www.auctionsieve.com

[mianwagner]

Hi Nev. I just won an eBay Up and Running grant recently and currently have the ear of many eBay employees. Since around the time of the September 30th's AS update, I have noticed a marked drop in sales. I haven't encountered a drop off in sales like this for as long as I can remember. In fact, my sales have been extremely consistent since October 2019. I had also never seen AS ever give "zero" results in my entire time of using the product right before the update. Can you perhaps provide any insight to what eBay may have done, to potentially stall sales this month? It just seems like a heck of a coincidence. Thanks

[wickmesh]

It could be an ebay issue? A recent experience suggests ebay's search is fundamentally broken - AS could simply not be having the results you want to see supplied to it.

I searched ebay directly for a car part by its part number; LR042160. At the time of searching, there were 4 listings on ebay for this part number (that I could find by other means; #374394852042, #112162883200, #274300996865 and #393533476326), all with the exact part number both in the title of the auction, and as a listed part number in item specifics. NONE of these items turn up in the main ebay search result!

How on earth is a seller supposed to have any confidence in ebay if even after they've done everything correctly and listed the details that the end user is searching for, when ebay then don't bother to display the items for that search term? How is a buyer supposed to have any confidence that they've seen the items available on ebay at any price, let alone the ones at the best price, if ebay actively are not showing legitimate results?

(Small aside but I've been suspicious for a while that ebay hides the best priced items from search results - I bought a voltmeter from China and it was only after buying that significantly cheaper listings for the same part started to pop up in "Sponsored items for you/Suggested items for you/Sponsored items based on your recent views" - all with titles that fell well within the search terms I'd been using.)

(Second aside but I've long been suspicious that ebay hides many other results - you can run your AS searches again almost immediately [or indeed the next day] and find more results in many cases, these results are not items listed since your last search but ones that have been on for hours, even days. Yes some of it could be AS's "hide items already seen" filter rolling over and showing items again I've seen weeks ago - but my gut tells me it's ebay not AS.)

For the record, ebay automatically decides a worldwide search is needed and gives 4 results, none of which are relevant - #275531680639, #374337944172, #293445547821 and #293727818895 [all of which are the wrong part but for reasons known only to the seller have the searched for part number as an item specific] - the only "good" result from this search is one of 2 in the "Results matching fewer words" section, which has the EXACT PART NUMBER IN THE TITLE. The "did you mean lr 042160" suggestion gives 14 items, all of which are also utter B/S - again the only "good" result from this search is one of 2 in the "Results matching fewer words" section.

It's utterly unbelievable, ebay can only be described as incompetent at this point.

(And yes, I checked for 0/O [zero-october] clashes, there are none. Changing from "Best Match" to [say] "Lowest Price" does nothing, changing to "UK only" reduces the results down to 2.)

[mianwagner]

Thanks for your feedback. I wish Nev would give some input here. I know he obviously has other priorities, but I would assume that he may understand and see a lot more than either you or I might with his programming experience. I realize that he interfaces with an API, but all the issues he has had to deal with in the past could probably give great insight.

I think the greatest problem with eBay is its change from trying to bring in new customers and focusing on taking more from its sellers than it already has in the past. Instead of increasing fees, it is trying to take an additional percentage by charging a percentage to promote listings. This is just reaching into the pockets of the sellers already on the platform again, on top of it's fees.

It would seem that what you are experiencing simply, are irrelevant searches and more promotion of items you were not looking for in the first place. My sieves seem to work well for me with AS, since all I do is scan Auctions, that have one or more bids. I haven't experienced the same search term problems you have using eBay U.S. Whenever I do a general search for the items I have listed I tend to find them easily. Have you noticed what you described for a long period of time or has this just started happening around the end of September? That is when I started noticing a big drop off in sales.