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!

[lane-ends]

It is definately about ID activity, not just item activity. Shelve your older slower stock for a while put some new high interest items up and get your ID back on the "most wanted" list.

GTC listings suffer from lack of urgency so  turnover rate slows compared to fresh listings with definate ending times. They may accumulate a lot of old stale watchers. But buyers per watchers and views is low.> Starts to rank low in interest.

It wont stop the Titanic sinking but it may get you out of the lower decks..!

[chameleon54]

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@lane-ends wrote:

It is definately about ID activity, not just item activity. Shelve your older slower stock for a while put some new high interest items up and get your ID back on the "most wanted" list.

GTC listings suffer from lack of urgency so  turnover rate slows compared to fresh listings with definate ending times. They may accumulate a lot of old stale watchers. But buyers per watchers and views is low.> Starts to rank low in interest.

It wont stop the Titanic sinking but it may get you out of the lower decks..!

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Agreed, and this is where auctions can have a role. If you want to stimulate some buying activity, list a few good items with reasonable start prices as 3-5 day auctions. The specific short end date gets intransigent buyers moving.

The million dollar question is what is the "hot sellers". For me it would be finding an old Holden dealership that closed down thirty years ago and still has boxes of new FJ or FC Holden parts still in the wrappers. Old Motor Cycle parts are the same. They are rare, everybody wants them and everyone is searching for the motherload tucked away in an old shed somewhere. Thats why they are "hot sellers" but very hard to find.

[clarry100]

Apart from the fact you appear to have found a niche product(s) and market what I'm drawing from what you say Chameleon is that new listings seem to get attention from buyers.

To that end a while back now we ended a bunch of our slow mover listings (stuff that had once proven popular but had sagged in sales) and relisted them using the "Sell Similar" function.

Also made a few minor changes to the items so that it did not look the same when re-posted.

But the anticipated ("hoped for") boost in sales just did not happen for us.

I had read on these boards that this had worked for others but did not appear to do so for us.

I was at the PESA conference on the GC recently and what I took away from there was that there is a myriad of things that can affect Cassini rankings (either POS or NEG) and no single one of them will have any positive impact.

If there is a "one thing" it is item popularity and sales.

You can pay Google thru Adwords for popularity but I don't know of any way to "pay" Cassini.

[dazzledayz]

Sell trhough rate seems to be pretty important.

If you are selling one offs that can make life difficult as sales histories disappear fairly quickly.

I see the effect of this with certain popular books as opposed to rarer titles.

If I relist from the sold items list I will often sell another copy fairly soon.

If it has dropped out of that list a totally new listing will often sit around for longer.

[plonkacolin]

we as small have no chance anymore

ive just taken a look at the big retail stores on ebay

I was so shocked at their poor feedback

there are thousands  of negative and neutral feedback left from buyers

gawd knows what their defect numbers are

and ebay lets them get away with it

all it does is give buyers a bad feeling about ebay

after 14years on ebay ive never seen it so bad for selling on here

it seems ebay have put a lot of faith in the big stores

but it could also be there downfall

[heihachi_73]

"Even I can not predict the future and don't know what I would have sold since 1/7/15??"

Good catch, it's not July yet, LOL. Should have been 1/6/15. 🙂

[gumleaf_goodies]

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@ourphonecase wrote:

Ahh yeah the good old days where you are allowed to have 1 picture free and everything else you had to pay for..

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Not sure if your reply was tongue-in-cheek or serious, but if the latter -

In the good old days there was a much greater chance of your items actually selling, as there were more buyers, and therefore paying listing fees seemed reasonable. BUT if I recall, there was a sliding scale, so that the cheaper your starting price, the lower the listing fee (and also from memory this is where the silly fad of starting an auction at 99c came in, as there was no listing fee). Now you pay a flat rate of $1.50 whether your item is listed for $5 or $50 or even $500 - how is that fair?

Also there was no such thing as an FVF on postage, which really eats into profits if you are selling low-priced items that cannot be sent as letters. So yes, even though in the 'good old days' you could only have one photo and everything else you paid for, you still didn't pay the outrageous listing fees set these days, nor did you pay fees on postage, and there were plenty more buyers..

[joethenuts]

to gumleaf   nothing stays the same ,prices go up in anything we do ,also people abuse systems ,so things have to change , on postage ,well you dont have to be a brain surgeon on that ,sellers for years were selling goods for $1 and adding $55 postage to cut back on fees ,is that not cheating the system . how about sellers with 8 IDS getting 40 free listings a month , on each ID,  how about sellers that reuse stamped envelopes, how about the old days were furniture stores wernt allowed to trade on sundays , but book stores were,  we had billiard tables selling for free when you buy a book for $2.500.not long ago we had sellers here  think that they did not have to declare earnings from selling online ,because they thought they did not have a business. .

[harley_babes_hoard]

I can tell you what I have noticed. It's all about recent sales. I have had stock listed for months with no takers, then someone will buy one of those items next thing I know over the course of the day/days I will then sell perhaps 2 or 3 more.

It happens time and time again.

[go-tazz]

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@harley_babes_hoard wrote:

I can tell you what I have noticed. It's all about recent sales. I have had stock listed for months with no takers, then someone will buy one of those items next thing I know over the course of the day/days I will then sell perhaps 2 or 3 more.

It happens time and time again.

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That's why Chinese sellers are always at the top of the listings.

They sell low volume items all the time and eBay have set it up so that "succesfull" sellers get top ranking in

search results AND visibility,(I had a 7 day listing up which normally have views within hours but it took 3 days

before it got it's first view),