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There's a pattern appearing that seems to demonstrate a direct relationship between having to have a vast number of listings to register a number of sales that appear semi-decent. But looks can be deceptive.

If you have a dozen listings, you probably get 0 to 2 sales by the end of the month. Before the changes I used to average around 6 sales per month for 8 to 10 listings.

If you have around 100 listings, you may be now getting a handful of sales.

If you have hundreds of listings, you may be now getting a couple of dozen sales.

If you have thousands of listings, you may be now getting around 50 or more sales.

In marketing circles, anyone selling a thousand of anything will, by the laws of averages, sell about 2% straightaway (e.g. phone 1000 people and you will most likely make 20 sales). Nothing special has to be done except try and direct your marketing at potential customers. Back in the 'good-old-days', Australia Post used to say, send out 1000 brochures using a list of potential customers and you should get about 3 to 4% return business immediately. It still astounds me how anyone can list a few thousand items under a single name on eBay, where the vast majority of the listings attract a listing fee, can survive any length of time with only 50 to 100 or so sales. Small shops need this on a daily basis let alone over 10 to 30 days! Some may argue the sale rates appear similar, however, the costs are vastly different! Where brochures are posted out, the cost of the marketing is considerably lower per sale unit. However, via that marketing approach, and by TARGETING YOUR KEY MARKET sending out let's say 1000 brochures, you should double the response rate thereby making around 50 IMMEDIATE sales for the cost of around $100 (cost of brochures, envelopes and stamps). Join in shared mailing and you can greatly reduce that cost. That means about .10c marketing cost per targeted potential customer. Compare that to eBay and possible Paypal in the mix, and you're most likely paying more than 30 times that on low cost goods, 150 times that on sold items around $100 and so forth. This is where sellers are being gouged.

So, the upshot of this is, something is seriously wrong at the moment for sellers on eBay. Given eBay's enormous reach, the consequential potential exposure and the increasing popularity of online sales, the ability to attract a vast number of targeted customers when customers use the search facility, the results and costs should be much better for sellers than what is currently happening. I can only surmise that eBay's May 1 changes this year have had a dramatically detrimental effect on Australian sellers. Possible defects on eBay's current part could be a failure of the search facility to provide a balance potential customer match (eBay is not properly targeting potential customers to our benefit like it used to), sabotage when competing items suddenly appear on our listing pages, a flood of overseas listings giving an unfair advantage (e,g, vastly cheaper postage costs for Chinese imports), an unbalanced fee take, compounding fees, a site which has become too expensive, a site which is no longer attractive to potential buyers?