@pinetreecottage wrote:
There are always going to be collectors and those looking for high end pre-owned items. So as some of us selling those type of items have been invisible for some time, I suspect it is the search methods that are to blame. Once in a while an item becomes visible with lots of views, and it sells. It's almost as if it was an error, the "bots" caught it and it was corrected back to darkness.
I wonder if those selling from China or the middle east have the same issues. Probably not, as lots of the posters here, have problems with slow deliveries, or no deliveries at all.
I am sure that holds true for those where best match might mean you end up on page 5 of search results instead of page 1. I sell in a category where that is much less of a factor and still have highly variable results. Item visibility is never an issue, they are there and come up as they should when searched and all search terms/product identifiers/etc are in place. Even then sales are just plain inconsistent without any particular reason. Case in point my sales are up 65.5% over the last 31 days, but I'm running fewer listings and have only had 1 new product. No sales, promoted listings, etc that are driving that change, it is just the rollercoaster that is ebay. Previous 31 days = 815,783 listing impressions with 12,359 page views vs 920, 355 listing impressions and 15,635 page views in the current 31 days. A difference in traffic to be sure, but not enough to explain the overall increase.
