Hello, I’m Patrick from the eBay Seller Communications team.
Many of you already receive our quarterly eBay Seller Report by mail each quarter and I personally get great feedback from sellers I meet about it.
Sellers also ask could we bring this report online (with a PDF option to print) and this is something I’m looking into.
I’d like to discuss with Tamebay readers what kind of information you would like to receive in your report. If we bring it online than a lot of the data we currently present such as Sales, transactions, DSRs etc are already available on your seller dashboard and account tab. Other data such as your competitive ranking among all eBay sellers is something I hear is really useful as too is data on % of sales that are cross border.
So what information would you like to see that would give you insight into your past months sales and more importantly, give you intelligence to potentially grow your sales on eBay? How about most viewed items in your category, items with lowest high search but low availability. Please feel free to comment below and we’ll be reading all suggestions.
As we are developing this new report format we will not be producing the edition 2 of the existing SellerReport (due in May) the next report will be available in the third quarter of 2012.
29 Responses
How about impressions in search and clicks?
AKA google adwords?
Complete search transparency.
Currently with Best Match, I simply do not trust that my items are being shown all the time to all buyers.
More transparency with search impressions and clicks, including geographical data would remove this apprehension I share with many sellers.
It would also bring Ebay into the 21st century in terms of search reporting.
Google already have the technology, so it can be done and the information is probably already available to Ebay.
how about saving us some money and not sending anything ,
we know what we have sold, and who to,
we dont care what our ranking is, because its calculated for a specific category,
and an individual account,
we sell across many categories with a number of ids,
we get at least six of these letters we really dont bother reading them,
and on top of that they go to our registered office and often sit for a week or more before we pick them up
What was the criteria for recieving this Seller Report? I have recieved only 2 or 3 ever and then they just seemed to stop.
Recieving it by email or by downloadable link would be a lot more cost-effective.
What I would like more than ANYTHING is for my Traffic Reports to work. I have never managed to view Traffic Reports in over five years of trying, despite contacting eBay and Omniture on so many occasions, you have failed to resolve the problem.
So what’s the problem? Well, I click on the Traffic Reports link, which takes me to https://sales-reports.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SalesReportsSummary&ssPageName=STRK:ME:LNLK:200 where it says “Sign in to use the Omniture Service”, but once I sign in, I’m redirected to https://pages.ebay.co.uk/storefronts/omniture-auth-error.html (a page that doesn’t even exist any more!) and can never access my reports. I’ve searched Google and judging by all the posts discussing this exact problem, I’m not alone.
I feel cheated as I pay a shop fee like everyone else, but I’m not getting the same services. Other sellers (my competitors) have an advantage as they can access reports that I cannot.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CAN YOU SORT THIS OUT AS NO ONE ELSE AT EBAY SEEMS TO CARE!
and while I am ranting on
its a buyer report we need!!
which buyers return the most ,who leaves the most neutrals and negatives ,who has filed the most complaints etc etc ,a letter with that info every 3 months would be read repeatedly
The real question put by Patrick is what information would be useful to help us grow our sales on ebay.
Now there is an aweful lot that ebay could do to help all of us grow sales and on this occasion we are to focus on the benefit of a report and how this might help us.
How would Patrick feel if the reports that are sent to him were surrounded by distractions and post-it notes to divert his attention away from the meat? That is effectively what we sellers have to put up with with our listings.
So let us see some evidence that all these distractions are working and that the cross selling that ebay plonk around our competitors listings result in click throughs to our own listings.
So we want to see the source of the hits. Is it google, ebay search, item specifics, a random catagory hit, or through the ebay shop that many of us have.
And how often do folk visit our ebay store through our listings. That would help so that we could see if template changes work.
Traffic source info would be useful so that we can see what generates traffic and what does not. That would help us to focus our efforts in driving traffic and to see which aspects of ebay are the most relevent for this.
Again I guess this is more buyer info than seller info.
I think the Seller Report is a waste of time & money – time & money that could be better spent on improving the site for sellers. I wonder if all your outlet sellers get sent this report? I doubt it. You should ask yourself why that is if it’s so valuable.
And why do you keep ignoring what sellers ask for and produce stuff like this that is useless to anyone except those that want an ego boost to be able to tell their friends they’re in the top XYZ% of toy sellers on eBay.
As a seller on your site I want to be able to do the following:
1) block buyers who leave regular negs and neutrals – if they’re so unhappy shopping on your site why don’t they go elsewhere? (I have the answer to that but everyone reading this knows it already as well so I won’t bore them)
2) be able to cancel a transaction when a buyer asks to change the shipping address after they’ve paid without them being able to neg us – your CS staff will be able to see the message through My Messages so why can’t it just be policy? I think the same would go for shipping to an unconfirmed address although this doesn’t affect us as we aren’t selling really high value items.
3) charge different shipping rates for different EU countries – everyone knows the risks involved in shipping to Italy are far greater than shipping to say Belgium and the shipping service and costs should be able to be more country-specific to reflect that. If this was possible we’d remove countries currently on our blocked list and sell to them.
4) communicate with buyers easily – why did you remove the ability to bulk message all buyers at the same time? This is essential and it beggars belief that it was removed to ‘improve’ the buyer experience. Which buyers asked for that? The same ones negging sellers every other day I guess? :-/
I could go on but I won’t. You have forgotten that we, as sellers, are ultimately your customers and that no matter how many big merchants you sign up, (mostly with terms that break that law I should add!) you will sink if you don’t keep the niche and long tail sellers on your site selling their sought after products. All you seem to be doing as a company is pushing them out. Tesco, Argos et al will not keep you in business because they will not pay you over 10% commission of sales revenue month in and month out and you can’t survive on no income and a place that has nothing people actually want – just ask Game. So stop with the nonsense communications that mean nothing to anyone and focus on what really matters, keeping sellers happy and wanting to keep selling on your site.
Hi Patrick,
Bin the reports, total waste of money, if you must send them, email them instead, it’s 2012.
Ebay should do a seller survey.
Question – would sellers prefer reports mailed or emailed?
(although what is to stop ebay simply plonking the same info in real time in a seller dashboard?)
As for wanting to help sellers to increase sales this is a fantastic mission to have but remember the old maxim:-
“SALES ARE VANITY. PROFIT IS SANITY”
I would prefer ebay to help us increase profits.
The club I belong to produces a members magazine 6 times a year. Members have the option of receiving the magazine by email and most elect for this option. It saves the club £400 a year in printing and postage costs which helps to keep club membership fees down. ebay could learn something from this factual story.
Replace the reports with champagne and send monthly.
I got my first ever last month, and thought it was largely a waste of time and money.
It didn’t really tell me anything, I’m not really interested in my rank and pretty much everything else was in my head anyway.
Save the money and spend it on acting on things that really impact other sellers like dodgy hidden business sellers and other rule breakers that get largely ignored.
I think the report is a “Nice to have” but if it wasn’t sent, it wouldn’t bother me.
To be honest, if i want to see how i am doing, i look at the bank account & my P&L report.
Hi all
Thanks for your replies and input. To answer a few:
Mark T : We could look into search impressions but the report won’t go into specific item data it will be around your main category data. But I’ll bring that to the search team to see if they can do anything around this.
Bunchy: The criteria to get the report was based on the last quarter’s sales volume and it went to a % of sellers. Hopefully we will now be able to get it out to a much larger % of sellers as a result of bringing it online.
St Gerorge’s Dragon: If you are looking for data on what items are profitable for you then your own internal reporting should handle this. Your ideas around greater data on buyers are interesting, Ill examine this potential.
Gary: We already did a survey with recipients of the report and the vast majority tell us they find it useful and the competitive ranking is what they like most so we ill be keeping this. On your other points that are off the topic of this post Ill pass them to the different teams involved. We are already working on a lot of these known pain points.
Jimbo: I like your idea and must do some research this weekend on the most suitable brand. It may take some time though..Hic!
Again, thanks all for the comments
Patrick
patrick
could you define the actual purpose of this report and any advantage ebay feels it gives because were missing something ,it makes no difference at all to how we use ebay, or how we conduct our business ,
and were delighted your considering looking at making buyer data available , as we its their habits and actions that are imortant to us we already knowwhat were doing
When ever I think about reports I find myself thinking back to an earlier employment many years ago. We had a computer generated report where you could opt for as much or as little information based upon a detailed set of financials based upon the Budgets.
A New Boss took over and demanded that he see everything(the previous Boss only wanted the exceptions ie where the actuals were above or below the budgets).
We pleaded with the bloke. But he was adamant. He wanted to see everything. It turned up in a printout that was almost too heavy for a man to carry. The next month he only wanted the exceptions.
Surely this is true of ebays reports. We only really want to know where things are going wrong or information that provides us with facts and figures that we can action to improve our performance. All the routine fairly meaningless guff we can do without.