This is going to be a very long post, but I ask you to please bear with me - especially if you have been having problems on eBay! If you had similar issues, please comment or upvote so this can get some exposure!



This is not just another "sales are down" post. I have found a number of issues that are a SOLID indication of problems in eBay's system, and I have many screenshots as examples/evidence.

At this point, I believe the only way this problem is going to be found and resolved is to go public with it to get some attention on the issue, find enough people it is happening to, and maybe find a "common denominator" to see what is happening. In 3 months since our most recent issues began, eBay has not been able to give us any information at all on how we can improve this situation. EBay does not seem to care or even have a team designated for assisting with these problems.

We have been an eBay seller that has been at the top in our category since 2013. We have traditionally handled up to 200 orders a day with a relatively small staff. We were such a strong seller that eBay managers have visited our office in person. Needless to say, we know how to perform well in the eBay climate. We were #1 in our category (by far) for 5 years. EBay has made MILLIONS of dollars from us on final value fees alone. You would think they would help us considering that... but it doesn't seem so.

Now, despite all that, due to issues with eBay's SEO, our store is suffering & the eBay problems are affecting the livelihood of our employees.

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The first time SEO issues began for us was at the holiday season of 2017. After New Years, the impression loss was extremely noticable. Our impressions, and therefore sales, plummeted to 40% of our usual. Sales were at BY FAR the lowest level we have had in 5 years.

Here is a graph we were given at the time to illustrate the drop, green was 2 years ago, purple was last year, blue this year: https://www.screencast.com/t/YCykVOiopg

Finally on Feb 15th, we were esculated to an eBay agent I will refer to as "J". He was able to find that our store had a high % of stagnants, and in our discussion, we discovered that eBay changed the way they factored in sales history & stagnant listings. It USED to be that a large sales history was a positive thing, now it was factoring stagnation more heavily.

Feb 15th we were given this information, we worked with our tech team and by the 18-19th all the stagnants were resolved.

This immediately started moving us back towards normal levels. Within 5 weeks our sales increased by 150k/month.

Here's the issue: NOWHERE on eBay's site does it say anything about stagnant listing calculations or sales history changing, and with a month and a half of working with eBay, none of them had mentioned anything about stagnant listings. They specifically told us the larger the sales history the better! Speaking to J, he told us a large sales history is only good if it is very active - it's not about a large history, it's about how often the items sell over time now.

If it were just a small penalty on sales, that would be fine. But eBays UNANNOUNCED changes cost us over $150,000 in sales per month! This severe of a penalty should at least have SOME notice to the sellers! It is very unfair that we went so long and lost so much in sales because of eBay simply not informing anyone of the changes.

We thought things were handled, but this is when the REAL issues began!

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The major problems began on March 23rd. This just happened to be the exact date of the eBay Spring Update!

Immediately as the spring update occured, the impressions drop was instantly noticable in our sales. I will not give exact sales numbers, but I will give you a comparable ratio we were working with: Lets say our sales benchmark was 10k/day for an average day, and 15k on a good day. In the 30 days prior to March 23rd we only had 2 days below 10k/day and 5 above 15k. In the 30 days after March 23rd, we only had 2 days ABOVE 10k/day, and our benchmark was now 5k for an average day... In the 3 months since then, we have only had 4 days above 10k/day. 10k a day is usually our norm for this time of year!

Furthermore, it was extremely noticable because sales were somewhat "flatlining". Friday-sunday was a flatline. This NEVER happens to our store, it has always been a slope decreasing from fri-sun. And being that I am part of the IT team here, I am aware that one of the things that is typically indicated by flatlining is some sort of LIMIT or PENALTY. Look up googles SEO penalties and you can see it often.

The next Monday I tried to report this preemptively to prevent issues, which they sent me to J again. He sent me some of our business readouts, graphs, and so on based on our performance. This is where the major issues became more obvious. From March, until today (June 20th 2018) we have found AT LEAST 1-2 new problems with eBay's statistics or search system per week!

Our sales in April dropped to the low point they were at in Feb again. We have been at that low point ever since, losing over 125-150k from our yearly average per month, and the impressions have NOT recovered at all! Impressions are still dropping!

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Here is a list of issues we have had since March 23rd:

- Impressions dropped from over 2.5mil to 2.3 mil by the time we connected to J. In the 30 days following, we dropped from 2.3mil to below 1mil impressions. Around this time I started taking screenshots. Our total impressions have fluctuated back and forth, but they are still half of what they should be for this time of year, and STILL dropping...



Here is our performance page so you can see what we seen & the progression:

April 26th: https://www.screencast.com/t/nwj7tJqTbhn

April 30th: https://www.screencast.com/t/aE0pUsjQ

May 7th: https://www.screencast.com/t/5Hf6EsZrB

May 21: https://www.screencast.com/t/73J0fOjsI85L

May 24: https://www.screencast.com/t/aTpuiQ7I

Here is the graph from the MSO sheet as of April, the green was 2 years ago, purple was last year, and blue is this year...

https://www.screencast.com/t/uKC6OHrIjUFN



A drop this large and this sudden is NOT normal!

- The MSO Business Readout for our account is giving inaccurate statistics. It states our account has 5,819 Total Listings, and 6,827 Active Listings. At the time, 6,827 was correct: https://www.screencast.com/t/pJrLK31y



- The MSO Business Readout for April 12th stated we still had 590 stagnant listings. I confirmed with eBay agents that at this time, we had under 30 actual stagnant listings: https://www.screencast.com/t/61MxPbIvhvyo . Also note if you add up the listings, the total number is the INCORRECT number, as reported in the above.

All of our listings are not being counted, and we have 550+ stagnants being reported incorrectly!

- Guaranteed Delivery statistics were not working correctly. The MSO sheet stated that only 45% of our inventory was enabled. I spoke to someone from the Guaranteed Delivery Front Line, and they told us that our actual number was 85%.

- J sent us a graph of our stores impressions compared to sales. The statistics on this graph do NOT match the statistics on the eBay website! During the time where we had 40% drop in impressions from the month earlier, there's no comparable drop on this graph!

Here is the graph he sent: https://www.screencast.com/t/ZJoFw0mT

This graph was dated April 20th. Yellow is this year, gray is last year. It was under 1 month since our drop began on Mar 23, and at this time we were being told impressions dropped around 30% in the last month. Here is the April 26th report: https://www.screencast.com/t/nwj7tJqTbhn



How come that graph doesn't show a 30% drop in the last month??? You can clearly see that the drop in impressions is NOT indicated by this graph! EBay's statistic graphs are NOT matching the impressions statistics that are found everywehre else on eBay's site!



Also, note that as I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of the year we were significantly behind last years impressions, and have never recovered. This is shown clearly by the first graph.

- EBay agents were surprised to see that all of our metrics were better than average in our category: click through, conversion rate, etc. But despite our statistics, our impressions kept plummeting.

- Stores under 1 year old receiving heavily padded search results. A number of stores copied our listings, even stores that were NOT top rated, who copied our exact listings, exact images with a different border, copied our product identifiers, listed at a higher price, copied our HTML template, had longer handling time, no guaranteed delivery, no free returns, no sales history, worse feedback - were being placed higher in search results than us. Even our items that were #1 sales rank, were not appearing above his listings! And his listings were NOT new listings, even ones that were up 2-3 months appeared above ours at #1 sales rank.

- The eBay Analyze tool was telling us our listings were sales rank #1, but our listings were appearing more than 50% down the first page of eBay search.

- We constantly received a notice for 2 months that "Active Listings are down 20%", "Active Listings are down 15%", "Listings are down 10%", "Listings are down 5%".

Week by week, from Feb 5 until April 23, our listing count was:

6339

6391

6432

6489

6514

6602

6638

6685

6719

6737

6774

6756



Our listings were UP each week, not down!

Here is one example of us being told we had less active listings from April 26th: https://www.screencast.com/t/nwj7tJqTbhn

This, combined with our total/active listing statistics being inaccurate, suggests even further that there's major statistical problems!



- Guaranteed Delivery was not always appearing on our guaranteed delivery listings. You check an item it's GD. You reload page, not GD. Reload again, it's GD. We needed customer service for some lost packages and some were NOT covered because even though they were eligible for GD, this bug listed them as NOT GD even though it was 1 day handling time, with expedited shipping supported by GD!

- Guaranteed Delivery had an error where some orders were saying "Handle By Date: Jan 1 1970". This marked a large number of our GD orders as late when they were shipped on time, and nearly lost our access to GD: https://www.screencast.com/t/gfA9hasBEp

- None of our listings are appearing in the new eBay catalog at all! The sellers hub states we do not have to do anything to update our listings for the new catalog. Yet our listings are not being sent there.

- Users who are new stores copying our listings, are appearing in the eBay catalog. One of our competitors that we used as an example with eBay support, who copied our listings, we were told has the #1 visibility in the category.

This one stings quite a bit - our new listings are not being added in the new catalog, but a new user who copies our listings down to the product codes/identifiers/html templates, with worse offerings, on a store that is not even top rated, is being added in the new catalog and is the most prevalent??



How come new users who do not use best practices are placing better than experienced, established sellers, with a strong reputation?

- We requested to be added to the new catalog twice and did not receive anything. Multiple different eBay agents also requested to add us to the new catalog, and one very helpful one also asked for a response if there was some kind of problem preventing the items being added to new catalog. No further responses.

- Some of our items sold 2-3 times in the last week, and then eBay's growth tool told us "100% less chance to sell", and suddenly our impressions drop on those items: https://www.screencast.com/t/6q86A073e

- Shipping not being calculated properly on eBay's search. One of our items being sold was for $107, free shipping. It was #2 sales rank. The #1 sales rank item, was $108, with $98 shipping fee. Evidence: https://www.screencast.com/t/wzzmrF1h1

- The top selling stores are NOT using best practices! I don't want to call out any specific stores, but if you check the top store alongside us in the category, they do have slightly cheaper items than ours (usually about a $2-$5 difference), but their base shipping is only 7 days. You must pay $6 for 5 day shipping, and over $20 for expedited shipping (which we offer FREE)! They do not offer free returns. They do not offer guaranteed delivery. Their feedback is worse. Their handling time is worse. The single thing they have on us is cheap base price (which is actually more expensive than us if you factor shipping).

As mentioned above, with shipping NOT EVEN CALCULATED accurately, they are appearing on top.

- Based on the above 2 points, best practices are SUPPOSED to give you an advantage in Best Match. Right now, best practices are NOT being properly rewarded! You are spending more for free returns & guaranteed delivery, but you are NOT getting the increased visibility that was promised in the eBay webinars.

- Promotions are not consistently showing. We tested this on multiple PC's/phones. Some of them would show no promotion, others would show the promotion. Reload the page, and sometimes it will change.

- Typically more than 35 out of our top 50 items were losing more than 50% in impressions in one month. Often times only 3-5 items were positive, while every other item in top 50 was losing impressions.

An example from 3 weeks back: https://www.screencast.com/t/SLW5sYyt9

An example from today: https://www.screencast.com/t/NhFDtM6iyJ7

The item on the 3 weeks ago screenshot that was #1 at the time with 28k? Now it's at: 2,766... Any strong listing of our begins to plummet!



- Our top listings with best impressions are not remotely similar to last years. You can see from the last 2 images that our highest is still dropping, and right now our highest on todays is 7.9k. If I look at the same exact date period last year:

https://www.screencast.com/t/m47fBbbruw

As you can see this is a HUGELY significant difference! After 3 months of dropping, we are STILL dropping!

- Our "eBay Store" impressions on most of our listings are suddently down 100%. Our total eBay store impressions are down 95%.

Our impression statistics from Friday-Monday sorted by store, absolutely ZERO store impressions!: https://www.screencast.com/t/wFpH4RWi52

- Our items dissappeared from google shopping. Only our very newest listings are appearing in google shopping now. We used to have thousands of our main category of items on google shopping. Now our main category is not appearing at all, and just a small fraction of our newest listings are appearing.

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I got J on the phone in April and he finally recognized that yes, there is a problem. He emailed me in April saying "I am still working on it, I did not forget about you!". It has been 2 months. No further word.

Upon no more responses, I sent the information to an agent I'll call "D". We worked with him in the past on some issues. He said he needed to get approval from J to work with us. After 2 weeks he tells us "Good news, J approved us helping you out, I will have T call you tomorrow!". No call received. "I will have S call you!". No call received. I let him know no calls received, no response. It has been 1 month since a response from him.

One other eBay agent "C" was very helpful. He noticed our issue and agreed with me that there was a real problem. He was the only eBay agent that actually called back when he said he would. He kept open communication with me, and informed us that "his guy found something to help us, he just has to arrange a call back on Monday or Wednesday. It has been nearly 3 weeks since then, and now even he has not responded further.

The three agents that were supposedly the "agents with the most tools at their disposal" and "highest they are able to esculate the case"... all recognized that there is a problem, and then have began IGNORING us.

It's very wrong that we were informed that they "found an issue that might help us", and then that is the last we ever hear from eBay.

I have sent 3 requests for them to call or email me back this week that I have confirmation were delivered according to eBay agents. Still no response.

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I'm sure these issues are happening to other users too. It seems like we're on our own to figure out what is going on and how we could resolve this...

I believe it's very likely at this point that eBay is intentionally trying to "Spread the wealth". Larger stores losing impressions, and seemingly being throttled according to the flatlining, while new stores gaining them.

I also believe there's a statistical issue going on. How could the algiorithm possibly be working correctly if the statistics for your store & listings are not even correct?? I know 100% from our issues earlier in this year that stagnants ARE considered in SEO, which means our store indicating 500+ false stagnant listings is DEFINITELY going to have an affect on our store! Then factor in wrong calculations for total listings, active listings, shipping...

At this point, we don't know what to do further. EBay agents, and even the supervisors, look at our account and can not find anything we are not already doing. We have competitive prices, promotions, we're following best practices, guaranteed delivery, free returns, we handled our stagnant listings, removed borders from image.

None of it has helped. Our impressions are still plummeting. Nobody can explain why. They tell us we have no penalties on our account so it "must be something in our listings", but then they look at our listings and promotions and can't even find anything to advise us on. As much as they say it's nothing affecting our account, it definitely seems this is an account wide issue.



On top of all this, nobody even has the decency to call us back when they promise to? If any of us sellers gave a customer this level of service, eBay would decide things in the customers favor. But since the tables are turned, it seems we're on our own.



This should not be unacceptable! We have had to let good employees go over this, cut back hours of employees, and reduce other anemities offered by our company. Lives are being ruined by this, and eBay does not seem to care. If we are truly on our own, I hope we can figure out a way to resolve this situation...