No More Sales or Trendy Items

[jacobstrading]

I have never posted here before, but would like to share our experience over the last 6 months.  My daughter and I have been selling off and on via Ebay for 6 years.  In the last year, we have really pushed to increase sales on our handmade jewelry items and have been doing pretty good so far.  The issue we have been having is at the beginning of this year, we started having the odd "Sale" of 20% off certain items to attract more people to our store.  We also started designing and listing some "trendy" items ie: "Love" word rings and Infinity rings.  What has now happened is in the past 6 months, we have gotten 1 negative (which we had removed due to buyer abuse), 4 neutral and higher than average amount of low DSR's.  In the past 6 years selling previously, we never had a negative, neutral or any low DSR's to speak of.

The only conclusion we can come up with is that the "Sales" and trendy items are attracting the wrong type of buyers to our store - ie buyers who have unrealistic expectations of the items they buy and are not willing to take the 2 minutes to send us an email to see if we would be willing to fix any issues they have.  I have also had buyers who leave false positives - they click the positive button, but leave a negative message and low star rating across the board.

We are now in the process of deleting all the "trendy" items and will not be having any more "sales" to see if things level off.

Has anyone else experienced this?  When I called Ebay customer service they chalked it up to "bad timing".  Lovely...but now I will lose my US Top Rated Seller badge for next month and potentially sales.  The DSR system is so broken, why doesn't Ebay see that 😠

[pierrelebel]

"I have never posted here before"

Welcome to the eBay Discussion Boards. 🙂

[rose-dee]

I think if you read through these boards, you'll see a lot of sellers struggling with arbitrarily or unfair FB/DSRs from buyers, particularly over the past few months.  I've been selling on eBay for several years, and I have to say that since about last fall (2012) I've had far less FB overall, more issues with DSRs, and my first neutral (for a customs charge - the neutral was removed).  Things seem to be getting harder for sellers. 

Personally, I'm not sure that discount sales or more trendy items necessarily increase problem buyers -- I suppose you'll only find out with time once you've removed that inventory. 

My own view is that there a couple of imporant factors involved:

1)  Many more people are using mobile devices to shop on eBay, which eBay has been encouraging with its ads.  There is a kind of rushed sloppiness that comes with the mobile turf that I think makes for poor follow-up on eBay;

2)  Buyers do not generally understand the full impact of DSRs.  I think many treat it simply as a forum for ranting, or a meaningless opinion poll, and don't realize what a serious effect their ratings can have on a seller.  It appears eBay is becoming aware of this problem, as they seem to be intervening more often to remove unfair DSRs.

There are no doubt other factors, but it seems eBay has become a less "friendly" shopping place overall.   

[femmefan1946]

Someone other than me would have to help you on this, but eBay has a method of showing you what your listing looks like on a mobile.

It's a shock, I'll tell you that.

And for impulse items like 'trendy' jewellry, I would not be at all surprised if rose-dee is right, and those purchasers are using mobiles to purchase.

I don't have that problem, on the whole, because I sell books and those customers tend to read. ]:)

Another thought. You could open a second ID for those sales, without worrying about FB or DSRs. A 'burner' ID if you like. And keep your long-term ID clear of those problem buyers.

[rose-dee]

eBay has a method of showing you what your listing looks like on a mobile.

I used to be able to "see" what my listings looked like on a mobile phone by going to "m.ebay.com", but I just tried it, and it no longer works.  EBay has been doing an enormous amount of tinkering with their site programming, and things are changing everywhere.  There apparently is another portal, "mobileweb.ebay.com", but when I tried this, I got a more or less normal looking screen.  My guess is that they've upgraded the software to accommodate the viewing hardware.  The information on mobile viewing is here, for what it's worth:

http://ocsnext.ebay.ca/ocs/sc

You might be better to just find a friend with a mobile phone and get them to take a look at your listings using that device.  As "femmefan" says, it is very different, although it's likely eBay has upgraded that look as well by now.  Too much happening too fast around here...

[pocomocomputing]

The old m.eBay.com can be accessed here http://wap.ebay.com/

Remember this site simulates older mobile devices with limited browser support. Newer (last 2 years at least) mobile devices have high resolution displays and a fuller browser support.  Listings appear almost like they do on a regular desktop. HTML is rendered properly and photos in the description are made smaller and look fine.

I have tested with an older Apple iPhone and listing from various sellers looked fine. I did not try purchasing, only browsing my listings and other sellers listings while logged into my eBay account and not logged in.

I repeated the same tests on an Apple iPad. All is normal. I did not download the special apps by eBay for these devices and just used the built-in Apple Safari browser.

I believe that the buyers who use mobile devices are using these more advanced devices (from Apple and others) that makes browsing eBay look like a desktop.  When a buyer is using such a device and going to eBay.com and eBay.ca, they are automatically switched to the eBay mobile site which handles the smart mobile devices better than the regular eBay site.

So using the above link to view the old eBay site that has limited support for eBay is not a true representation of what many mobile users are seeing. Older devices that would use that site would see a poorly rendered listings which would hopefully stop the buyer from purchasing.

So use the mobile site about with caution. It is not what many mobile buyers see.