I think this is my cue to move to a more transparent platform.

[pokeboxuk]

I don't like to buy into the 'eBay sales are down' posts because all sales are cyclical, but something truly bizarre has happened this week. I've gone from consistent £200 a day in sales, to £28 over the last 2 days (and £0 today), and I think I know why. (Conspiracy theory incoming).

Only one thing on my account has changed. All listings are the same, 0% defect rate, 99% positive feedback, no price changes. The only change is I've stopped buying postage through eBay this month, from which they were presumably getting a healthy cut.

Since I stopped using eBay for parcels, 100% of my sales for the last week have been 'large letter' sales where I still use eBay postage (which is utterly bizarre as they accounted for virtually no sales before this week). I've gone from posting 100 parcels and 5 large letters a week to posting 5 parcels and 100 large letters. It is almost as if they factor commission from postage into whether they push a sale or not.

The 2nd conspiracy theory is this... My traffic is consistent, even when sales evaporate. If eBay was really limiting my sales, surely traffic would be considerably down. Unless the traffic stats are **completely fabricated**? It is ridiculously improbable that 30 separate relatively popular listings would all suddenly go from a year-long consistent run of 4%ish conversion, to all getting 0% conversion all at exactly the same time, but still be getting exactly the same impressions, click through rate, and views.

It increasingly feels as if some major fudging of numbers is taking place, probably to pull the wool over the eyes of shareholders. The crazy platform-killing policies like free listings for private sellers, the desperate attempts at getting us to pay eBay's marketing costs via 'offsite ads' (just so they can direct users to higher paying promoted listings from our own listings), the new 'regulatory fee' that doesn't pay for regulations at all. It all feels like what you get when an organisation is on it's last legs. the final cash grab.

I think it's time to migrate everything to my own website. Why pay for eBay to have 'offsite ads' when they can decide that those users I've paid for should be redirected to listings that are more profitable for them?

[sheba-knows-best]

I'm not a big one for conspiracy theories but this is curious... are you discussing sales from the account you posted from?

Two things spring to mind:

1) have you checked the competition.?There was a beauty products seller on these boards who lost her sales overnight when a new seller moved into the market and undercut her. 

2) If it were me? Principle be damned, I'd go back to using ebay's postage and see if sales returned as quickly as they disappeared. That would kind of prove your point, no?

[pokeboxuk]

Unfortunately it's not so much about principle as it is about money. I have a courier account that charges me 60% of the cost of buying from that same courier online, so it's not feasible to keep using eBay postage. The things I sell are very low value items with high postage costs (i.e. a box of 100 DVDs), so getting a good price for postage is the most important thing.

It is definitely a category with a very low barrier to entry, so there are times when sales drop off a cliff when someone new joins the fun (which is probably worse with the new 'free listings for business sellers pretending to be private sellers' debacle). But this feels different. Those times you'd at least get some sales by virtue of having a track record with the algorithm, paying high ad fees etc. Now it's 0 sales across any product that's not posted via large letter.

I probably will go back to eBay postage, but only to get rid of current stock.  It's one of those things - in the long run eBay should see it as a positive to have more sellers opening courier accounts for lower postage costs, leading to better deals for customers. But maybe in the short term, the algorithm and the suits at HQ see slightly lower quarterly margins and freak out.

[sheba-knows-best]

I was suggesting going back to ebay postage just to see what happens....

Do report back.

[billtev]

I use ebay postage and have done so for nearly 2 years and my sales are dire to say the least the past year so not using ebay postage is causing this sorry!