You know you really should be ending these old listings and then listing them again as new listings (not relists).
Do you understand how Best Match treats these very old listings that have not sold? They put them at the very bottom!
Anybody had anything listed longer than this sell?
Not personally, I've never had a listing run more than 30 days.
I did see a listing a few months ago that had been running since 2004, the seller had it as a GTC, 5 cents per month time 120 months.......$6 in listing fees paid........price of the item........
$4.99 !!!!!!!!!
Crazy part was that the seller had tons of listings that had been running anywhere from 5 - 10 years and they were all sub $10 items.
If you go back to the start of Best Match (a "smart" search known as "relevancy" on other sites) the key factor for ranking was the Views/Impressions ratio.
Move along a few years and eBay has tossed dozens of other factors to the list of things that influence ranking in Best Match.
Thing is, all those other factors are still secondary to the primary ones, views/impression, watchers, bidders (in the case of Auctions), previously sales (in the case of FP) and of course PRICE.
Your TRS status, your handling time, your feedback, your dsr's etc etc etc. are actually rather meaningless and are mostly just used (if at all) to rank the top of the list which is made up of things that got there because of the primary factors.
An old listing that has been sitting for years, gets no views, has no watchers, no previous sales history goes to the bottom because everything indicates "buyers are not interested in this so we won't even show them unless they really drill down through all the other stuff".
Traditional retail would sometimes put dead inventory front and centre in hopes of moving it out. eBay doesn't carry inventory, they don't care if we are stuck with junk, they want to put stuff that buyers actually want right up front because that creates sales. They will still let you list your non-selling junk but they are not going to give you prime space to display it.
Then of course there are those buyers that don't use Best Match, for those buyers all this ranking stuff is irrelevant.
@ricarmic wrote:Hi! Yes I've given up trying to understand what drives the best match, and to be honest, as long as my monthly "advertising" costs stay in line, I don't really care about the old stock, it seems to eventually sell..... and when it does that is a bonus... certainly being able to list or easily review old stock would be helpful. I've been experimenting with sale prices, it would be good to be able to put everything listed longer than a year on sale...
I can hardly keep up to the rate stuff is selling, unfortunately, at least in my world (stamps) the quantity of items selling is actually higher now than last year, but I'm selling a lot more $12-$20 items and a lot fewer $100 and up items.....which is lots more work.... and total sales is flat if not lower.... sigh.....
You should move up from Turbo Lister!
Seriously, you should be using an all-in-one management tool like SixBit, it will cost you some money, +/-$500/year, but it would be well worth it to manage the quantity of listings you run and it would definitely save you time and make you more productive.
I don't like spending money on software but I think of it as an instant payback if I can sell one or two extra items a month or avoid just one order screw up.
