@ojewellery wrote:
@goingfishinguk I'm sure that you're expressing some sort of frustration in your comments but I don't understand quite what. I'm slightly uncomfortable by it. Posting my findings/ adding my personal experience on the forums is never intended to offend. It is intended to challenge, because its business. I find constructive challenge has helped my business grow and evolve. I get in ruts (I'm in an eBay rut at present) but I am rather Pollyannaish. No point dwelling, dust off, move on. The forums help with letting off steam and finding new glimmers of hope to try.
None of my comments ever intend to offend, however they will always be the truth so if that does offend, I’m sorry the problem is the reader’s not the writer. As for being ‘Pollyannaish’ that is fantastic and I wish I could be more of that however I prefer to be labelled, which I do not like, more of a ‘realist.’ I take my experience and sprinkle in my expectations and then come up with the 'answer.’ My reply to you was how is it put ‘For Balance.’ Remember you can’t have balance unless you have equal on both sides by definition.
So now the boring bit. A wee story. Many years ago, well not that many about 5 or 6 I decided there was a gap in the market for a particular piece of fishing tackle that I used but was manly hand made. None of the top brands had decided to bring out their version and I was not happy with the quality of the ones I was using so I decided to invest in a little wire forming tool that could only be bought in the USA. At the time it seemed a huge risk this little device was about £140. I tweaked the design of the product a few times, trial and error etc and eventually got to where I wanted to be with it. I went fishing a few times and got asked by ‘nosey’ anglers what I was using and why. I was happy to share and was told a few times I should sell them on eBay. So, I did and to my surprise I could not make them fast enough. Using this money, I decided to make other items like fishing weights and clips.
All this time I was holding down a full time job so basically all the money the ‘business’ made went back into the business or allowed me to extend my personal fishing tackle hoard – you can never have enough haha. My good lady saw how well I was doing (no promoted listings of any kind at this point) and suggested I went more official, proper company name, contact wholesalers for products and do it more full time. My first Limited Company was born. As I’ve mentioned on here before it went from strength to strength as I could plough all the profit back in hence it grew quite fast. I now started to use promoted listings at just 1.2%. This was forced up in the near future to 2%. I now had four or five of the big Fishing Brands on board and was growing out of my spare room ‘shop.’ The decision was made to go full bricks and mortar fishing shop. Wow I was so happy. This was my dream job and of course meant I got my tackle to use personally cheaper.. always a bonus. I kept growing and growing and soon was hitting an average of £600 in sales a day, all with just 2% PL. Dreamland. However, I had a very big decision to make and that was I had to quit my day job. I could not go and teach all day then spent at least four hours on an evening packing orders.
Now the last 12 months or so. This time last year or about September time I was averaging over £1000 a day. Again, just PL at 2%, ADDING new listings not sell similar and ending just ADDING new listings regularly. Then I noticed a steady and very disturbing pattern like decline and started to panic. I came here to find a solution and spent many hours trying to work out why this decline was happening to me. It was not a seasonal thing; it was not people were not spending it was (Terapeak) or seemed to be my account was being capped. eBay promised us they would protect us against INR cases. As the thread went on and on they admitted they FORGOT. Yes, that is right folks they FORGOT. My sales were basically dropping £50 a day week on week till just before Christmas my average daily sales had gone from £1000 a day down to £50. Why? (Was me giving eBay £90,000 a year not good enough?) Then, I stumbled across a post regarding service metrics. If you were in the ‘very high’ bracket you got a warning you were a threat to the community and your account was restricted, the policy said (not quoting it) that you would have extra time added to your delivery time as a consequence, nothing about restricting sales but to all that was involved the truth was your delivery dates stayed the same, but your sales restricted. Once eBay had fixed their monumental ball dropping sales picked up and I could see hope. According to my accountant I lost over £35k in sales during this period.
Desperate for answers and to be honest the truth I sent a very long snail mail letter to head office. I was very surprised that a few days later I received a phone call from the executive office of eBay.. woo aren’t I special. (We had a few phones calls and emails exchanged) They of course brushed aside my claims but did offer me six months free shop as a good will gesture. When putting my claims across I could tell they were not happy with my threats of legal action. I was told, and again not quoting that if I did that my selling would be restricted so I could not afford such action and was told if I did what I threatened and that was to email eBay’s executive office every time I had a complaint about tracking numbers (my other complaint) that I’d be banned from eBay full stop.
Things slowly improved and I was nearly back to the £1000 a day mark when again in Feb the same happened although this time my service metrics were fine but the affect the same. I stubbled across a post by SKB who suggested (again not quoting) that ‘you’ should try the new version of promoted listings, these were the pay per click. Funnily enough after losing approx another £10 to £15k in sales they started to go back up. Pay to play brothers and sisters!!!
July came and wham, again sales on the downward spiral, this time no apparent new feature to try and all along doing the usual hoop jumping which never seems to work. It turns out that we were part of some impressions test which crippled our sales, again eBay’s fault no compensation. This actually finished my business off, crippled with low sales and mounting debt. I was advised to just open another account which I did and on what little I had left I crept along. Again, got to about £400 a day sales but now back to about £50 to £80 a day, completely capped, last three days IDENTICAL amounts and IDENTICAL number of sales – no market forces can do that. The search has been proven to be butchered, more and more Promoted Listing schemes have come out and I actually think eBay thinks it’s okay to give them over 50% of each and every sale. I wonder what the shareholders would say if I asked them for 60% of their dividends.
So sorry if I offend but I’ve lost one business nearly two, £380,000 in sales, had three full on nervous breakdowns and at near retirement age riddled in debt and having to go back to my old career when really I should be travelling around in my new(ish) camper van with the missus. Well, that was the plan. So sorry as a ‘realist’ eBay only care about themselves and their shareholders, they care about the dividends and they do not care how they get that or how much misery they cause in doing so. They are heading for a large failure that is for sure and I really hope I’m around to see it however again they won’t care the CEO will get a massive fat cheque and move onto another company, the shareholders will probably not even notice they have lost a million odd here and there. All greed and it should be stopped, maybe one day probably not soon enough for me. So, apologies for being a realist.
