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Your web site has a lot of good information on selling online and I have been following your selling adventures on Ebay for quite a while now. Regarding this weeks topic, while I would agree that it serves no good purpose to endlessly rail and whine about the injustices of the Ebay market place, I would not necessarily dismiss the claims of these sellers as a figment of their imagination.
Ebay says that I am a Power seller with 100 percent positive feedback but, I don’t have an Ebay store subscription, I just use what ever free listing promotions that I get from Ebay and on occasion I will pay for listings if I have some particularly good merchandise. To date my total sales on Ebay number a little 1400 items.So as sellers what do we get from Ebay? What we get are listing views from potential buyers using Ebays internal search function .
Each listing view is a potential lead which we hope will convert to sale , and your listing is the sales pitch.
Unfortunately not all leads are equally good and it doesn’t matter how good the photos and description in your listing are, if nobody sees it. When you consider that Ebay has over 26 million sellers and a billion listings at any given time, the search results for a common search term such as SMART PHONE could yield thousands of listings.
In practical terms only a small subset of those results will be returned because the conventional wisdom in sales and marketing is that if there are too many choices the buyer may hesitate to buy for fear of making the wrong decision.
For good or bad , I have no doubt that Ebay is constantly tweaking their search algorithms and in the process are picking winners and losers among the Sellers.
In terms of my own personal experience, over the past few years, I having been selling mostly small items on Ebay which I have purchased at estate sales in the Northern Virginia area.
In 2015, it seemed that most of my sales were to buyers west of the Mississippi. When I used Ebays internal search engine Cassini to find pricing of items of local interest such as Redskins Football memorabilia, most of the results delivered by were for sellers outside the Mid-Atlantic region. When I used the same keywords in Google limiting the search to only Ebay pages by using the term , site:ebay.com , I found a number of active listings of nearby sellers of Redskins Football gear that were not shown in Ebays Cassinis search results. If I clicked on these listings through Google and used the same keywords again in Cassini, the new listings would suddenly appear in Ebays search results.
I believe that Ebay had written their search algorithm to try to maximize their revenue from final value fees for shipping by filtering out results where the buyer and seller were nearby . What this meant for me is that I likely I lost sales for items that I had calculated shipping and that I had to lower my prices compensate for the higher shipping costs due to the fact that Ebay was only showing my listings to more distant buyers. My answer to that was to ship flat rate wherever possible.
In 2016 I found that I was getting a number of sales on the East Coast , indicating to me that Ebay stopped the practice of the filtering by distance. However I found that I would have a good volume of sales in the first half of the month and then views on my listings would virtually cease until the start of the next month . What I believe was occuring was the so called throttling where my account had a hidden revenue limit when reached potential listing views were apportioned to some other seller. Of course there are external factors that can limit ones sales on Ebay. Sales were chugging along quite nicely during the summer and into the fall until the Presidential debates in October, when my sales tanked. Consumer sentiment cannot ignored irregardless of whether or not people believe that politics should be discussed in this forum. Most of the items I sold during the Fall were more utilitarian items that could be used day to day such as dishes, replacement parts for appliances, safety razors and the like. The knick knacks and decor items in my inventory still gather dust.
My biggest pet peeve with Ebays filtering of listing results is that many times I have had a flurry of sales only to receive the dreaded TOP TIPS FOR SELLING ON EBAY message which asks that I provide free same day shipping and 30 day returns on my listings. Once received, that message virtually guarantees no sales for the next few days. While I could rework all my listings to comply with Ebays top tips there is no guarantee that doing so will improve their position in Cassinis search results.
I hope that takeaway here is that Ebay search function is a black box to which we are not privy to its inner workings.
It is perfectly feasible for Ebay to change their search algorithms to segment their market place by putting certain buyers and sellers in a given sandbox. Anyone selling on Ebay should understand that it is not a level playing field and it is not a realistic expectation some goverment agency is going to intervene to make it fair.
Sell on Ebay for as long as it it profitable to sell on Ebay and have an exit strategy for when it isn’t. By that I mean don’t invest so much money in inventory and storage costs that if you can’t sell your goods in a timely manner then financial ruin will in ensue.
Also when shopping on Ebay, buyers would be well advised to use an external search engine that scans the Ebay website such as Google or Bing to help ensure that you are finding the best quality product at the best price particularly for higher dollar items.
