eBay

cidsa_dragoon · ‎03-15-2018

Hi all. I've been noticing that my listings have gotten very few to 0 views lately and was wondering if anyone had any insight.

Last year I sold a whole bunch of stuff really easily with tons of views and sales but this year it's just turned into a snail's crawl. I don't know if it's because I get drowned out by Chinese sellers with bootlegs galore or if people just don't want my stuff or if Ebay did something..

It's pretty disheartening to be doing better sales at local shows when my city's not doing well economically than on Ebay, where all the buyers should be.

izzame · ‎03-15-2018

Lack of visibility . You have no control over this. Ebay will tell you to do this that and the other thing (all at a direct or indirect/back door cost of course) to help your visibility . A carrot only.

reallynicestamps · ‎03-15-2018

This won't help with views, but you only have shipping for Canada and the USA on your Shipping tab.

Potential overseas customers have to contact you for shipping cost.

I also suspect that by using Flat Rate shipping you are costing yourself money .

Could I suggest that you use Calculated Shipping for all non-Canada destinations?

And that you use the Custom Location options in the dropdown menus?

You can use Custom Location several times to give different prices for different destinations. For example, shipping to Australia is higher than shipping to Austria.

You may also want to think about using more Item Specifics since those show up in Search.

Neither of these costs you any more.

Best Wishes.

momcqueen · ‎03-15-2018

'Is there something wrong?' is a question that's tricky to answer.

You have some nice products; do you advertise your listings in any blogs or social media? Once you become a Top-Rated Seller (or decide to subscribe to the lowest level of store coming which is like $5 a month which is a steal of a deal) , you will be eligible for Promoted Listings. This will help with eyeballs.

I've found anecdotally that brand new listings fare better in Search placement than old ones unless the old ones have a strong history of Solds embedded within. My suggestion would be to revise and update, check with your mobile optimization tools and watch some of the webinars ebay is offering for tips for new(ish) sellers.

https://www.ebay.com/rpp/mso-webinars

You might be interested in Mobile Optimization and Best Practices. Also the Webinars on Demand feature reruns of previous topics. Those are good too. Each are about 30-minutes long. If nothing else, it will be a useful investment of your time when you're not otherwise fulfilling orders.

jt-libra · ‎03-15-2018

@cidsa_dragoonwrote:
Hi all. I've been noticing that my listings have gotten very few to 0 views lately and was wondering if anyone had any insight.

Last year I sold a whole bunch of stuff really easily with tons of views and sales but this year it's just turned into a snail's crawl. I don't know if it's because I get drowned out by Chinese sellers with bootlegs galore or if people just don't want my stuff or if Ebay did something..

It's pretty disheartening to be doing better sales at local shows when my city's not doing well economically than on Ebay, where all the buyers should be.

I experienced this during the months of January and February and even started a thread. Over that two-month period, 50 to 60% of my sales had 0 views .... highly unusual.

https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/So-Many-Listings-with-No-Views/m-p/395231

A lot of sellers reported significantly lower sales and offered possible reasons and remedies.

This month, I noticed that my listings are getting views again, not resulting in sales, however.

Since I'm in the process of selling off my inventory, I'm not spending a lot of time on analysis. eBay has finally worn me down If I had just begun to sell today, and not 12 years ago, I would be so stressed out. I know you're disheartened but there's always been an ebb and flow with sales and, no doubt, your sales will increase again, if history proves me right. You have to have the constitution to stick with it, until there is absolutely no joy left in selling.

hlmacdon · ‎03-15-2018

Since I'm in the process of selling off my inventory, I'm not spending a lot of time on analysis.

Having just reviewed year over year here I would say there isn't a great deal to glean from analysis, at least what we can see from our levels as sellers. My inventory levels here are quite consistent with some ebb and flow in the timing of new product release coming in, but in general I don't find much correlation between listing impressions, listing page views, and sales. My conversion rates hover above standard ecommerce conversion rates (low single digit is industry standard), but not dramatically so. My conversion rate and number of transactions is often higher in months where I have less page views and listing impressions.

The base problem is your visibility, which is hard to discern from the data we get since a listing impression isn't really meaningful. In general listing impressions are dropping year over year, month over month, at least in my case, for my niche. Perhaps that reflects eBay's lack of relevance in younger demographics as a recent industry survey pegged near 90% of the customers in my niche in the 21-40 year old range. Listing page views are relatively consistent and aren't showing the same behavior. At least in my niche eBay's customer base doesn't seem to be growing, and really you need to significantly increase the number of buyers looking at your listings if you want to see increased sales. Unless you focus on price or exclusivity it is difficult to make strides there. Site navigation from a category point of view is broken in many categories so you are relying on placement in the absence of exclusivity. For specialist sellers I still say your time is far better off trying to drive people in your niche from outside of ebay to your ebay listings, rather than optimizing things here. Difficult to say what to do otherwise with ebay seemingly bent on removing seller engagement from the equation.

cidsa_dragoon · ‎03-15-2018

Thank you all for your responses,

I suppose my demographics may not really be looking on Ebay first so I will look at trying to direct people to me more.

As for the flat shipping, I generally don't really lose anything on it as shipping to the US is cheaper than within Canada but I may return to calculated shipping just to be more accurate.