, now". So, since I buy large quantities and make smaller packets (which I then listed as 'new without tags'), I bought a direct thermal label printer, designed a brand label, whack that on all my items, and list as "new with tags" under my own brand name.

Things did actually pick up noticably, too, and I've only updated a small-ish percentage of listings. Could be a coincidence, of course, but if nothing else, my stuff will no longer show as "used" when people are googling for things I sell. 

[muh1534]

Hello
Trust me EBay is bull**bleep** and even there Moneyback Guarantee Yankee bull**bleep** operations This is what you can expect
They switch you off at there will
There should be more internet seller company’s
Should also be more Countries, like South Korea
That stand up and not scared of USA
When things don’t go USA way
They know how to kill the market in there favour
What do you expect of Yankees
May the Human Race be protected from this bull**bleep** and any harm from USA