Power/high volume ebay sellers - how're your sales doing?

flipper_2010

My sales have been terrible this month, but I'm only a small seller. September was great. Although just sold a £20 book on Amazon so that makes up for the terrible October.

skint-student-nurse

my business sales are slow, but tbh, i am waiting on new stock. my private account sales are through the roof, every item i have been listing is selling. november was the month my crimbo sales really got going, so im not worried...yet!

TurkishDelight

The best match is just awful at the moment- we're doing fantasically well somehow anyway, but the best match is hindering us a lot.
It keeps putting us pages and pages in, practically invisible.

Ebay are useless, and just have a look at the search results whenever they are emailed, which since it keeps changing position is just so fustrating (funnily enough they can always find it on the front page :rolleyes: ).

It's been going on for weeks now.

86ianh

Best Match, TRS, prior sales weighting changes, 24 hour spam auctions - there are so many factors that affect how/if your items for sale get viewed by buyers.

Raghav Gupta was the Principal Research Scientist at eBay research labs who invented eBay's Relevance Search algorithm (sadly named "Best Match") - here's what he says about it now he's left eBay.

"For a long time within eBay it was considered impossible to sort live listings by relevance in real-time, without human training/classification. Unlike regular web-search where the index does not need to be updated immediately as soon as someone somewhere in the world changes his/her webpage, eBay's search engine would need to constantly update its index as thousands of items get listed and expired every second, coupled with confusion over the meaning of "relevance" in an auction style e-commerce scenario."

As a non-techie, I don't really understand all the implications of what he's saying, but I have found the ebay labs website a useful indicator of what they're thinking about and the "Optimize Your eBay Listing Title's BayEstimate" seems to be helpful (although may be out of date now?)

As a newbie I can't post links, but post #6 on Ebay best match?? from stevew8975 has details about factors that affect the positioning of listings in the eBay search results and may help people get the best results possible by optimising what is within a seller's control (rather than the unfathomable rationale and key performance indicators known only to eBay.)

Smart_But_Casual

September was mind blowingly good and October week one has been pretty good as well.

sandiep

Is anyone using the Adcommerce PPC ads? We've tried and we haven't had a click yet, so no idea what's going there.

As for best match, it seems to be basically a method of pushing the smaller irregular sellers, and more unreliable sellers down the listings, and putting to the top those bigger more frequent sellers that have good DSR's. In principle all sounds good, but I think there are a lot of very good sellers that don't sell huge vast amounts that are perhaps being penalised.

I think best match honestly means that there is no guarantee of ever getting to the top, or even page one, of the listings for a particular search or category.

StaffsSW

sandiep wrote: »

Is anyone using the Adcommerce PPC ads? We've tried and we haven't had a click yet, so no idea what's going there.

I switched mine off last week after running it for 3 months. My ads were getting 100,000s of views, but the click thru ratio was miniscule about 3 clicks per 10,000 impressions, and there was no way of knowing whether those clicks resulted in a sale or not.

I had a budget of £50 per month for adcommerce, but the CTR was so low, it was only costing me about £5 per month.

I still think a lot of ebay users are reluctant to click on the sponsored link type of displays.

boombap

Cheers again for the responses all. Rather than feeling jealous of those of you with good sales I'm feeling quite optimistic

Did anyone else get a phone call from eBay today? I was rang just before midday with a rep to tell me that the bulk of my listings had to be edited to show the domestic turn-around times and returns policy...dopey me had thought that old listings just had a default setting!

The Ebay rep gave me a URL that is meant to take you to a bulk uploder but the page appears to have been removed - pages.ebay.ie/sell/sellerupdate/editlist.html.... anyone know where this bulk uploader can be accessed elsewhere? I'm registerd on the .co.uk version - have no idea why they directed me to the Irish version.

Thanks in advance,

S.

86ianh

squee wrote: »

The Ebay rep gave me a URL that is meant to take you to a bulk uploder but the page appears to have been removed - pages.ebay.ie/sell/sellerupdate/editlist.html.... anyone know where this bulk uploader can be accessed elsewhere? I'm registerd on the .co.uk version - have no idea why they directed me to the Irish version.

I wonder if they meant Turbolister which is here - pages.ebay.co.uk/help/sell/turbo-lister-install.html

thepedestrian

not a high seller ( more high buyer actually ! ) does anyone use best match ? - as soon as the search appears I turn it straight on to ending soonest then nearest first without even looking at what Ebay sticks on the top slot