Sales down like never before in 20 years
Summary: maconlection started a discussion about a drastic drop in sales on eBay, noting a significant decline over the last four months. Several participants, including frelonverre, solitaire04, and flofigurine72, exchanged views on the possible causes, citing economic problems, poor management by eBay, and the impact of competition. Some, like flofigurine72, decided to turn to other selling platforms, hoping things would improve. Others, such as patbo65, criticized eBay’s practices that hurt sellers, suggesting that participants leave the platform. The conversation reflects general dissatisfaction with eBay, with concerns about listing visibility and the erosion of the customer base.
The drop in sales started about 3 years ago but for the past about 4 months, it’s been a disaster!!! What do you think? From about 10 items sold per day for about 16 years, now it’s between 1 and 4 ??????? With an immediate buy list of about 6500 items
raisolvia
·3 months agoI've never sold anything on eBay, crazy, around ten views while on other sites it sells right away
allotami
·3 months agohello
My concern is not the low number of sales, it's the fact that there's practically no traffic on ebay.fr.
Let me explain: some time ago, I listed a collector's item, a commemorative object for a royal birth.
The fact that the item didn't sell I understand: maybe the starting price was too high, but what puzzles me is that over 5 days of bidding it didn't get a single view. Completely hidden. Do you have to pay for promotions in order to sell? I know about fixed-price listings, but does that exist for auctions??
tiripsowt21-0
·4 months agoPro seller for a long time, a year later I see this discussion thread and things have drastically gotten worse on our side, 3000 contractual listings online at competitive prices all well detailed, the bibliophilia sector, arts, engravings etc..I struggle to make 30 sales a month compared to 70 easily 3 years ago with fewer listings, that's how it is, the listings aren't even looked at. sometimes I end up searching for my listings even in the eBay bar and they don't exist!!
eBay has become a pretty toxic platform, Chinese junk, dropshipping,; algorithms, an unintuitive sales tool, a Rube Goldberg machine that serves no purpose, bad SEO..Moreover a punitive platform, that manages its sellers through stress..We're slowly leaving..
chiffonnier-1457-b2
·4 months agoaatlanticlight
·7 months agoI’m a small seller (around a hundred varied products for sale). I’m also seeing a sudden and dramatic drop in sales, even though I haven’t changed much in my offering... The reasons I can think of:
- The whole tariff story decreed by Trump has dried up the U.S. market. Customers are afraid of being hit with very high taxes on their purchases. And we can’t really tell them what’s actually going on. There’s a sense of fear among buyers. So they don’t buy.
- Brexit has closed off the British market. Tariffs discourage any purchase.
- The Chinese are dumping their goods at rock-bottom prices, and they’re organizing to deliver quickly, with very low transport costs (often zero).
- Will ebay shut its doors like the textile retail chains that are disappearing one after another?
- Ebay has raised its prices so much that we don’t really feel like working with them anymore... And if we raise our prices, it makes the situation worse...
In conclusion, things are looking pretty bad for selling on ebay... And for ebay... And for sellers who sell only on ebay...
passifloreflo
·7 months agoHello,
We can also point to the drop in turnover because of the French postal service, which has eliminated the “books and brochures” rate since last July 1... no more low-cost shipping of books internationally...
Then for professionals, there’s REP; not only do you have to register and pay in France, but now in Germany too, or else our listings won’t appear on Ebay Germany, same for other countries ...
And of course the competition from new online platforms, spending habits are changing, no more frivolous extras.
Regards
dadesse
·9 months agoHello. Agree with you. I suspect Ebay of favoring the biggest sellers and thus responding to a certain market (selling tiny little items quickly for next to nothing, Temu/Shein style, or else relying on a certain firepower) and also of throwing small sellers off course even when their listings match S.E.O. (keywords), to push them to sponsor their listings, which, as you’ve seen, costs extremely dearly and serves no purpose. In short, we’ve gone from a win-win to squeezing the lemon dry - Result: staggering view counts on items that have real strengths, sales that take months even though they match searches. Honestly, it doesn’t smell very good!
frelonverre
·9 months ago@dadesse
and so, years of servitude to a site that despises you, is that enough for you
get out of your comfort zone and reinvent your bizness
dadesse
·9 months agoThanks for the crash course in the style of an American teen series, but is it really useful? I don't think so.
frelonverre
·9 months ago@dadesse
just have to believe that with a few ideas you could change
destock83170
·9 months agoWe were in the same situation, we were at nearly 40 sales/day, currently it's 10 max. It's becoming very complicated.
oclock_777
·10 months agoI can only say the same thing! For me, it started very precisely and very abruptly in September 2023. Since then, not a single sale!!!! not one!!! So, I’m an individual seller, it’s not my business and I have few items for sale. A watchmaker by passion, I used to put watches up for sale. What we call watchmod and a few vintage watch restorations. Before that date, I would list 2 watches and they’d sell within the month, mostly between the 25th and the 5th of each month. Sold mainly in France, then in Germany and Italy. The trend reversed and the last 2 I managed to sell were in Germany. Since then, now for 18 months, I haven’t sold anything. To the point that, well, I’ve stopped doing it! I never looked for profit, I sold those watches for the pleasure of it at the price they cost me... which, when I think about it, was costing me money in time spent, consumables, tools, and taxes !!!!!!!! I have always found it completely crazy that shipping fees are included in my "turnover" !!!!!!
The last two I eventually sold, I was forced to sell them for less than the price of the parts !!!
There are indeed the big Chinese stores that are promoted by eBay, the search criteria that are more than exotic, and the icing on the cake: eBay regularly removed my watches on the grounds that they violated the rules, even though hundreds of watches exactly like mine are for sale coming from China and the USA in particular !
I even went as far as making around fifteen reports on the grounds that if my watch is removed then hundreds of identical ones should be too!... I was pissing into the wind! And for all those reports I received an email saying those listings were fully compliant! So I took the trouble to call. And there, we’re no longer at rock bottom, we’re below rock bottom. You systematically end up with someone who can only recite the email you received back to you! No matter how much you end up getting angry, you’re facing a wall! It feels like trying to have a conversation with a doll for a little girl who can only say 2 phrases: "Hello, my name is Barbie" !!!!!
Really, all this has become delirious!
silentpoly
·10 months agoSame here, 47,000 listings and sometimes no sales for 24 hours, I see no effort on eBay's part to fix the problem, in recent years they've invented quite a few ways to take more money from sellers who are forced to raise prices to pay eBay and we've become too expensive. I now sell more on my personal site with 7,000 listings than on eBay.
seewhatisup-0
·1 year agoEbay has totally tanked,
I get zero views, whereas 2 years ago I was getting hundreds of views per item!
I used to sell every day, now, it’s 1 item every 3 months
Bottom line: we removed all our items to sell them on **bleep**.
Can’t wait for **bleep** to arrive in America,
frelonverre
·1 year agoand what are you doing to fix that?
you just sit there and acknowledge the facts while lamenting, that's not effective, get moving!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
flofigurine72
·1 year agoBasically that's what she does, she moves elsewhere ^^
Then the clientele has already migrated for quite a few item categories and I don't see it coming back to eBay in the short term
We'll see in the future if eBay is able to change, but I doubt it (you never know, in 3 years they may have moved back to #1 )
i_revolution
·1 year agoHello,
For my ( other ) pro seller account, more than 10 years ago I had bought a so-called "featured" shop for €39.50 excl. tax per month ...
Since I'm under 300 listings/month and especially considering the advantages (?) that this subscription level brought me, I’ve just switched to a basic shop ... that will still be €20 excl. tax less paid for visibility that will probably not be any lower since it was already nonexistent 😉
On average I get three times more views and more sales on the local site even though I’ve noticed a slowdown there these past two months as well ...
Good luck!
globemar
·1 year agoWe pay for a shop, we pay selling fees, but for visibility, it seems you have to spend a lot on advertising and in the end you make very little profit.
So a very complicated situation right now! how much longer can we hold out?
ya2tout67
·1 year agoaimeemich
·1 year agohello - no sales, okay, we could say our items aren't selling for x reasons, but the worst part is that there isn't any traffic. The listings can stay online for a whole month without getting a single visit!! I had sponsored a few listings that weren't featured since there were zero visits, so I deleted them.
ebay seems to work well in the US but not in France.
frelonverre
·1 year ago@aimeemich
eBay seems to work pretty well in the US but not in France.
well, they basically did everything they could to put off sellers and buyers
the good ones have left, the others are afraid to give up the certain for the uncertain
flofigurine72
·1 year agocustomers have moved on to other sites
By switching to another site while waiting for better days and an overhaul of eBay, the competitors have been selling very well, even better than eBay over the last 2 years
Maybe one day eBay will understand that it's shooting itself in the foot, but that's not a given
vmp-58
·1 year agoHello
Same observation, a dizzying drop since April, never seen in 11 years of selling on this site.
And yet since 2022 I’ve lowered my prices and my shipping costs.
I still get the impression that the visibility of listings on Google is almost zero, unlike other online selling sites.
Unbelievable
Hang in there everyone
noctisauxroses
·1 year ago9 out of 10 products sold by eBay are auto and motorcycle parts
Don’t think for a second that these pages are the preserve of weekend handymen: « Over the space of three years, the share of professional repairers who regularly buy used parts on eBay has increased by 40% », says Francesco Faà Di Bruno, head of auto and motorcycle parts at eBay France. The platform sees this as a welcome growth driver to stand out from the classifieds giants that are LBC and VT. « Along with refurbished electronics and art and collectibles, spare parts are among the five priority categories set by eBay five years ago: all are growing at an average of 5% a year, but auto parts are the best-selling category. » The success is particularly strong in France, where eBay brings together 5 to 6 million listings posted by some 300 auto recyclers. « They are the ones who make our catalog the biggest in Europe, after eBay’s in Great Britain. » In the end, second-hand and refurbished goods (across all product categories, not just auto and motorcycle parts) generate 40% of eBay’s global revenue
raytatav
·1 year agoEven old engravings no longer sell on Ebay. As for drawings or paintings, forget it; making a listing is a waste of time.
flofigurine72
·1 year agoThere are a lot of current factors to take into account
Purchasing power has never been this low people are completely freaked out by the current situation in France and are afraid of the future so they prefer to cut back on non-essentials
The sharp decline in sales isn't just on eBay even if, to be fair, on eBay it's much more violent than on other sites like Vd Coincoin but for this part you have to blame the main culprit, which is eBay
When you run your site as well as our president runs his country, you shouldn't be surprised to see bankruptcy at the end of the tunnel
eBay currently no longer attracts buying customers apart from in a few rare areas like Pokemon cards
Young people under 30 don't go on eBay to do their shopping the site is unreadable seller or buyer protections are nonexistent you get the impression they're tossing a coin when it's time to hand down their verdict
The site fees as well as the fact of making sellers pay the shipping costs also greatly cool independent sellers down (we still end up with eBay with URSSAF +25% fees on shipping costs)
And the icing on the cake in my eyes remains the 2 tax issues of 2020/2021 which for my part made me decide to leave this site and I'm certainly not the only one
Last point the visibility of independents or intermediary shops (-10k items) is almost zero you work on eBay fr and in the end it's German shops that are pushed to the forefront the dropshippers and the Chinese you pay fees to work on your country's site and in the end you're put behind the others you add to that private sellers whose listings are offered or have no selling fees and who are pushed forward by the algorithm and you have the answer to why you sell less
maconlection
OP1 year agoThanks, all of that is part of my thoughts as well :: I remember, back in my early days in 2004, I put everything up for auction: out of about 10 listings a day, about 7 items sold, then all of a sudden, a huge drop: immediate purchase had appeared ......I got into it, at about 80% of my listings and then about 10 sales a day ....
Now, if you look for an item on everyone’s sales list, for example: .....................a pair of briefs (humor) that can lead you to carburetors, frying pans or ........................tobacco jars ....... so confusing for the buyer searching
And also, if a buyer opens one of your pages, below the title and description, a bar with "similar items on ebay" appears before the rest: description and price, , distracting the would-be buyers from the item to analyze :::::::
Anyway, I’m giving myself until the end of summer to stop on ebay
Thanks and good sales anyway,
Patrick
flofigurine72
·1 year agoWe agree, the site is totally unreadable anyway
It’s easier for a customer to find the dispute button than the send a message one, I get the impression
Everything is done against common sense, as far as I’m concerned tomorrow I’m pulling the rest of my listings and bye-bye eBay it’s sad, it’s the site that let me get started but sentimentality won’t bring back a customer base that’s gone and won’t come back, and the new generation doesn’t come to this site
eBay has the same logic as the post office
We have less traffic so they tax more, which makes sellers flee; the main issue in my eyes is that if it improved the site, it would only bother me a little, but when you see that when a customer wants to buy a product, as you say, the keywords lead to completely different items and that if the buyer finally finds their product, when you click on it you get ads for the same products on competing sites
maconlection
OP1 year agoAnd also, as is the case today, a buyer is taking 7 items from me on vintage trucks, he wasn't able to, like many now, group the items in his cart to ask me for a single invoice: He bought 7x1 item, paid 7x, but some give up and empty their cart
j'ai already called Ebay over the years to point out these flaws, but apart from thanks, nothing is ever done
See you later
Patrick
flofigurine72
·1 year agoeverything is more complicated on this site it's a disaster
I just finished removing my items from the sale and for my part I moved over to coin-coin and it's pretty good even if there are fees, the fact of just having the labels to print and not having any transport fees to pay and be taxed on changes your life
raytatav
·1 year agoThe parent company of **bleep** bought Ebay for 8 billion euros. It's the same shop now.
maconlection
OP1 year agourssaf +25% in fees on transport costs: no, it's 15%
patbo65
·10 months agoA piece of advice, As a pro on Ebay, they do nothing to help us with their declared turnover figures to URSSAF
worse, they leave us to sort ourselves out even though they still have the merit of acknowledging their mistakes
but well, to make them work, they don't deserve it anymore, a piece of advice RUN AWAY FROM EBAY
frelonverre
·1 year ago@maconlection
it's in the air these days, the site is tanking and the finance minister is clipping it
keep your head down and look for a way out, it's a matter of dodge or die
solitaire04
·3 months agoHello,
* it's not the site that's sinking as said above ., it's the crisis and people have less money.. that's all.
Moreover it's not like before " starting price one EURO is more reliable and putting our starting price directly doesn't please people.
frelonverre
·3 months ago@solitaire04
of course the site is tanking, and has been for years
this site does everything it can to squeeze sellers, makes unfair decisions against them, and in the end only the "stubborn ones and the big ones" are left
you know, luckily other sites have popped up, so we’re still surviving after all