Ebay Recent Changes 15-03-2024- Promoted Listings no Sales

[theglo-68]

I wonder if someone can share their experience as sales are down to Zero  from 15/03/2024. We can see a pattern where sales have gone down from good to really bad.

Anyone else experienced this issue or we are the only one?

[typo_lee]

Ours are the same. Doing really well up to 15th then went dead. You can rely on eBay anymore that's why we sell

on multiple platforms 

[the_book_seekers]

I've just checked sales slowed around the 10th and the last one was on the 15th.

[bravergrace]

I don't know the reason, but I do know (from my own attempts to buy stuff on eBay) that they've been playing with search again, with dire results.

Example A:

Best Match search, all categories, 82 results, pretty good match (around 70 of them are relevant to my search term, and the other 12 are sponsored items with no relevance at all. 

Click on "Price: Lowest First" - and change NOTHING ELSE at all.  

It changes to 17 results, of which only 5 are relevant to my search term, and the other 12 are sponsored items with no relevance at all. .

Result: I buy my item from another site.

Example B: 

Four-word search term, 80 results.

Remove 2 of the words, 12 results.

I'm inclined to think that eBay search is trying to reduce the number of results rather than respond to the actual search inquiry.  It's worked out that people are more likely to buy when they are only shown about a dozen results, so it thinks the best strategy is to show them just 1 or 2 relevant sponsored results, plus 10 or 20 complete non-starters.   This means great sales for the sellers prepared to pay eBay 80% of their turnover, and no sales for anyone else.

If you sell bicycle light bulbs, eBay can give you thousands of "impressions" by showing your light bulbs to people searching for aluminium foil, flea collars, or Easter eggs.  This won't get you any sales, of course, but you'll look at your statistics and say "well, impressions are booming, I must be doing something right."

Bear in mind that with sponsored listings, eBay doesn't care if overall sales are down.  As long as the successful sales are for an item which earns eBay twice as much in fees as your item would, eBay can absorb a 50% cut in sales without noticing.

[patch*perfect]

Same here.  There's obvoiously been some detrimental fiddling around going on.

[vintagechinashop]

Honestly I've never known it so bad. This week I've had 4 sales. I've gone from selling 15-20 items a week in February to 4 or 5 a week and mostly low value sales. 
something is very wrong here. Because I've barely made enough to cover my fees and that's never happened before. I've spoken to other sellers in other categories and they are reporting the same 

[the_book_seekers]

The last time something like this happened ebay was running 'tests' with impressions. But that was obvious as people could see their impressions had taken a nose dive. At the moment I can't see anything obvious apart from sales diving from the 15th.

[typo_lee]

Same here. All the traffic stats are consistent only thing that's changed is sales stats have nose dived big time. We had big sales days leading up to 15th

[motoringmagpie]

Some sales still coming in but as you say down from the 15th/16th on and sufficiently reduced to ring concierge last Wednesday to see if they had any reports of  issues which could potentially be affecting sales. Got the 'not aware of any issues at present' reply.

[wavesales]

Hi,

I totally agree with your flustration, I sell a certain type of belt that is using promoted standard I had holiday settings on due to eBay issues but all my items were selling except for this 1 item and it is heavily promoted and I did not get a sale for 3 weeks all my other items are 100% perfect and selling except for this one. I believe they just demote promoted listings because they have know where to display it!!  

[vintagewatchpart]

Just did a few random searches and something is different. 

Search "pocket watch" - the best match results show the first 12 items, all randomly selected (and mainly poor quality!) then after those results there is a box "Picked for you" where you scroll to the right that shows all the sponosred items. Then if you keep scrolling a few sponsored ones do appear amongst the search results.

This is different, there used to be more sponsored results within the organic search results, but by putting them all into the "picked for you" box my instinct when I view the results is to skip past that and not pay any attention to it. 

So if your sponsored results no longer appear within the usual search results and have been moved then this could account for a huge drop in sales via promoted.

[retail_media_station_group]

yes , up to 14th march fine , 15th march huge drop in sales, 16th March again further drop and by the 18th march no sales at all and nothing since other than three £3.99 sales .. Something happened on the 15th March. Thats is clear as a lot of users are saying the same dates . Ebay Agents all deny anything all is good and "All businesses have a donwturn from time to time and it will pick up" Strange though that the downturn starts on a specific day for many ! AI is a good thing when it works , but when AI is bad it hurts us all!

[the_book_seekers]

I drew an eight day blank before a couple of auctions sold over the weekend, but nothing doing with BINs as yet. There has been talk about being switched off, but that is what it is like, everything seems to stop. This has happened before, of varying lengths in duration and I don't think it happens to every seller.