Feedback ratio and the "rolling blackout"

[terminalcity]

Femmefan mentioned the pheonemenon of the best match "rolling blackout" in another thread on this forum.

I've been watching this carefully, since I tend to get a blast of sales from the USA, then nothing for days. It is as if my listings get "turned on" for a while then off.

For example, I'll get only international, non-US, sales for three or four days form weird places like Montenegro-- but no US sales. Then suddenly, two things will happen sequentially:

-I get a series of positive feedbacks

- very shortly after that, I get a wave of five or six sales from the US, starting in Califronia and going across the USA as evening comes on.

For what it's worth, I've developed a theory about this: it's all about the feedback ratio.

Since I sell 95% of my items to international customers,it takes about 10 to 15 days before feedback starts rolling in. As a result I have always got 30 to 50 items without feedback.

Looking at my sales, it would appear that when less than  10% of my sales in the past two weeks have positive feedback, my sales drop to zip in the USA.

I've watched this for a few months and it is happening consistently, although it could of course be caused by any number of things.

Any thoughts?

[art-in-the-making]

Very tempting to buy into any number of different theories.

For my part, I have noted months of no overseas sales - and then suddenly a few to weird random places over one or two weeks, then none again. Similar clusters of sales to TX, CA, OH, then Canada.

At the same time though, I have also noticed the most unlikely coincidences involving such things as user names, addresses, even email addresses among buyers - like in one week selling paintings to two different people in one week with a similar last name (one letter off) each living on a street with "Eagle" in it in different states. And so forth.

So that makes me think there are always going to be weird clusters and coincidences and they probably don't mean anything.

But I never thought of that feedback tie-in. Since I have a similar feedback situation as you I am going to look into it. Maybe that's a reason for leaving feedback on payment.

[threebears63]

Hi all,

I have also noticed that our sales seem to have on and off periods that are quite defined, I have occassionally felt like someone at e-bay literally turned our listings on or off for viewing.

We also have periods where we will have many sales from the same place all at once.

As far as coincindence goes we have noticed that we get weird connections with user names, for example in one day we may have two or three users that have the same word in their user name, sometimes not very common words. Go figure.

Cheers! Heather

[westernstargifts]

I have noticed the "similar user name" syndrome myself & thought it was only me.  However, I have always noticed that happening frequently, even before Best Match & DSR's.

And I do seem to get more sales right after receiving a cluster of FB although I didn't think to look to see if they came from the same country.

Some things to watch anyway.

[ricarmic]

Hmmm this is very interesting. On May 18th in the morning, I got a burst of feedbacks, 18 from one person, a Canadian actually and since that morning, sales have been good, after a couple very slow days. It can't be completely coincidence. I'm going to have to watch this aspect closer now for a while too! There seems to be so many different things impacting Best Match!!!!