Summer Has Been So Dry, and I don't mean the weather...

[canadabeltbuckles]

Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but this summer, (June July & August so far), has been terrible for sales!

I am wondering if this is normal, I would assume as much, as people are away on vacation, etc...

Is the drop is sales that I am experiencing typical for summer shoppers?

Anyone else feeling the pinch?

Does anyone know, historically, if it will pick up in September? God I hope so...

Any comments would be welcome from you long time powersellers out there... 🙂

[pierrelebel]

"My observation shows the older the FP listing withing the 30 day period, the better positioning it gets within Best Match."

That is THE point!

Each listing will get the same exposure over 30 days, regardless when it is started!

Now, take a look at your actual sales (all of them), matching them to the start or scheduled end of your listings. Do you see an actual pattern?

[dipmicro]

Pierre, I think we are discussing two different things.

Your store is an orchestra of listings, who work together. Many buyers find you through something else they end up buying. And my point is to be found at all times, not only when GTC listings are ending.

Say there is 1mil buyer per hour on eBay and 0.1% of them is interested in your niche. Say you are in category, where the last 5 minutes are shown on first page (1/12 of 1000 = 83 walk-bys). Say all your listings end within 5 minutes, and you manage to bring all of those 83 browsing walk-bys.

When OPs 600 listings are spread evenly, he gets on first page 20x per day. Maybe only 5 buyers out of those 83 would enter hist store, but 5x 20 x 30 = 3000 walk-bys got in during 30 days.

Those are not serious estimates, just to show the point. The more you are on the first page in your category, the more walk-bys you get.

[pierrelebel]

Once again, take a few minutes and check your actual sales from fixed price listings.

Do you see a real pattern between time of sale and scheduled ending time? (the pattern is obviously different for short term auction listings)

Regardless of the products sold and category where they are offered, I feel there is much, way too much, emphasis given by many posters to buyers buying in the last hour of a fixed price or store inventory listing. That is no longer eBay's reality.

[dipmicro]

Again, I went about spreading items to be seen at all times to generate traffic. I must have been speaking japanese.

[canadabeltbuckles]

Ok, I have finished my sales analysis and default search results analysis...

For sake of simplicity, I will stick to just the Bolo Ties I list in the BIN-GTC area and the results will only be based on July sales.

12 Bolo Ties were sold during the month of July. All of the sales were for different Bolo Tie designs, there were no 2 designs that sold during the month, but 12 different designs, one of each.

Listing days till renewal when sales occurred, ranged from 20 days and above, nothing sold that was scheduled for relisting under 20 days.

Default search results only using 'Best Match' as the criteria, which in most cases is the default search criteria. My search was on 'all items' I did not break it down to just Auction items or just BIN items.

My listings at the time of the analysis were as follows:

6 listings renewing in 14 days 2 hrs.
1 listing renewing in 19 days 12 hrs.
1 listing renewing in 25 days 6 hrs.
10 listings renewing in 26 days 2 hrs.
1 listing renewing in 28 days 1 hr.

On page 1 of the results, I saw one listing ending in 19 days, and 3 listings ending in 26 days.
One page 2 of the results, I saw one listing ending in 14 days and 2 listings ending in 26 days.
On page 3 of the results, I saw one listing ending in 28 days, and 4 listings ending in 26 days.
On page 4 of the search results, I saw one listing ending in 25 days.
On pages 5, 6 & 7 of the search results, I saw none of my listings.
On page 8 of the search results, I saw four of my listings ending in 14 days.
On pages 9, 10 & 11, none of my listings showed.

My conclusion from this is that the longer the distance, time wise, from renewing or ending the better exposure on pages 1 & 2.

Therefore, I think it would be better if I followed the follwing scenario when listing my Bolo Ties...

List 3 designs on day 1
List 3 designs on day 5
List 3 designs on day 10
List 3 designs on day 15
List 3 designs on day 20
List 4 designs on day 25

With the above hypothesis, I will ensure I will have at least 3 listing showing within the 1st 2 pages of a search result at any given time of the month...

Any comments?

[art-in-the-making]

Our sales and traffic are down so drastically this summer that I am getting concerned.

Today i did a scan of several U.S. message boards and this is a constant theme:

* sales and traffic are down drastically
* many say it started around July 14
* many say it is related to the new selling pages
* eBay is claiming there is a major problem with store traffic reporting that they hope to have resolved by Sept 15 and that traffic is actually normal
* many are saying that is BS
* many are saying that Google is requiring "new" or "used" parameters to be included on listings and eBay's format for showing these labels isn't working and traffic is suffering
* many buyers are saying they can't navigate eBay due to the new selling pages - i.e. screen freezing etc.
* a lot of people are reporting they only get the item descriptions in a ridiculous 1 cm. window that you have to scroll (I have seen this on some of my listings)
* one 30000 FB seller who sells 100s of items a day in the summer sold only 2 items over a recent 2-day period even though he did nothing differently
* one seller reported getting refunded by ebay for recent lack of traffic on certain items (after he went through a LOT of grief going back and forth)
* another seller reported 2 full days with no sales, which had never happened before
* a LOT of posters putting up screen shots of their Omniture reports FLATLINING
* many buyers reporting waiting several minutes for seller pages to load on their computers
* many think the problem is partly due to sellers who were also buyers quitting eBay en masse
* someone said that ebay accidentally reset the feed info on sellers' store settings - I found that was not the case for me
* many are saying that eBay's new affiliate program (they took over the tracking of the affiliates from Commission Junction about a year ago) - now it's called "eBay Partner Network" is a shadow of the former program... and watch traffic drop even more in the near future, as eBay goes to "quality click pricing" in Sept/Oct., which will cause any affiliates still around to massively revise their approach so that clicks are more targeted... with the result that affiliate activity will drop and sellers will get fewer visitors sent from affiliates, although a few lucky sellers may get more serious buyers
* many are saying that eBay is cutting back on advertising everywhere - TV, net, etc.
* the percentage of active users over total users on eBay is dropping like an anchor the last 3 years

This all on top of the fact that eBay's current business strategy is fundamentally flawed and doomed to failure (where is the demand for an online dollar store selling low end cookie-cutter junk?) and that the company is being run by the wrong people...

given all of that, I guess our sales could be worse. after all, we did have a sale even today!

Let's just hope someone wakes up

[dipmicro]

Hmm, trend is that number of online shoppers is increasing. That means if eBay numbers are declining, they must be going someplace else. Maybe Google is the new eBay.

[surplusdealdude]

Maybe Google is the new eBay.

Perhaps not the other 800 lb gorilla yet, but Google does have a marked effect on sales.

A lot of the other sites, like The Ranch, say that Google is a MUST to generate sales.

And I did read a story about Google's overall effect, but I forgot the details.

The one thing that came through is that YOU MUST BE IN GOOGLE PRODUCT SEARCH. -------------------------------------------------------------------

It is our similarities that make us all human - it is our differences that make us all interesting

[surplusdealdude]

And google says their personalized payment system increases the likelihood of getting sales. -------------------------------------------------------------------

It is our similarities that make us all human - it is our differences that make us all interesting

[pierrelebel]

"trend is that number of online shoppers is increasing. That means if eBay numbers are declining, they must be going someplace else."

More large and small retailers have increased their online presence, including many eBay sellers who put more emphasis in directing the repeat traffic to their own website to save on fees and bypass many of eBay's recently implemented ridiculous policies.

On the other hand, my eBay sales are UP very substantially this year, more so in the last few months. 🙂 Obviously, there are still millions of buyers shopping on eBay. Sellers need to find ways to get the business at the expense of their competitors.

To blame eBay exclusively for a sales slowdown this year is missing the point.

[surplusdealdude]

"trend is that number of online shoppers is increasing. That means if eBay numbers are declining, they must be going someplace else."

And yet a recent survey by ChannelAdvisor reports that 70-80% of people buy online at either ebay or The River. So these 2 are still the dominant players in a fractured market.

To blame eBay exclusively for a sales slowdown this year is missing the point.

I agree completely. -------------------------------------------------------------------

It is our similarities that make us all human - it is our differences that make us all interesting

[pierrelebel]

Take a minute and check this http://seekingalpha.com/article/145144-amazon-and-ebay-in-satisfaction-survey

"This quarter, 13% of buyers said they like to buy with the auction format vs. 19% a quarter ago and 23% in Sept. of 2008."<.b>

Amazing how quickly the world is changing! In nine months, the popularity and desirability of the auction format has dropped by half!

Sellers need to pay attention to what buyers want to succeed on eBay or anywhere else online.

[art-in-the-making]

Interesting survey.

I get it that buyers prefer buy it now.

But the question is a little bit flawed. In a sense it is equivalent to asking someone:

would you rather have $10 in your pocket or a one in five shot at winning $100?

If the question is: would you rather shop online by auction or "buy it now",,, then the answer will be skewed because auction buying is clearly not shopping in the normal sense of the word. Semantics I know - but it is surprising that anyone would ever say they prefer an auction format... waiting as much as a week to find out if you "win" something, rather than just go ahead an buy it! Yet people do it all the time.

So, the person shopping by auction is doing something else other than regular shopping, slightly akin to gambling.

Anyway, I have found that anything I've ever looked for on eBay almost always has a BIN variation - so I don't see the auction format as a deterrent to buyers in any way.

The more telling stat in that survey is that buyer satisfaction on ebay has dropped by 5% over the last year.

According to eBay's geniuses, shouldn't removing the possibility of so-called "feedback extortion" against buyers have resulted in new droves of happy buyers at eBay?

What about the great drive to polish up the sellers' acts? Shouldn't that have improved buyer satisfaction by at least 5 or 10 points alone?

What about the amazing technology of "best match"... shouldn't that have produced a whole new generation of ecstatic buyers enchanted by eBay's uncanny ability to know exactly what they want to buy and from whom and what they want to ignore?

None of these moves have worked. In fact it seems that all eBay has succeeded in doing is angering a lot of people by messing with something that was once good.

[axe_n_gear_music]

While my sales have been relatively steady throughout the summer and I have no complaints at all, I still do expect things to pick up even more now that the kids are back to school (tomorrow, Sept. 1st here!!!), and we inch closer to Christmas.
I also wanted to point out another couple of venues that some buyers are moving towards for many of their purchases, which I think have slowed down a bit of the eBay steam lately too - and they are Craigslist, and eBays own free Kijiji.
I have used Kijiji myself lately for some of my own purchases. The reality is, there are many more places online nowadays for buyers to choose from, and ebay is no longer one of the only online options (depending on what buyers are looking for). Some people I find are still not very comfortable making an online purchase through eBay or websites, but will use the face to face, try before they buy, kijiji and craigslist sites instead for a more upfront and personal buying experience.
I know, personally, I would never buy a car on eBay where I couldn't see it first, but I recently found and purchased my new show car on Kijiji.ca.

Just some food for thought,
Cheers,
AXE

[art-in-the-making]

yeah kijiji and CL are big and getting bigger. ebay not only owns kijiji it has a big share in CL as well.

Now it's only a matter of time before the demise of newspapers plays out...

There's still the auto traders and buy & sells... continuously merging and buying out competition, mind you.

The only question is when, not if, Paypal becomes the only legal method of payment on Kijiji :^O (only half joking)

[surplusdealdude]

CL and Kijiji are only the tip of the iceberg, if you look at the global picture.

The big classified ad systems on the planet aren't CL or Kijiji - they're gumtree, out of Britain and a site out of India ( I forget the name)

Each has literally THOUSANDS of boards - small towns everywhere, small island states and so on.

Walmart has a classified ad section now - just found that out last night.

There must be thousands of sites out there by now - there's even software available for you to set your own site up.

It's a valuable resource to explore if you want to go intensive on a geographical basis. -------------------------------------------------------------------

It is our similarities that make us all human - it is our differences that make us all interesting