@musicyouneed wrote:
Besides the ebay counters being broken, I think ebay is just broken at this time. Too many sellers, too many products, ebay and google haven't made up, too many choices for online buying. Shipping is too high and product prices are too high. Younger buyers their tastes are different from the over 50 crowd. Younger buyers are not generally collectors, they like the latest gadgets.
I have reviewed my selling strategy, lowered a lot of my prices of the CD's I just listed and will be lowering the others as I have time.
I would concur that all the testing and broken code has had a negative effect. Looking at YOY numbers Q2 listing impressions and page views are down by an amount that seems out of sync with general seasonality of previous years. It is hard to pin down whether that is just due to general traffic or if we are seeing the effects of an algorithm change or the effect of various other features/filters like guaranteed delivery, free returns, grouping of products, and so forth. All I know is Q2 here was **bleep** and out of sync with results elsewhere.
There has been a lot of monkeying with search as well as seller store views that hasn't been helpful. Most of the feature changes have made things worse rather than improving anything, they just confuse long term site users and fail to meaningfully attract newer buyers. How features are implemented and tested here is amateurish. You get unfinished buggy code loading at random page refresh intervals to test a feature which just makes for an inconsistent user experience.
It will be interesting to see what their Q2 earnings report looks like. I've never seen such as an established site/platform/business throw so much **bleep** at the wall in such a relatively short period of time in an attempt to increase revenue. Frankly it smacks of desperation rather than innovation. At this point some of the basics aren't even been done properly. There are plenty of categories that still have woefully incomplete item specifics for example. The whole site feels like an unfinished beta where the execs are just jumping from idea to idea without actually properly implementing anything and the product buy signals seem more like an insurance pitch than a product sale. There is something to be said for buyer psychology when the primary ebay sales pitch to buyers comes from an extremely negative mindset. Every product page feels more like a why you should buy from ebay pitch where you are more or less telling the buyer there is a good chance something will go wrong rather than focusing on the product itself. Younger people are savvy enough to know what a chargeback is, it is not as if we have travelled back in time and they are just being weaned off money orders or sending cash in the mail and are afraid to use credit cards on the internet.
