I appreciate your interest in my business, I honestly do, but I think most of your suggestions are more appropriate to someone just starting out. I have been doing much of what you've outlined for quite a while now, having worked in the product development and marketing field for several years in the past.
I'd like to reply to a few of your comments.
"It's as if my buyers aren't seeing them anymore." I think I should have been more specific with this comment and said: "It's as if my eBay buyers aren't seeing them anymore". I seem to have little trouble on other sites. The issues I've set out in a number of posts on the subject are largely unique to eBay. I don't encounter most of them elsewhere.
"While so many of us are searching for problems caused by ebay we don't look around the entire online marketplace for the real issue. Problems like the Shopping Cart disconect and Search placements are more related to the use of Smartphones, and started over two years ago."
You are certainly correct about marketplace issues being relevant, but as I said, the worst (and most frequent) issues I have are on this particular site. Sometimes I try to delineate these in order to work out solutions, sometimes simply to point out eBay flaws for others to consider or be aware of.
The .com shopping cart "disconnect" does affect both smartphones and PCs alike. My buyers are largely PC users. I know this because I communicate with many of them after a sale and inquire about how they found me, how they processed the sale, etc. They are also readers (you have to be an attentive reader to sew well), so they do pay attention to detailed descriptions. Although eBay now claims that something like 65% of transactions are "touched" by mobile -- note they didn't say "conducted by mobile" -- I'm fairly sure that statistic doesn't apply to my customers.
Incidentally, I discovered by doing some comparison (through Google's testing tool) that my home page on eBay has several issues with respect to mobile viewing. This isn't the case with my other sites. I brought this up with Raphael one week, and while he did say the Google test was reliable, he really didn't provide a satisfactory answer with respect to the actual results. My fix for this will probably be switching to the new store format and hoping for better results, but I will lose many of the direct promotional and marketing features currently available in my "old format" store.
"Build your brand. Using your product category as an example." Actually, I'm all over the place on the internet (except Facebook, which I'm very reluctant to use). My buyers "hang out" on different sites than most youngsters and 20-somethings do, and find me via links to my eBay and my other sites on just about every facility I use. I'm not willing to list all my marketing strategies here (I've worked hard to build them), but this does include sites that even provide a direct link to purchase (both on eBay and my other sites) a particular item I've highlighted.
I used to be able to monitor this incoming activity on eBay (including people searching specifically by my brand name, a nice plus). Omniture was useful in this regard, but alas, it's now gone. I'm only hoping it will be replaced by something similar and accurate, but more accessible. Again, one other site I sell from does this job (tracking statistics) beautifully.
"In your case I tried searching for you personally and found very little. What I couldn't find were your customers taking about you. It looks like you are just watching the ship sail off into the sunset. [...] If I type my name into Google, Paul Gage, it autopopulates tires. I own the results! Never mind searching any of my part numbers alone."
I wonder what search you were using, because my brand name occupies 5 out of 9 of the results on the first page on Google. I don't use my personal name or my eBay ID, mainly for security reasons.
However something may have changed on Google over the past few months, because on doing a search on "antique sewing patterns" today, I see the results are strangely unfamiliar. This search used to consistently bring up my eBay store name, many individual eBay items, and my other sites on page 1, but doesn't anymore. Could this be part of the reason for sluggish sales? Lack of eBay exposure on Google. I can't do much about what eBay has worked out with Google, but I can change things on other sites. Maybe somebody like 'poco'
"You are on my Grandaughter's business target list. She already decided she is going into the catalog mail order business when she's finished business school. She spends hours every day looking for categories in ebay to target."
I'm not sure what you mean by "target", but I'd prefer not to have unsolicited marketing emails. She may be graduating from business school, but I've worked in marketing and public relations in the real world and I do everything reasonably possible within the time limitations I have, to keep up with trends.
"Sales volume rises and falls, however there are more and more consumers every day as the global population rises."
Yes, this is quite true, although if you're selling something that appeals to a particular subset of potential buyers, you have to understand what those buyers are looking for, what prices they're willing to pay, and study your competition keenly in order to be able to profit from that market. I have done, and continue to do, these things.
"I'm pretty sure you have heard this all before." Yes, I have, not all of it, but most.
"I wish you would start to listen instead of looking for the pea under the mattress, there is wasted elegance in your writings."
I appreciate the compliment, but not the admonishment, because it really isn't the case. I'm not looking for the pea under the mattress, more like the elephant in the room.
Believe me, compared to one other site that I use in particular, eBay has major issues in functionality, ease of use and buyer/seller friendliness, not to mention over-policing and a web of rules almost no one can fully understand. I continue to sell here now as a "sideline", but it isn't as easy as elsewhere. I stay for the one thing eBay does still outdo others on, and that is visibility. Whether that visibility will continue to make up for the other flaws in my particular case is a matter of time and of changes eBay itself could make.
I should add, as a final note, that your comment: "it frustrates me to no end when I see an online opportunity that could explode like an atomic bomb instead of fizzling like a wet fuse" almost precisely expresses what I currently feel about eBay. If the S.E.C. document we read recently is any indication, eBay may not want to focus most of its resources on online selling anymore; they're making a lot more money in other endeavours.
Anyway, cheers, this was my honest response to no doubt honestly meant comments.
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