Is Ebay "Broken"? A telling tale:

I just came across this article on AuctionBytes that talks about the theory that Ebay "broke" sometime in the spring of 2006 when they implemented Stores in Search and then took it out again. Check it out here: Data Points to Problems on eBay.com Be sure to check out the blog discussion that follows here.

I have to agree with this article. It is dead on. My sales were at an all time high the year of 2005, and peaked when they placed Stores in Search. When the took them back out again, my sales have never been the same.

Someone in the blog discussion mentioned that it was also around this time, that they implemented Ebay Express. This was not mentioned in the article and it very well could be a part of what is "broken". I don't know what the hell is wrong, and I think too much time has gone by for even Ebay to know what the is wrong. All I know is that I agree with many other sellers, that something in Ebay's system is broken, and they need to figure it out. If things don't pick up for me this fall, it may be time to call it quits for me there and time for me to go out and get a real job.

EBay Moves to Recharge Its Auctions

From the NY Times today:

EBay Moves to Recharge Its Auctions

EBay is also testing new ways to deliver search results. Instead of heading each list of results with items whose auctions are about to expire, the company will in the coming months give users the option of seeing search results headed by items the company predicts will be most appealing to buyers — a measure determined in part by how well sellers have been rated by other buyers on eBay.

This should be very interesting! I have almost 5,000 feedback, 100% rating (lavender-haze). Hopefully I will not be lost among the bigger sellers with 5 digit feedback and higher. For those just starting out or with low feedback that is not stellar, this could be very bad. I think the potential is there for scammers to try even harder to steal some hard-working sellers ID info.

Ebay pulls ads off of Google - bad news!

This can't be good news for Ebay sellers. No matter what you typed into Google's search before, SOME type of Ebay ad would come up!

EBay Pulls Ads From Google's U.S. Ad Network

Ebay's stand: "an instance in a continued experiment eBay does to determine the best allocation of its advertising and marketing budget."

Google's stand: "an angry reaction by eBay's management to Google's decision to hold a protest party concurrent with the start of eBay Live, the company's annual conference for merchants. Google has been reaching out to media to promote the party, aimed at eBay merchants who are upset that eBay doesn't allow them to use Google's Checkout online transaction system."

If I had to choose, I'd have to say I'm leaning toward Google's stance. It's not like Ebay has a money shortage and needs to trim their budget or anything.

eBay Seller Joins Chorus of Complaints over Search

Very interesting article on Auctionbytes regarding the flaws in Ebay's search tool that have been talked about for almost a year now and never acknowledged before to exist publically. There can be no denying by them any longer that there does indeed seem to be a problem! It will be very interesting indeed to see what happens next. We can only hope and pray that they will eventually see the light and put the Ebay store items back in search.