US Sales have dropped dramatically! (I'm in Canada)

[vesivus]

Hi all. I've been selling on eBay since 2003 -- I have plenty of experience and lots of metrics to track the health of my business.

The majority of my sales have been to the US for most of my business' lifespan. In the last few months, however, I've had almost no US sales -- only 1 !!! Normally I have 10-50 in a month.

I am still getting some other International sales... but not US. 

Is anybody else experiencing this issue? Did eBay change something I'm not aware of? I'm literally losing money for the first time in many many years.

Thanks for any help!

John

[ypdc_dennis]

* sales tax being rolled out this year for most States

* more competitors using sponsored listings

You might look at listing some of your stuff in different categories. If I'm looking for a keychain, the RPG category is not where I'd look.

[vesivus]

Yeah, maybe. Keychains are about 0.005% of my income.

And this wasn't a "gradual decline" as competition came in. It was literally a fall off of a cliff. Many sales... and then NONE.

I was thinking something changed with the search algorithms between countries, or something.

John

[kawartha-ephemera]

Looks like you list on .com, I don't know why but my few .com listings have had few sales too, started last May after the GTC mandate was fully implemented. 

For what it's worth I checked on how well your items come up in search in that tough category. 

I noted that even though I asked ebay to search all categories they defaulted to specific categories which in this case seemed to work ok, sometimes they showed results in Games and other times they defaulted all the way down to the Games / Role Playing / Accessories sub category which is the category you're using, so all good on that front.

First tried just "dice" in both Best Match and Highest including shipping, even though you have hundreds of listings (among 50,000+) your dice were buried way back several pages from either end, highly doubtful you'd be found using just that one general term. 

On the other hand if a shopper knows what they're lookin for and adds a brand, type or colour to their generic "dice" search term then your items fare very well in the results list. I forget the exact placement in Best Match but it was definitely within the top 20 where your first item placed. In Lowest cost your items were #1 and 2, and 5 of the top ten! I didn't try the Highest with shipping filter which I should have as that would have been a much more exciting list to fare well in.

Surprisingly, there were not many Promoted listings present in this category's search results, if the OP promotes any they were not shown to me. In this category the real usefulness of Promoted listings may be in ebay showing them in other sellers' listings.

It's a puzzle to me why some .com listings have seemingly slowed. I confess the result has been I've sort of given up on .com for the last several months which of course has meant no sales there.

In short, as far as I can tell the OP's dice should be selling provided the market for them has not suddenly evaporated,, titles, item specifics, photos, description all excellent.

[femmefan1946]

your dice were buried way back several pages from either end, highly doubtful you'd be found using just that one general term.

As I understand the Search criteria, with Fixed Price listings, they will slowly move back as the 30 days move on and then back up as the days come to an end. Which would mean it I list something today, it will be showing higher than it will in two weeks, but by November 15-20 it will be nearer the top. But that's just one criterion.

there were not many Promoted listings present in this category's search results

I've been using PL and notice a distinct rise in the number of Views and I'm even seeing some Watchers.

But Viewers view. Watchers watch. 

I want buyers.

I'll have to wait a few more months to compare how PL has affected by annual and monthly sales compared to 2018 or 2017.

BTW-- I only use 1% as my percentage. So if a $10 dress pattern, that is also promoted, sells, I pay 91c FVF and 10c PL (I use Free Shipping and include my shipping cost in the price of the pattern).

There is in my opinion, no reason to spend more on PL.

We were told that GTC allows our long tail listings to be picked up on thirdparty browsers Google.  Maybe.

I like GTC, because I can do less monitoring of what needs updating. And we are all in the same position, unless we want to be constantly manually closing and reopening Fixed Price listings.  Which is allowed.

The state sales taxes are going to be a shock, especially with those Americans who seem to believe that all taxation is unconstitutional. But it is not exclusive to eBay.

Any word on how alternate sites like AZ or etsy are showing the tax on their customers invoices?  With eBay it is a line item and that upsets our southern neighbours.

[electronicifycanada]

I use 5% on all my listings, I've tried 1-5% with no real noticeable change. However, there is a thing we should all understand about online advertising that's really important.

All online advertising works on CPM(Cost per impression) or PPC(Pay per click) basis unless your giving a set commission and eBay we are not doing that. Every impression and click on your ad will take some of that percentage away. Once your 1-5% is run out and nobody purchased the item yet, your listing probably isn't really being promoted anymore.

Now with everything working off promoted listings I think that is a major flaw that will have some side effects on eBay that nobody even realizes yet.

[kawartha-ephemera]

---

@electronicifycanada wrote:

I use 5% on all my listings, I've tried 1-5% with no real noticeable change. However, there is a thing we should all understand about online advertising that's really important.

All online advertising works on CPM(Cost per impression) or PPC(Pay per click) basis unless your giving a set commission and eBay we are not doing that. Every impression and click on your ad will take some of that percentage away. Once your 1-5% is run out and nobody purchased the item yet, your listing probably isn't really being promoted anymore.

---

If this is true then ebay certainly is not admitting to it … they absolutely do control the exposure a promoted listing gets but we've no idea whether there is a set number of clicks / dollar allowance or not that matches up with the % of commission sellers bid. All they specifically say is that the higher % bid, the higher the probability of the listing being seen.

Seems to me ebay has made some recent noises about offering some sort of alternative advertising deal, not promoted listings but something entirely different that will be based on pay per click … have not heard anything more about them introducing that yet.

Personally would rather everyone as a group paid a little higher FVF and get rid of these slick advertising models altogether. Heck ebay could increase the FVF a few fractional points every quarter if they think they need more earnings, sellers will pay more until they won't … they'd soon find out what their FVF limit is.

[brettjet38]

US Sales have dropped dramatically! For Americans also..

If you read the US threads sales are also tanking in the US for American Sellers, this is the new normal...

..the masses no longer have "disposable income" most are just covering their basic needs, as for wants...

[vesivus]

Yeah -- I've listed on .com since 2003, long before .ca arrived. Why change what was working? 🙂 

Maybe its not working now, but as I said 85% of my sales were to US residents.

[teenytrinkets]

Generally, Sept and Oct are slow months for me. But, I've noticed it has been slower than normal for US sales, too. I'm convinced there's a category eff-up with searches. And the GTC is the other thing messing with my sales. US residents are buying the same items I have, but for a higher price. That tells me they're not finding my items. I've tweaked some categories, but it's REALLY frustrating!

[kawartha-ephemera]

Should be a way to make it work again... but what is the magic formula?
The odd thing about these cases where sales have all but stopped is there are others at the same time selling at a good clip and often at higher prices. I see this happening in my categories.
How are you non China competitors' sales?

[femmefan1946]

And the GTC is the other thing messing with my sales.

I see lots of complaints about GTC, but I really can't see any validity.

The buyer sees the end date for the listing (up to 30 days depending on where in the cycle the listing is) which might mean a few more sales at the beginning and the end of the cycle. But it's Buy It Now. If the customer wants it, she can buy it. Boom. Done.

Watchers watch. Viewers view. Buyers buy.

It can be a hobby. Lord knows, I've furnished entire houses on my Wayfair and IKEA window shopping. Never bought a thing.

US residents are buying the same items I have, but for a higher price. That tells me they're not finding my items.

Is a freight forwarder like chitchatexpress a possibility for you?

If you are shipping from the US, you are entitled to put the US town as "location" although you might want to add a day to your handling to allow for short lags.  Your shipping wouldn't have to change since the forwarding fee would be offset by the cheaper USPS rates.

I wish I could use this advice, but there is no such service here in Victoria.

[hlmacdon]

You really need a combination of promoted listings and a strategy to drive your own traffic from outside of ebay to your listings these days. As mentioned promoted listings are important for the cross promotion exposure you'll get on competitor listings. The downside is that is only as effective as the item specifics available within your categories. Cross promoting to unrelated items does more harm than good. Other than that multi-quantity listings will help you more than one offs since their historical data will be used for ranking. Use the out of stock option if there are items you can restock later. The search approach is more data driven now from the buyer and seller side so retaining sales history for a listing is usually a good idea.

Keep in mind eBay's being pushed from the investor level to cut back marketing expenses, hence less coupons, but more importantly a heck of a lot less of money paid to google for exposure  and more generic branding advertising. You can see now why the focus is on increasing the monetization of existing listing inventory (and sellers in general) via promoted listings. Combine the marketing cut backs along with increased advertising revenue and you get to fudge higher margins to keep certain people happy. Margins are the antidote when you can't deliver on growth.

I don't put much stock in assigning blame to GTC, have always sold GTC, had the same drops many others experienced, and have recovered significantly since taking a longer term approach to promoted listings and driving more traffic from outside of ebay. The one consistent thing I've found is promoted listings are a cheap way to acquire new customers. When you actually run through your PL sales and see what is being sold you really get an idea of just how little most buyers these days are scrolling through search results. Items with higher prices are selling over cheaper options, items that hadn't sold well previously are now selling better if they rank within the first handful oflistings, etc. Basically it's the same problem every ecommerce retailer eventually ends up with, very few people browse outside of high visibility areas like banner space and sales pages. They really need to figure out a way to deliver products to people outside of the artificially gamed search results and same old tired front page promotions of refurb electronics, cheap watches, and handbags. Sending 20-30 emails a day isn't a smart way of doing that.

[frontline66]

My sales did the same just over a month ago, I'm from Canada as well, I've only been on ebay for a year now but noticed that things are working good until ebay forces the "best offer " as im only a "buy now" seller ...... Each time they give the option to buyers' all that happens is dealing with offers to decline instead of actually selling ..... Ebay is always trying to force you to sell your products so they gain instead of going out and finding new clients .... thus there are a few other sites that have came into the market place in the past couple of years which is obviously is taking customers away from ebay

[femmefan1946]

@frontline66 

Back when we joined eBay in the 20th century, eBay was a new and wonderful thing.

It's still #2, although well behind Amazon, but for the collector of  unusual and quirky goods it is a much better site, since sellers here have pictures of the actual item being sold and descriptions that are not canned.

Buy a book on AZ, you may as well buy on price, because you have no idea what you will get.

But new sites are popping up daily as you say. Some will stay, some will fade away like Bonanza or eCrater. Still around but never more than a shadow and moving into a wisp.

I'm not sure the new sites are the reason for any decline (and although market share is down, actual number and values of shares has increased) rather than the growing importance of Amazon, which continues to grow and grow, putting even mega-sellers like WalMart at a disadvantage.

good until ebay forces the "best offer "

EBay used to tell buyers that only sellers who specifically allowed Best Offer should be sent BOs. They have changed that policy.

However, I wonder if you are still using the terrible Simplified Sell Your Item form?

That has Best Offer as a default.

At the top right of that form is a link that allows you to change to the clearer Advanced/Business form, which has BO only as an option.

In any case, you can accept, decline, ignore or counter-offer on any BO. 

(I don't recommend ignoring them, some actually do turn into decent sales.)

You can also opt for an automatic decline on BOs that are too low for you to bother with.

[hlmacdon]

More on where things are heading via eBay's advancement of the Not A Hot Dog approach to ecommerce. 

[ricarmic]

I have had the "sense" that the number of US sales have been lower than usual in the last little while.

I haven't been keeping track but this piqued my interest enough that I will keep tabs for a while on my experience, I'll start another thread on that topic with my ongoing results for a bit or until I forget to update it!

As a note, whilst I was reading one of the "impending recession" newspaper articles today, it noted that lower consumer confidence is leading to lower consumer demand in the USA, so it could be a "country economic" thing as opposed to something in particular to any one of us...

[frontline66]

Best offer 

If you go to contact buyer ..... its hidden there as well for best offer on contact 

Im sure its not the only reason for the huge decline in sales but when you go from 100% in 60 days to 30%  in sales and only heading lower you have to question the tactics of Ebay bc once it turns into kijiji (which ebay owns) and destroys it the same there's no going back

I'm not sure when the taxes are in effect for USA buyers but thought it wasn't till Nov 1 and just throwing that out as a date ...... but if that's case it should have been a rally on sales prior  to Nov 

have not been here long enough to see the cycles to see what effects what but in my own 30 years of sales having best offers will just waste your time or have people raise the prices up to protect their business which is extremely unfair to the person that hits BUY NOW  

Long story short is i'm not here for a loss and Ebay won't be here either if they dont make money .... and may I add shipping companies are the biggest winners of this whole thing 

[kawartha-ephemera]

---

@femmefan1946 wrote:

@frontline66 

Back when we joined eBay in the 20th century, eBay was a new and wonderful thing.

It's still #2, although well behind Amazon, but for the collector of  unusual and quirky goods it is a much better site, since sellers here have pictures of the actual item being sold and descriptions that are not canned.

Buy a book on AZ, you may as well buy on price, because you have no idea what you will get.

But new sites are popping up daily as you say. Some will stay, some will fade away like Bonanza or eCrater. Still around but never more than a shadow and moving into a wisp.

I'm not sure the new sites are the reason for any decline (and although market share is down, actual number and values of shares has increased) rather than the growing importance of Amazon, which continues to grow and grow, putting even mega-sellers like WalMart at a disadvantage.

---

The sites you mention are to be frank not worth mentioning, of the marketplace sites active in the vintage and collectibles market only the slick artsy site has gained much market share at eBay's expense.

Many folks may not believe it but I don't think traditional marketplaces are even ebay's major competition when it comes to what you describe as "unusual and quirky goods". Today, sellers and buyers are using social media in all it's forms to discuss, share knowledge and trade. Facebook groups, Instagram, Pinterest and the like are swallowing up a large chunk of the collectibles that used to trade on ebay … that's where the a lot of the good stuff and buyers have gone.

The thing is, there is a general unawareness that this has happened as these private sales are not reported anywhere, the true extent of the trade is an unknown.

As for just plain old used merchandise the FB Marketplace has taken a bite out of ebay too, I would think their kijiji (sp?) and their other classifieds sites have suffered there.

[hlmacdon]

Social media reselling has definitely taken out a large number of sales for the vintage/collectible/OOAK markets. Facebook has been doing large enough numbers that they are now moving on to a multi-year plan to monetize their marketplace and seem well placed to totally take over that space. The problem is those categories are going to continue to suffer moving forward with a structured catalog which will only further increase seller attrition. The goal is to reduce search results based on relevance to the buyer. That is fine for items with MPN/UPC as you can have a high level of confidence on matching products, but you can see they are now moving towards abstract ways of approaching the non-MPN products via machine learning and natural language processing. The problem is these things are usually implemented quite poorly (case in point eBay's policy bot which regularly generates false positives, or go look at Facebook, Youtube and Twitter who are investing on several orders of magnitude higher than ebay and they have been having major problems).  Worse yet you are working from inconsistent data sets because they are all user generated.

When you replace curation with bots that hide listings and cluster unrelated products you get an absolute mess of an experience for buyer and seller alike and you reduce the fundamental advantage of ecommerce: selection. If you think drops are bad now wait until they really start manipulating search results. You can already see elements of this in some of the various search results they have been testing over the year. From what I am seeing the results have been quite abysmal.

Ebay doesn't understand or know what it wants to be. On one hand it goes out and buys millions of listings in targeted categories and spends marketing dollars to attract new sellers and on the other hand it is overhauling the site to as much as possible shrink search results to ideally a single result, and at worse a handful of results. The UX ranks amongst the worst of any major ecommerce entity and instead of fixing that the leadership basically is saying we have too much inventory, go put 99% of it in the back warehouse and stack the remaining 1% at the entrance to the store. Brilliant.