why have the ebay sales dropped 70%?

[Anonymous]

has anyone experienced a 70%drop in sales gular,and no free listings offered apart from the 40 per month.I use to be offered 100 regular,the sales are so poor that I cant afford the listing fees,it may be my time to leave.

[babydolls63]

Yes, I agree. My sales have continually dropped since beginning of this year.... as for the free listings, just found this.....
http://sellercentre.ebay.com.au/promo/2179

[beallieblue-oz]

There were 150 freebies 2 weeks ago, and now another 150 from today,.
I am not getting any emails for them, but have to come onto the forums to find them, as someones always puts in the link.

[cq_tech]

The problem is it's too little, too late. Ebay already make an absolute shipload of money in FVFs on sales as well as postage (something for which I will never forgive them) so there is no real need for them to be charging insertion fees as well. They already give sellers 40 free listings, so why not abolish the limit and simply make all listings free?

Simple maths should tell them that the more listings there are, the more sales they will make, and therefore the more eBay will make in FVFs, yet by holding out for a miserable $1.50 per listing, they're basically cutting their own throats by restricting their income. Whoever makes these high-level decisions is clearly not very bright.

[beallieblue-oz · Accepted solution]

Totally agree, its hard enough to sell handmade items now, let alone adding another $1.50, so just wait for more freebies.
at least we are getting relist 3 more times, but thats coming to a holt.
USA has stopped that, you only get 2, and if they relist it comes off your monthly amount. Not sure when it will get here. greed will backfire on them in the end. As we know quite a few have already left.

[cq_tech]

Well their greed has already reduced them to their current state so if they want to go down the tubes even faster, then by all means let them cut back the free relists and reduce free listings. Dunno about you, but when it takes as many as 5 or 6 relists before I make a bloody sale, there's no way on earth that I'm going to pay a $1.50 listing fee. And then they want their FVF as well? Greed! Nothing but sheer & utter bloody greed, and I doubt they'll ever learn.

[clarry100]

We operate two basic stores and three regular selling IDs where we just list auctions using the 40 per month.

At the moment our store sales are well up for the pre-xmas rush, possibly 10% better than last year same time.

But in the past month or so the sales from our auction IDs have hit rock bottom.

It used to be that as your auction neared the end your listing would bubble its way to the top in search results.

But that is not happeneing any more. They are swamped out by massive amounts of listings by Chinese sellers and people have no chance to see our auctions.

It has reached the point now where we can't even be bothered taking the time to list on the auction IDs since the returns are just not worth the effort.

This flooding by Chinese sellers is getting worse by the day.

As a genuine Aussie seller you have no chance to sell against this cheap rubbish. We have asked a couple of our return customers their opinion about this and they tell us they will never buy from the cheap Chinese sellers that they would prefer to keep the business in Australia. But obviously we are getting a skewed result as we are only hearing from those buyers who are doing the right thing.

[qball28]

What chinese sellers, I've never come up against them.😧

[ourphonecase]

Cheap Chinese **bleep** is easy to deal with since you can advertise as better quality. The problem is when they list items for cheap when their item is actually good quality then when we have a real problem of competing.

[springyzone]

I agree with you that it makes no sense to charge relisting fees.

I would imagine they blame the seller for the fact an item hasn't sold and think the price is too high, so they don't want to encourage too many free re-listings.

I suppose there is a way around it. I found on gumtree that when things expired, I could either pay to relist and bump them back to the start, or else just relist, which meant they were way back on about page 20 of the search results.

For some reason, they also charge to edit an ad after 12 hours.

So what i do now if i want to relist is I save all my spiel in a word document and just click 'new ad', do a cut and paste. It is a bit of a pain as photos have to be reloaded.

For a small scale seller on ebay, the same system might work. Don't click relist, just treat it as a totally new ad and re post.

Of course, if you don't have many free ad spots left for the month, it makes it hard.

From my perspective, can I just say that when I read the listing fee on ebay a while back and saw it was something like $1.50, I could not believe my eyes. My sister and I used to sell back in 2003-2005, and most of the stuff we sold was small, second hand items. Sometimes only for $3-$4. Postage was extra of course, but listing fees were only about 30c back then and it was feasible to sell them, whereas nowadays, it just would not be, not if you had to pay a listing fee that high, on top of selling and paypal fees.

Ebay used to charge to put a photo next to the listing, which i always thought was sheer greed too. It obviously pays them to have items more visible to customers so i notice that fee has gone.

The main fault I see with offering unlimited feee listings is the big sellers are already flooding ebay. Do they have access to unlimited freebies as i can't imagine they would all be paying $1.50 a listing, especially for some of the cheap stuff from China.