It seems there is a general consensus in the eBay seller forums that eBay use methods to throttle seller accounts. So the results in search will change based on criteria such as location and time. Also to perhaps stopping one seller showing many times for one search term when they are selling similar items?
I'm not sure if this is true, however I have found sales volume can vary wildly from one day to the next...perhaps some sort of search result fiddling going on?
Either way, do people use stealth accounts to increase the volume of sales or is it simply a way to mitigate the risk of one large account being booted and being left with nothing.
Would you put the same or similar products across several accounts to then put several listings in the search results verses having one account with several similar items on? aka taking more of the search result 'real estate'?
I kinda got pretty fed up with ebay and focused on Amazon over the last few years. Now i'm looking at plans for the new year and just weighing up pushing eBay more but utilizing stealth accounts.
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I use multiple accounts for two primary reasons:
1) Redundancy - As you've mentioned it's not good to have all your sales on one account which could go down any day and halt all cash flow
2) Cornering markets - Ten accounts selling the same item (or niche, or whatever) will get you a ton more sales compared to one good listing on one big account. Just make sure all your listings look different and don't appear to be the same person. Other sellers don't stand a chance once almost the entire first page of search results are your listings.
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Thanks for the info. Seems like it would make sense to use the multiple accounts to effectively gain more traffic.
I'm assuming you would also use different accounts for different locations?
We sell small items and could ship to the US from the UK. Would the preference to open up a dedicated US account and just say you are based in the US and increase the dispatch times to cover the extra time to post items?
We have a UK account but even selecting to show up on eBay US gives us a pathetic amount of actual US sales. So low it makes it pointless as we cannot benefit from bulk postage discounts.
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Originally Posted by phaz0rz
I use multiple accounts for two primary reasons:
1) Redundancy - As you've mentioned it's not good to have all your sales on one account which could go down any day and halt all cash flow
2) Cornering markets - Ten accounts selling the same item (or niche, or whatever) will get you a ton more sales compared to one good listing on one big account. Just make sure all your listings look different and don't appear to be the same person. Other sellers don't stand a chance once almost the entire first page of search results are your listings.
Frankly I'd consider maybe using a Canada account instead of US.
I don't know how familiar you are with US tax law but all US Paypal accounts have to provide a US tax ID before passing 200 sales in a calendar year. So unless you plan to get an EIN from the IRS and file taxes in the US each year, you'd be limiting yourself to 200 annual sales on that US account.
If I were you I'd go with a Canadian account and then make all your listings on eBay.com rather than eBay.ca. Using that setup you'll get 95% US buyers, 5% Canadian.
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Frankly I'd consider maybe using a Canada account instead of US.
I don't know how familiar you are with US tax law but all US Paypal accounts have to provide a US tax ID before passing 200 sales in a calendar year. So unless you plan to get an EIN from the IRS and file taxes in the US each year, you'd be limiting yourself to 200 annual sales on that US account.
If I were you I'd go with a Canadian account and then make all your listings on eBay.com rather than eBay.ca. Using that setup you'll get 95% US buyers, 5% Canadian.
Yep totally but like everything you need to take into account the effort to run all these accounts. Be very interesting to see two accounts with the same products and how the scale up. Aka is 6 accounts three times better than 2. I guess you get to the point of diminishing returns.
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Originally Posted by aking
Seems like common sense to me.
If I have 1 accounts with 2 listings of Item A, a few people will see it.
If I have 5 accounts with 2 listings of Item A of each account, 5 times as many people are going to see Item A equating to more sales.
Do multiple accounts increase sales volume? 
