As any webmaster will tell you, reading your traffic stats is like taking the pulse of your website. eBay Store owners rely on traffic reports provided by eBay and powered by Omniture. When sales go down, sellers go directly to their reports to see if traffic has also gone down, or if visitors are just simply not buying.



We're receiving a number of reports from eBay store owners that their traffic plummeted around the end of August. Some are sure it's a decline in traffic, others are wondering if it's a glitch with the traffic reports themselves.



Last week a seller sent me some screenshots of his traffic reports, and this week he wrote again: "There is little doubt in my mind that the problems at eBay are quite serious, I am generally not an alarmist but this has been 19 days of dismal and getting worse traffic. As of 1:22pm today I am sitting at 40 views.... my normal for the day at this time of the year is in excess of 900. I'll be lucky to hit 90 for the day. I did call eBay today, expecting little to no help, basically rep agreed that the pattern is not quite right and that he is passing it along to an IT person to examine."







"The question - which is broke... eBay or the report generator at Omniture," he asked. "I know of another active seller that has mirrored my downturn, we have compared notes and it began at the same time in the same manner."



In an email titled, "Ebay traffic plunge or data issues?" another eBay seller wrote, "I noticed that at the start of this month my daily traffic reports are showing 30-50% LOWER on a daily basis for page views. Sales are down as well but I don't think they are down as much that those numbers would reflect. At the beginning of the year, I showed up to 1500 page views a day. That has slowly come down and over the past few months, I've averaged a little over 1000. This month however is showing 300-600 page views per day. I tried contacting Omniture but they never responded. Has anyone else experienced this I wonder?"



Given the increasing number of anecdotal reports about slow sales on eBay, it's not easy to determine or even guesstimate whether it's a traffic problem or a glitch. Today's Letters to the Editor blog, for example, is from a seller who said her sales have not yet rebounded from the summer slump.



Clearly just because some sellers are experiencing a problem doesn't mean everyone is, particularly now that eBay is running frequent experiments on its site to test new features and is testing its Cassini search engine, so we turned to eBay itself on Monday morning, and we're waiting for eBay spokesperson Ryan Moore to tell us if eBay is aware of any problems with the traffic reports.



If it is a problem with the traffic reports themselves, let's hope eBay gets them fixed fast so sellers won't be flying blind. In the meantime, here are some links to some of the threads on the eBay boards where sellers are discussing these issues.



Omniture Not working????



Traffic cut in half, literally.



Omniture report showing unusually low page views.



traffic reports down 80% Why ???

