Until ebay introduced "Send Watchers An Offer" watchers might have meant something for the reasons already given and back then if I got any watchers on an item I regarded it as a good sign. Because far fewer of my items got any watchers at all, it meant something.
Then ebay introduced "Send an Offer" for sellers.
In general I listed at least 1 item every week since last January and I only remember 1 item (a 19th century tea bowl with a visible crack) that didn't get a few Watchers. So why the increase??
Because re-sellers soon realised that they could scroll down page after page of Newly Listed items, add them to their Watch List, sit back and wait for offers and probably only bother to look closely at the listing details if a tempting offer arrived.
As ebay has wrecked the search and progressively made non-sponsored listings harder to find, browsing collectors / buyers have given up trying to find anything worth buying on ebay. That's given the re-sellers a more or less clear field with very little competition to make them buy anything at the asking price.
It's another reason why so many private sellers have deserted ebay. These days it's really only re-selling businesses that have the time, patience and inclination to winnow out decent, genuine items from the mountains of irrelevant (but sponsored) items that ebay throws into the search results and all over every listing. (Who would have thought that a search for "19th century tea bowl would have results of about 12,000+ to sift through?)
Only four times, out of all the items I've listed this year, has a buyer paid the (always reasonable) asking price. When an item doesn't sell, it no longer automatically means that it's over-priced, it just means that there isn't enough profit for the resellers to take an interest, so reducing the price just plays into their hands.
Ebay has stitched-up private sellers with the combination of doing away with the old, easily searchable categories and replacing them with huge new ones, send / make an offer and sponsorship fees. None of them have speeded-up sales as ebay said they would. It has reduced sales in collectable and niche areas to the point where private sellers can be held to ransom by resellers for want of any other buyers.
I've sold 4 items this year at the asking price and I'd guess they were the only genuine private buyers who managed to find my items. To me that shows how few real buyers ebay has these days and why every month we see at least one new thread about "Sales collapse in (add each month as it goes by)". Things aren't going to improve while most of the "buyers" here are only looking for "bargains" to resell.
And they STILL haven't fixed the Spell Check.
