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Hi, my name is sonia and I am a recovering conspiracy theorist.
I recently fell off the wagon when my sales tanked over the last month. So today I decided to investigate the Performance Tab of Seller Hub. If eBay was truly turning off the tap to my listings, then that would show up as a lower # of impressions, but my fabulous listings should still have the same click-through rate and sales conversion rate. When I look at the data, I see that the # of impressions did go down a lot in mid January, but has been creeping up steadily and is almost back to late December levels, while my sales have not recovered. My click-through and sell-through rates also dropped in mid january, and have stayed low. So there’s a big part of the answer – people who see my stuff aren’t clicking on or buying it.
I’m assuming that the sharp drop-off in # of impressions is due to the late end of holiday buying season, but it could be something more nefarious on ebay’s part :). Anybody else also seeing a big drop-off in # of impressions starting in mid-January? To find out, click on “Performance”, then click on the “Traffic” section, and then change the data timeframe to the last 2-3 months.
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Here’s the graph of my # of daily impressions for the last few months. How does the shape of this graph compare with yours? I sell 80-90% clothing, including vintage. A lot of long tail stuff.
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No dip for us, but this will be interesting to check out as the summer months come and our sals normally always sink.
https://imgur.com/a/GxfjFI’m glad you’re actually looking into your numbers vs just being angry.
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Ooh – I love your flat graph – thanks for sharing! Anybody else?
FWIW, there is more than one kind of conspiracy theorist, Jay 🙂
The first kind are the angry, capital-C Conspiracy theorists who think eBay is evil and out to screw them. I belong the second group, the capital-T conspiracy Theorists, always trying to figure out the secret algorithm in the black box and what contortions to go through to get around it. We’re not angry, but rather just worried/anxious (when sales are down) and maybe sometimes over-think things instead of just listing.🙂
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Mine has gone up but I think it has to do with me adding 300+ items in inventory over the course of February. There is that drop on the 24th of January that I saw, dropped off 1000 impressions.
I don’t wanna get political but it could have been because of all the news going on with the inauguration and the executive orders being passed… people stop buying when they get scared or confused. Lot of people protesting and stuff maybe they are the same ones who buy cool vintage clothes on eBay? Just another Theory for you =D
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Thanks for sharing your data and thoughts!
At this point I think I probably need to take a break from the theories (b/c they are making my head hurt) and get back to listing. But it is really cool to see other people’s actual data. I’m very glad that eBay added this functionality to Seller Hub. -
I have not consistently listed since December. I have only listed on two days this year so far – each time about 10-15 items. My average daily listing impressions appears to have dropped from 16k to 12k day, or 25%. Page views dropped by about the same.
My February sales are down 58% from my December sales. I wasn’t listing very much in December either, but I was at least listing.
Now when it comes to J&R, they list constantly and they have very consistent impressions statistics. It just goes to show that listing = more views = better chance to generate a sale.
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I have noticed a direct correlation to the activity I spend on Ebay and how much I sell. And by activity, I mean any activity at all, even just checking messages and making adjustments to listings. My theory is that Ebay will reward you for the time you spend on the site, by making your listings more visible to buyers.
To back up my theory, I went a few months being very slack with my time on Ebay, and during that time it was as if my store went dormant. I got zero sales even though I had about 150 listings. But as soon as I began getting active again, suddenly old dead inventory started moving and I was back in business.
I do believe that Ebay gets involved with their sellers, and their stores. I think they want to reward their sellers for their time. So somehow they manipulate things in favor of those who are putting time in. This is my theory anyway. So now that I want to get serious about selling I have a rule to make sure I spend time on Ebay everyday and this is working for me.
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I appreciate that Jay always has a positive attitude whenever it comes to “Ebay throttling” or whatever you want to call it. While I agree with him that there is no insidious plot by Ebay to limit sales, I do believe that Jay underestimates the variables used in algorithms that a publicly traded company like Ebay uses to try and drive total sales / revenues.
It’s not even a theory really. Do a search for something on Ebay (i.e. “Polo Shirt”), then log out of your store, delete your cookies, and change your IP address, preferably to one from a different part of the country, and the ordering of results will be different.
I will often see sales from specific geographic areas or categories spike over periods of time. Recently, it’s been 4 hat sales in 2 days (random trucker hats and high end baseball caps). Yeah, it could be random, but I think it’s more likely that Ebay’s algorithms rotated me to the top of the “hat” category for a period of time, and the sales kept me there for a while.
There is no malice or human thought involved, just a computer algorithm running and trying to maximize sales via search results.
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This is a great overview of what’s happening in eBay search engine. This happens on Amazon, Walmart, and any search engine you use. It’s the nature of a search engine algorithm.
I’m simply confused when people say eBay is “throttling” them, somehow illegally hurting their sales, or singling out their store for punishment. These sellers (and ecommercebytes) are signally bad intention that is illogical.
For any instances when eBay’s search algorithm may lower the rank of my items, I assume there are an equal amount of instances when my items are pushed up depending on who’s doing the searching.
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I’ll play, mostly because I was curious, and love the fact that someone is taking a calculated approach to things.
Mine is mostly flat, but there’s probably a slight dip in mid-late January. Listing volumes were relatively consistent over the period. One or two listings a day on average, give or take one or two here and there.
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re: “singling out their store for punishment” – to me that’s exactly the same thing as saying “I don’t get as many views/sales when I’m not listing or otherwise interacting with my store.” In other words, you get punished for not listing. That is not necessarily a bad or evil thing on ebay’s part. I can see how it would make sense for eBay to reward sellers who are actively investing in their stores. Just like it makes sense for them to reward those with better feedback, fewer defects, fewer late shipments, etc (which is the same as punishing the others). The only difference is that they don’t explicitly advertise listing activity as a search rank criterion, so we’re left to wonder.
So what’s my point here? I’m just trying to say that I don’t see what’s so horrible about wondering why one’s sales are down and thinking that one of the possible reasons might be that eBay’s search engine is de-ranking your items b/c of some not-explicitly-advertised criterion that you would be happy to improve upon if you could be certain what it was. It doesn’t automatically make you some sort of negative paranoid angry conspiracy theorist.
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Sonia, I don’t think you’re a negative paranoid angry conspiracy theorist. But if you go on the eBay forums, those sellers do exist. They live on ecommercebytes and sometimes they wander over here for short periods. They spend an inordinate amount of time convincing each other that their failure on eBay occurs because eBay is punishing them.
There’s nothing wrong with wondering about how a search engine works. There’s nothing wrong with experimenting.
My point is simply this: if we are listing quality items with clear photos, good photos, and researched prices, we sell items. Day in and day out. We have the data to back it up in the form of eight years of full-time income.
There are slow parts of the year, but we choose to not think eBay is throttling our store or working against us. We choose to focus on scavenging items that excite us and list them as quickly as possible. Anything else feels irrelevant to our business. If sellers have suggestions on how to sell more, we’re always open to listening to results that are reproducible.
But every seller can have their own way of working.
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Thanks for that, Jay. I agree with you that the angry sellers do exist on the eBay forums, and I agree with your opinion about them. I guess I just *thought* you sometimes used the term “conspiracy theorist” in other contexts relating to non-angry (but perhaps sometimes complaining or overthinking) sellers on here, and that bothered me. But I may have misheard or misinterpreted. And with my CFS brain fog issues, it’s altogether possible that I just made it up!
Anyway, I’m off to pack and ship and then list more. Although it is useful to do some wondering & hypothesizing about low or high sales from time to time, it’s most important to just list, as you and Ryanne always say. If not for the ABL indoctrination I have happily gotten from SL, I think I might have easily gotten stuck in a deep rut of wondering and complaining about the mysteries of sales patterns, to the detriment of actually making money.
🙂
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As far as the spending time on eBay meaning more sales. I know what you mean cause when I am looking at my app or searching eBay or first start listing I will sometimes get a sale but I know it’s just a coincidence. Weekend sales are the same. Honestly a lot of people get paid on Friday so Friday Saturday and Sundays always tend to be more active overall for me then anything else. I think Tues-Thursday being dead some weeks as no one has money atm for the stuff I have online.
Listing more items is the only real way to generate more sales as your odds of making a sale go up with every item you list. It’s just odds and the factors are:
1) Item being listed
2) Price of Item
3) Item condition
4) Buyer searching for exact item
5) Buyer having money for item
6) Buyers desire to spend money on itemI can’t tell you how many items I watch and item on eBay with the intention of buying but I forget or never doing it, the first 4 steps of that equation are there but sometimes I don’t have the money or I just don’t have the desire to spend the money on that item now. That’s why I have items with 15 watchers for months but a shirt I listed a year ago sells before it, someone just checked off all the marks to make that sale happen.
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All of my peaks are listing days plus MLK weekend and the day after I put my store in vacation mode. So some items are being shown each day but definitely a correlation. My best listing days are adding only 10 items in a 350 item store, but some peaks were listing just 2 items.
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