Big Drop In Ebay Sales This Week

I think ebay was better when they charged a listing fee. Too many free listings. Sellers had an incentive to start auctions low or risk paying another listing fee. Too many listing fees and all profit was lost. Now the same overpriced stuff keeps cycling around and around. If I wanted to see the same items over and over I'd go to bidstart or delcampe. Believe me, they are pretty boring.

I'm a seller too and I know it can be scary listing an item with a low start, but it's always amazed me how many of those actually sell for more than I would have listed it for as a Buy It Now. It's the caught up in the bidding phenom. It's too easy for buyers to skip right over a higher priced item. The low start gets it on their watch list. Sure you might get stung on a low start every once and a while but I think you come out ahead in the long run. Problem is you remember the loss more than the gains.

I think ebay should have incentives for sellers that actually sell items. Perhaps based on a % of items listed. After all that's when they make their money.

I am convinced my ebay lots are not being seen / viewed, maybe my lots are in a ebay rolling blackout mode? Probably my lots are buried in Casinnis search engine results. Have good qv covers starting at just $3 each with a 1d red stamp on them. Normally these sell out. Kcaramat I agree on the over priced stuff being constantly relisted, cycling around and around and never being bought. These are all BIN items and those sellers have them set at relist if unsold after 30 days. The problem is they don't ever bring the prices down so all the high priced items no one buys takes up the room in ebay search results, and other better cheaper items get buried behind them. Some of the sellers with 2000 plus items in their store on BIN, really need to review what is not selling. Either reduce the price or take them down. I have seen some of these over priced BIN items relisted at the same high prices for weeks on end, what is the point of offering them over and over again at prices no one would pay?

For the overpriced BIN items, have you sent a message to the seller offering a lower price? I have done it a few times and been successful. As for excessive postage, I always add the postage to the price of the item before I consider bidding. If the item is still a good deal, I would still bid. It doesn't matter to me if an item is 99 cents with 19 dollars in shipping, or 20 dollars with free shipping, the cost to me is the same, so if I think the item is worth more than 20 dollars, and I need it, I will bid.

Yes, I've done that. Been successful some times, other times not so much. There are Buy It Now items that have been on ebay for several years. It isn't costing the seller to have them there, so what is the incentive to move it?

I like to list items with a reasonable start price and a Buy It Now. That way if someone doesn't want to go thru the auction process and the Buy It Now is fair, they can end it. Many times a bidder will bid the start price, taking the Buy It Now off the table, and the item ends up selling for more than the original Buy It Now. Those are the cases that offset an item selling too cheap.

They can be waiting for the person who *will* pay that price, for whatever reason.

Just because *you* were there looking that day, is no reason to think that all of the tens of millions of people who have ever bought anything on ebay will see that item during any 10-day listing period.

Q/ Do you know of any brick'n'mortar store that takes things out of their shop window if they don't seel in one week?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

How many times have we seen, on this forum, the recommendation to 'first, check prices on ebay"?

We should be proud of our perception, and our success.

Q/ If an infinite number of robots were collecting an infinite number of prices, would we crash ebay?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

No. First, it is doubtful that they would all request data at the exact same time. But more importantly ebay would quickly filter out any spider/bot requests as soon as they noticed the increased traffic. Spider/bots crawl the web constantly now and there are standardized measures in place (i.e. robot.txt) that can easily be used to control what is allowed to be crawled.
Don

Edit; I would add, that flooding a server with requests at a lower packet level is called 'Denial of Service' (DoS) attack. It is illegal, disruptive, and anyone who attempts such a thing ought to be hung out to dry. A more sophisticated version of this is called 'distributed denial of service' (DDoS) where hacker use other computers across the internet to all attack a single (or set of) servers. These are particularly ugly and cost us all huge amounts of money. Again, anyone who attempts this kind of thing ought to be thrown in jail and kept there for a long, long time.

Some sellers might list stuff that may seemingly never sell because they want to draw more eyeballs to their other offerings. I nearly always look at a seller's other offerings and will try to combine multiple items to save on shipping. Sometimes that process starts with me clicking on an item that I probably won't buy.

I think that the larger number of unsold auction listings is due to one of the recent changes in ebay policies, whereby they took away "free" fixed price listings for non store owners and dramatically increased the number of "free" auction listings for the same. In conjunction with this change, ebay started a new functionality which allows unsold auction lots to be relisted automatically 3 times. I believe that this has changed the nature of auction listings where the automatic 3 relistings has created a new type of defacto "reserved price acution". As a seller if you want to create a normal reserve price auction, you have to pay ebay a fee. Not with this new type of listing.

The risk of any type of auction is that this might not be the right moment to get what the seller considers a reasonable price. So ebay has created an incentive for sellers to set a reserve and run an auction for a month. 4 bites at the apple and hopefully one buyer or more will notice. For the lots that are truly mispriced, this just creates more stale inventory for the buyers to sort through.

From a big picture perspective, this practice is not that different than the one practiced by all big time stamp auctioneers. How many stamp auctions have I been to, where the auctioneer starts a lot out at a price... maybe drops it a bit to see if there are any takers and then just passes the lot? Often times that lot just morphs somewhat and shows up again and again. Different venues.... same result.

ebay's logic when they tried to force people out of the fixed price space into auction listings is that auction listings have a higher sell through rate. Of course that assumes that the auctions actually sell. I have no doubt that the sell through rate on auctions has gone down with this policy shift. I am sure that the MBA's at ebay are trying to think of another "Update" that will "improve the experience" for all. Ha Ha.


Bob

Robots.txt is just a suggestion to robots. 90% of robots/spiders ignore it. Even Google does sometimes. In fact, the bad bots use it to deliberately find what your trying to hide.