Are there ANY eBay metrics, which have ANY value AT ALL?

[Ostap Bender]

Hi there!

My question might sound pretty naive, but please keep in my mind that i started selling only 2 months ago.

From my limited experience so far with the eBay dashboard, i wouldn’t say that any metric there has any particular value (with one notable exception)

Whether it might be visitors, clicks etc. non of the figures there truly say anything important to me or am I wrong ?

Only exception:
If you have any observers, watching your article, you can expect some best-price-offers in the near future (although i start to doubt this as well, tbh, since now 25 % of my articles have observers, but i rarely get any offers these days = summer ?)

What’s the experience of other forum members ?

[Jay]

Other sellers might disagree, but we find that eBat metrics are not helpful. Especially if you sell weirder, vintage items. There are only two metrics eBay gives: Views and Watchers.

Views: Absolutely do not look at this number. I assume that views aren’t even accurate.

Watchers: We sell items with 0 watchers all the time. Sold 14 items so far this week. 4 of those items has zero watchers. That’s almost 33%.

Best thing to do is learn to do research and trust your gut. eBay is great because you can see the historical data from the last 90 days of sold items. Plus you can see everything similar that’s for sale now. You’re definitely not flying blind of you learn the market.

[Ostap Bender]

we sell items with 0 watchers all the time. Sold 14 items so far this week. 4 of those items has zero watchers. That’s almost 33%.

That’s exactly what i experienced too.
I sold last week some articles, which sites might have been visited 10 times and had 0 watchers as well.

Regarding this:

eBay is great because you can see the historical data from the last 90 days of sold items.

I do wonder if you still oppose the use of Terrapeak ?

My problem with the historical data from the last 90 days is that i sell some “rare” products which haven’t been sold in the last 90 days on eBay, so i don’t have any reliable info from eBay on this particular product and I’m the guy with only 150 articles listed.

How do you deal with this problem without any additional eBay research tool, Jay ?

[Jay]

I know seller’s who use Terrpeak and say it’s useful. We havent been able to justify the need to pay $12/month for the data: https://www.terapeak.com/products/

I bet there are maybe .001% our items don’t have any historical data on eBay’s 90 day sold search. How many items are you finding without any data? I would encourage you to expand your search because often rare items were just listed strangely.

But the other 99.999% of items we list have plenty of data. Its pretty incredible that almost anything weird we find has been listed on eBay in the last 90 days. The power of crowd sourcing.

Plus, how valuable is info as it gets older. If an item sold 5 years ago, is that price still relevant today?

[MyCottage]

My guess? If you sell new, commodity type merchandise than some of ebay’s metrics, price guidance, and other Seller Hub stuff might be pretty useful. For scavenger sellers, the utility of most of that stuff is pretty limited. I will sometimes (at least before the new 14 day rule) use the watch list to put stuff bon Markdown Manager, because (supposedly) watchers are notified by ebay that the price has been lowered. Also, if I get an unusually large number of views I might adjust the price or the photos or something, because there seems to be interest but not one actually doing anything.

But I would also say, if ebay took away the view and watch count (and its been screwed up for weeks), I’d just continue along without it.

But I do stress, some of this data is probably very useful for commodity sellers.

It would be nice if ebay would focus some of their improvements on us scavengers, but then again, perhaps benign neglect is better than ebay’s “improvements” LOL

[T-Satt]

I update and graph out the following data by day:

Listing Impressions
eBay Page Views
O/S eBay Page Views
Transactions

I find it interesting to see what type of traffic our store is generating. This is the only view into how many “customers are browsing your store”.

I line this up with our Inventory level to see some percentages.

Page Views as a % of Impressions – What percentage of the time does a shopper click on our item when it is on the screen in front of them? For us, currently 1.5%.

Transactions as a % of Page Views – What percentage of the time does a shopper purchase our item when they click our listing? For us, 1.46%.

Impressions per Transaction – How many Impressions does it take to land a sale? Right now, we are at about 4,400. So we have to get our listing in front of a shopper 4,400 times to get a sale.

This leads to Jay’s point about needing a good size inventory to get consistent sales. We are selling our items about 4 times as fast as Jay and Ryanne, and we still have to have our item put in front of over 4,000 people before we get a sale.

Plus, it is interesting to see that we have about 40,000 impressions per day right now. Imagine a store that has 40,000 people per day looking at your items!

[Ostap Bender]

This leads to Jay’s point about needing a good size inventory to get consistent sales.

May I ask you & the others how many items you have in your inventory ?
I’ll immidiately admit that i’m a bloody beginner with roughly 150 articles in his inventory (but i’m expanding it weekly)

[Jay]

You obviously havent read our very scientific manifesto 🙂 https://www.scavengerlife.com/manifesto/

Unless youre selling very high demand commodity items, we started seeing steady sales after about 500 items in our inventory back in 2008/2009. And since more and more people are getting into online selling, I’d say that 1000 items might be more appropriate now to guarantee regular sales.

[bcfol440]

OStap – it took me 1.5 years to get from 150 to 500. I like to review the thread on the main weekly podcast b/c folks report their store number and how many from store sold that week. You will see variance on the ratio. It also depends on what you sell of course. 😉

[T-Satt]

Ostap – Here is our trajectory. Other results may vary…

2015
Starting Inventory – 331
Ending Inventory – 808
Average Sales per Week – 39

2016
Starting Inventory – 808
Ending Inventory – 1,225
Average Sales per Week – 47

2017
Starting Inventory – 1,225
Ending Inventory – 1,644
Average Sales per Week – 68

2018
Starting Inventory – 1,644
Current Inventory – 2,405
Average Sales per Week – 80

[bcfol440]

T-Statt: Your STR is very, very good! Wow. I am inspired and also jealous.
What are your categories?

Back to OP question: Once your store is over a hump (let’s say 1,000 items or an Anchor / Premium store) can a person “set it and forget it” and watch the sales roll in? The answer, is yes, but slower pace perhaps. For example, you list every item in your house, death piles, etc. You have no new inventory and no cash to obtain it. Would you still make money? Yes. Will your amount of sales be slower than a store with new listings? Yes. Unless you are ranked extremely high in the category (from what I heard)? OR you have a highly ( very highly) in demand product priced correctly….

[T-Satt]

bcfo: We do a lot of clothes and shoes which increases our STR. We are still trucking at about a $25 ASP so it is working in a good range right now.

[ebaymom]

I have been finding the Marketing Tab -> Promoted Listings (# of Clicks) dashboard metric interesting because I’ve been running heavy on my promoted listings. I can verify that the more I promote, the more extra “clicks” (and sales) I am getting.

To use my store for example, these dashboard metrics are telling me that for every 237 “clicks” on a promoted listing I average 1 sale. I average almost 300 clicks a day from paying for promoted listings. This costs me an average of $2.2 per sale (and my ASP hovers between $20 and $30) – so I’ll continue with the promoted listings at this time – the payoff is worth it.

[Author]

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