I’ve written many times lately about eBay search – Best Match, Catalogue, Auctions and Fixed price listings being hidden in search results – and none of it’s been good, so today for a change I’m happy to report that eBay appear to be fixing the issues.
I noticed today that I had started getting sales above the level of the last couple of weeks, so I went looking in search to see what was going on. Products are appearing on the first page of search results that previously had been missing – not surprisingly once items were visible they started to sell again. eBay have identified and fixed some of the issues (they are always monitoring the site performance) and the good news is things are getting put right just in time for Christmas sales – traditionally as soon as people receive their pay check at the end of November sales go through the roof.
How have your sales performed over the last few days? Have you seen an uplift in the last couple of days? eBay never share the secret sauce behind Best Match (partly to stop sellers gaming the system but also I think because they tweak it so often that what they told you today would be out of date tomorrow), but have you seen any change in sales patterns this week, particularly in categories that are catalogued and are displayed as Product Cards in search results leading to Product Pages?
8 Responses
Glad to hear you’ve got your visibility back Chris. In terms of auctions and demotions on some accounts, this is a deliberate implementation made by eBay and their Best Match algorithm, so I don’t think eBay will consider that to be a ‘bug’ to be fixed.
As a seller of many years with eBay, I should be inundated with sales right now, but in light of unannounced changes, I am feeling the consequences.
I actually got an email back from some senior guy in Germany today. They dodged all my pertinent questions regarding how they changed the Best Match FAQ (in regards to auctions) etc. etc.
They did say (having ignored most of my emails) they were sorry for doing so, and then said my auction visibility was set to correct itself shortly, but I’ve shot myself in the foot by listing lots of auctions yesterday that aren’t going to sell (their words). Well the only reason I did that was because of the free promotion on ebay.com
I have been specifically told that conversion rates are only in connection to duplicate styled auctions, but obviously this is not the whole truth. It is connected to auction conversions fullstop. The fact that I’ve had no duplicate auctions for over a month now, and getting an email saying I’ve destroyed any chance of getting visibility back for some time is testament to that.
As to yesterday’s promotion encouraging those to list on .com with up to 5000, 1, 3 or 5 day auctions – is this an ingenious ploy to engineer the downfall of many accounts? I listed a mixture of 1,3 and 5 days. How many people get a good conversion rate on 1 day auctions? Now eBay have the audacity to have a go at me for taking advantage of the promotion, despite I haven’t listed any duplicates.
Glad your visibility is back Chris, but it’s not the case for everybody.
Yes Chris my sales have been great today on Amazon . *Insert big smile *
No use sitting on eBay feeling sorry for myself ,I have to follow the buyers.
Ebay seem to have done something as I have had no international sales since 16th November …..
I seem to lose a lot of visibility out of nowhere for a bout 2 weeks now. Sales dropped by 80% in 2 weeks. I thought may be consumers holding on purchases because of Christmas. But i don’t habe any drop in sales in other channels. So it is weird issue i can’t put my finger on.
I’m a eBay seller for 2.5 yrs now with 250+ items listed in fixed price and auctions and a 99.9% feedback rating with almost 2,000 feedbacks… From the Omniture traffic reports, I can see our page views are getting somewhat back to normal since 11/18– after some SERIOUS dropoff in visibility– but our sales are still only 5-10% of what we had at this time last year.
According to the page views reports, our search results dropped like a rock as of 9/30. We went from 500 views per month to about 40-50 views PER MONTH. That did not rectify until 11/18.
I’ve been complaining bitterly about this, seeing sellers with much worse feedback ratings, or only a few hundred sales, showing before our listings. Sellers with 75,000+ sales are also FLOODING the listing pages with garbage, burying our listings on 12+ pages under.
An eBay CS rep told me yesterday that:
a) right now eBay and Google are “having a moment” and that could be part of it. I asked her to be more specific about this and she then dismissed it and said it probably wasn’t having too much effect. Can anyone here elaborate on that????
and
b) I should clean out my keywords (I didn’t even know I could do that after multiple calls asking what to do about this) and she directed me to the Search Engine Keywords in Manage My Store, saying that the keywords are often loaded up with duplicates as this is something eBay does automatically, often sweeping up words multiple times and this will causing Google to ignore the page. Is this really worth the time and effort to clean out keywords?
We’re about ready to drop eBay auctions altogether and would love to hear of any intel, positive or negative, to help us make that decision.
Appreciate any and all feeback as we are sooooo frustrated.