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28 Responses
If eBay are not showing your items in the search results once the seller reaches eBay’s allowed sales quota regardless how much effort the seller puts in to their listing the sales will be the same as last month and the month before.
The system is rigged so you sell what eBay allow you to sell regardless what you do to your listings
I have a regular larger seller using me as a drop shipper and getting 3 times the prices I sell for so why are these buyers not finding my listings and buying from me instead ?
You need to be smart about selling. If you have large priced items that are only making you a low margin, but you have smaller items making you a similar margin, then simply drop the large margin item and move it to a new eBay account. eBay are limiting sales, and my turnover has been static for 12 months now. I noticed when my larger priced item is not selling, my smaller items booms and vice versa so you need to think of new strategies to counter the eBay limits. This is why more and more sellers are putting accounts into there wifes name and starting a new seperate business. Hard if you have a single niche product line, but easy if you don’t
I haven’t sold on eBay for some time (there were no limits when I was last on the site) and I was considering coming back but after reading these comments I’m wondering if there is any point if turnover / growth / success is basically controlled by eBay and small sellers (the people who put eBay where they are) are paying the price for the growth of the big brands.
eBay is playing a dangerous game, there is no doubt sales are controlled to the sale, they are basically running a subscription scam. I’m amazed they are not in the least bit concerned just how bad their press is, it certainly seems the vast majority of sellers now despise this crooked company, one day soon they’ll see an exodus as people vote with their feet and give them the finger.
One thing for sure is people who did not believe eBay were doing this a year or so ago are now noticing the same trends in sales once you hit the ceiling regardless what you do your sales will be static.
How can a business invest in a future on eBay when eBay control the top line and wont even admit what they are doing its the biggest scam on eBay and makes all the fraudulent INR claims seem a drop in the ocean no wonder eBay don’t care abut sellers been ripped of they are as bad as the scam buyers they love so much.
Anyone who has more than a few thousand listings a month just look at your invoices all within a few quid every month what a coincidence.
Maybe Tamebay could ask eBay to explain why more sellers are seeing these unnatural sales patterns and come clean once an for all and let us all know the truth and then we can decide if we still want to play and invest our futures in this rigged game.
Sales are totally controlled for any seller who has been on the site for more than a couple of years; my sales are £1500 per 30 days. I sell mostly on a Monday and Tuesday now, then …tumbleweed for the rest of the week.
My store had a staged decline in sales from 6-10k per month in 2014 to 6k for 3 months, 5k for the next 3 months, 4k for 3 months, then 3 then down it’s current level which is where it seems to stay now. I tried all the usual advice – free shipping, revised listings, ending old listings and renewing them with new photos etc, I even doubled my stock size. Nothing worked. My store is now circling the plug-hole.
And yet with all these complaints Tamebay still don’t run a story…. Why Tamebay? Why are you so quiet to vocalise the disquiet increasingly shown to eBay as a result of its underhand practices????
Its frustrating to invest time and money into expanding on eBay only to find doubling the inventory and taking on more staff does not make any difference to the eBay sales month on month.
So now I have quartered what I list moved staff on to the other outlet sales Amazon and eBay monthly sales are the same as ever the maths just don’t add up double the lines to 20k same sales as 10k so half them to 5k and its still the same every month.
Next month it will be 2.5k and I will see what happens the rest can be Amazon only where extra products increase revenues
Not sure questions will result in honest answers from these guys, but there seems so many people noticing extremely dubious patterns that do not effect other sites, something that’s only increased in the last two years. It seems highly unlikely so many sellers in diverse categories are reporting this anomaly that all too often is called a ‘conspiracy’ theory… Somethings happening that’s feeding this increasingly widely held opinion.
How about an article regarding what people are saying, and let the comments decide if their is an issue. I have a strong feeling it may be one long comment thread. Just a thought.
Could I ask does David @ stuffusell experience these patterns?
My thoughts being, as they are running this pilot scheme surely they would want David to sell as much as possible (thus, no limits) to encourage more selling.
I like many others have this thoughts, every month it always averages out to roughly the same amounts sold, despite free postage, more listings, better photos etc.
It cannot just be a coincidence that us and many others are experiencing this.
We’ve been testing this in a different way for for a while now – we’ve listed no new stock for a couple of months. Guess what? Our sales are exactly the same – and listings that haven’t sold for months – or even years are now selling…
Thinking we may not be investing so heavily in Christmas stock this year!
I am at my wits end with eBay. for the last 2-3 years I have invested so much time and money into making sure we are one of the best at what we do on eBay. But eBay have capped our sales and no matter what we do, no matter how many listings we have or deals we do we cannot break through the ceiling we have. I have invested tens of thousands of pounds in new stock, increased stock holding, better IT, more staff but eBay are preventing us from growing as we should be.
I keep track of what our nearest 8-10 competitors are doing on eBay by using Terapeak and we are all doing the same, we all have the same weekly/monthly sales within a few thousand pounds, that cannot possibly be a coincidence, I KNOW that we are capped by eBay and I am not going to spend any more of my time or money trying to grow on eBay.
They,(eBay) have made me ill in the past with the worry and stress, they treat us sellers terrible, we spends £20K+ per month on eBay fees and they treat us like dirt. None of our other suppliers are so arrogant, they know they need to look after their customers.
I was at a local meeting a year ago and I said that I see eBay going down the pan in the coming year and I was right.
Unfortunately we are beholden to them as no other platform gets the amount of traffic and sales but then no other platform causes us so much grief.
So the question we need answering is is it legal for eBay to cap or manipulate sellers sales?
We noticed a hug increase in sales when we upgraded from a Featured Shop to an Anchor Shop, I was reluctant to pay the extra but somebody who used to work for eBay just kept telling me to do it, they said don’t ask why or how, just do it, so I did and almost overnight our sales grew massively.
So what is the next step for us? I would happily pay an extra £200 per month to get the same increase in sales but there is no higher subscription level….or is there?
…. Time for an article I’d say.
I have to say I agree with everything that’s being said on here. My listings have gone from 50-70, basically because I couldn’t keep up, to almost 500 and my sales are at best a third of what they used to be. I’ve gone round and round in circles trying to figure out what is going on and how to solve it, nothing works, the peaks and troughs are horrendous, very stressful and not a normal business selling pattern.
It’s taken me months and months to decide, yes there is something going on with eBay and I’m not just losing my mind, that’s because despite all the similar information I was getting I’m very wary of people just making noise, but I KNOW now there is.
I get one ‘good’ night each week, always on the same night though it changes every few months, that’s not normal. I used terapeak as a trial, another way to help sales, and looked at sellers selling similar items, the graph unbelievably showed a spike in sellers sales on one night a week, each seller having a different night.
I run a group specifically for sellers having problems with eBay and we’re all reporting the SAME THINGS! If I could bin eBay I would but unfortunately nothing else at the moment is as viable, that will change if they don’t change their strange game.