I have experienced a 80-90% drop in traffic to listings and a huge drop in sales, no ranking change on my account but listings are appearing 9 to 10 pages after the first one even with free postages and selling at prices where I make a loss, sales have dropped by at least half, any one else experiencing poor listing performance over the last few months ? Please respond to the survey leave any helpful tips on improving listing performance if you have any clues.

I think you'll find this is something that either is happening, or has happened, to a lot of sellers over the last year or so, with quite a number of factors that can affect listing performance (including - seemingly - the sheer whim of the eBay 'gods' :O). Best Match, which determines where your listing places in search results, is based primarily on sales, but there are a lot of unknown factors as to how one listing can outrank another when it has fewer sales, and the seller's feedback is worse than others. Auctions and discount sales can sometimes help, though I have always found that when things are quiet, they stay that way even with very attractive auction/sale prices.

More recently, some results for eBay listings returned in google searches has fallen in rank back a few pages, so that may be affecting sales if you were getting a lot of hits via google. Sometimes it lasts for a while, sometimes things go back to 'normal' (as normal as sales can be) relatively quickly.

Re: statistics in general, I use a few as a gauge - eg if someting I've listed is getting a lot of views but not even one watcher, I presume the title is ok, but there's something about the listing that's not particularly attractive (price, photos, description and so on). A revamp and/or price change can do wonders (and I don't always reduce when changing price). If something has only gotten a scant number of views in a couple of weeks, I'll give the title an overhaul.

Re: search results - I use ending soonest by default, then if nothing I want at a good price is ending anytime soon, switch to price + postage lowest first, usually filtering out auctions as well.