What has happened to the Traffic on Ebay?

[darre3808-jzkif]

Is it just me or has the traffic on Ebay taken a massive dive?

I have just come back to start selling saddles again after some years and have

noticed that traffic on Ebay is nowhere near where it used to be.

I have listed a saddle: LeTek DRESSAGE SADDLE

There is only 2 of them in total on the site and mine is cheaper so I would assume

that the lack of competition should see my item getting plenty of views but I am

not seeing very much traffic at all.

In fact I listed the same saddle on a new Aussie selling site and was really surprised that

the new site had more traffic to my item than Ebay had, the items were listed on both

sites on the same day.

As I write this the traffic is;

Ebay: 30 Views

Swapmeet: 53 Views

Thats quite a large difference!

Is anyone else seeing that the traffic on Ebay has taken a huge dive?

[englishrosegardens]

Digi is right.  If there are less results that come up if someone uses the word horse in a search, and your listings do have that word in the title, your listings will be part of the few, so you have more chance of a sale.  The only way you'd have less chance of a sale is if they excluded listings with the word horse in the title, as digi has already explained.  Every time you put a word in the title that someone may use in a search and isn't likely to exclude, you raise your chances of being seen more than other listings in the same category.

Just because someone knows saddles and horses inside out and back to front doesn't necessarily make them intelligent when it comes to searching online.  I look at a lot of the sellers on here who profess to know how to sell, but a lot of them couldn't find their way out of a paperbag.  You can be an expert in one area but a total failure in another.

It's to the buyer's disadvantage if less listing show, but not to the seller (providing their listings show).

[elusiveeditions]

Overall, I guess you could say it's better to have more search keys than less and including the word 'horse' couldn't hurt. Still, I agree with lyndal- I can't see people a) buying a saddle as a gift or b) stumbling onto a saddle from a vaguely related search and saying 'Actually, I'll have that'.

Back to the OP, I had a quick bash at listing on swapmeet and met with a few problems- nothing that spending some proper time on it wouldn't sort out I'd imagine. Mainly my pics were sideways and couldn't rotate them, and a few other small things. I had 2 listings up for about 36 hours before taking them down, and was pretty amazed at the number of views in that time. Views don't mean sales of course, but I'll probably give it another go. It'll never get anywhere without people listing.

[digital*ghost]

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@lyndal1838 wrote:

Digi, have a look at post #13.

The use of the word "Horse" with  saddle or dressage saddle gives a lot less results than the stand alone words.

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I know, that was kinda my point. Having 'horse' in the title won't exclude the listing from search results, it would just make sure it's in the search results if someone does happen to use 'horse' as a search keyword. 

In other words, if I type 'dressage saddle' and get (I forgot how many you said, and I'm too lazy to go back and check  ) 5000 results, those 5000 results will include all of the listings that have 'horse' in the title as well. If I add 'horse' to my search keywords and the results are only 500, I'm actually eliminating all the listings who don't use 'horse' in the title, rather than either of those searches eliminating listings that do.

I'm sure the fact that so few do use it is telling, and would perhaps liken it a bit to using 'music' in the title for a CD, in that the vast majority are going to search for an artist / title and find exactly what they want, without even thinking of typing "Crippled Black Phoenix music CD" (just who I'm listening to right now, as an irrelevant FYI :D). But every now and then someone will hop on eBay and type something like "classical music". 

[misterforgetfulsbooks]

there used to be good ways to search and exclude the carp on ebay.

Now you have to waste your time going through pages and pages of **bleep** just to get to something worth your time opening the page on

[padi*0409]

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@misterforgetfulsbooks wrote:

there used to be good ways to search and exclude the carp on ebay.

Now you have to waste your time going through pages and pages of **bleep** just to get to something worth your time opening the page on

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You can still filter your searches quite easily by putting -xxxxx -yyyyyy -zzzzzz at the end of your search parameters, where x,y and z are the things you don't want in the search. You need to put a space between the end of your original search and any -xxxxxx.  

[englishrosegardens]

There are people out there who wouldn't search for a specific brand because they don't know exactly what they're looking for.  I'm talking about the people with more money than sense whose 13-year-old daughter expresses an interest in learning dressage.  The parents think that buying the most expensive gear will automatically earn their daughter everyone's respect, regardless of the fact that she may be pretty hopeless at riding, or they think that having the most expensive gear will make her a better rider.  Because they're totally new to it, they aren't going to know what brand to look for.

I've seen this in many different areas of life where a child expresses an interest in something and the parents outlay enormous sums before the child has even learnt the basics.  My own sister spend thousands on fancy riding clothing (tailor made), thousands more on warmbloods and having one of them professionally broken in, thousands more on a custom made horse float because warmbloods are too big for standard ones, and then not actually using any of it.  No, our parents didn't pay for it but she was prepared to spend thousands to have the best and showiest, and some of it got absolutely no use.  She'd be riding for many years but she only rode this horse once or twice.  Never wore her fancy jacket, and used the float more to cart firewood than horses.

I've also known people to give expensive gifts without actually knowing what the person's needs or tastes were. Years ago I knew a man who bought his wife a fairly expensive sewing machine as a gift.  She definitely got use from it but he had no idea what sort of features she'd use most so they would have got much better value for money if he'd consulted her first.  There could easily have been features on the machine she got that she'd never use, but missing features that she really needed, and that were possibly available on a cheaper machine.  He felt like a real man for doing it the way he did but it wasn't very practical.  It's entirely possibly that someone who knows nothing about saddles could do the same thing for a relative who's interested in horses.

[lyndal1838]

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@englishrosegardens wrote:

Just because someone knows saddles and horses inside out and back to front doesn't necessarily make them intelligent when it comes to searching online.  I look at a lot of the sellers on here who profess to know how to sell, but a lot of them couldn't find their way out of a paperbag.  You can be an expert in one area but a total failure in another.

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Thank you for your ringing endorsement of my intelligence.  After 10 years and in excess of 12000 purchases on ebay I think I am reasonably competent to search for what I want to buy.

As for selling ability....I have no idea as I am not a seller.

[englishrosegardens]

I never made any reference to your intelligence at all. Just because some buyers are intelligent doesn't make all buyers intelligent, which is the whole point of what I'm saying. Some people know how to search properly but many don't. A lot of buyers don't know you can sort by anything other than best match, many don't even know you can look at a buyer's sold items, but these people can be brilliant in other fields.

Are you saying that because you are intelligent, that makes ALL other buyers intelligent, especially those who have the same interest in horses? I know people who are brilliant riders but they're hopeless when it comes to computers.

[misterforgetfulsbooks]

Thing is you might look for lets say horse riding gear only to find there are erasers, pencils, pads, rulers, exercise books all with the words horse rideing gear beside them. DOH!

For me, I like to look for Australian movies made using Australian actors etc...

So I do a search for Australian movies.

Do you know how many Aussie Release movies I have to bypass to get to the 1st Muriels Wedding or Rhomper Stomper?

Point being is everyone uses the same key words now and it is near impossible to find what you're looking for without trolling through 100's of pages before you find anything that resembles what you're looking for

[dylan11235813]

Having content within the listing helps as well.

Having too many keywords can be detrimental also. I sell 2 near identical items and one I sell lots of for some reason, with slightly different keywords. The one I sell less of I concider a better product.