Ebay auction traffic shaping

[sam999]

I had a quick search but couldn't see anything on this.
Are others experiencing Ebay traffic shaping, i.e volume fluctuation through the month?

My sales dipped to one item per day or less across various categories towards the end of April. Today (1st May) I've sold 6 items so far and nothing new has been listed. I'm not a big seller but usually sell 2-3 items per day. It isn't always the case that sales die towards the end of the month but my sales volume cycles constantly up and down as if Ebay are shaping traffic to my auctions.

There is no way it is simply coincidence, sometimes I sell nothing for a week during the worst periods then get a volume of 6+ in a day with the same items.
I've searched my own items before from another browser to check my Cassini rating but it doesn't seem to change, so what's going on?

[ebaystealth1974]

When you say "auctions", you really mean "buy it now"... right?

[sam999]

Yes sorry, I mean buy it now.

[13obby]

This is happening to a lot of people Ebay is just shareing sales between sellers as theirs an influx in sellers it’s becoming more common then usuall and the only way around it is to have more accounts.

[aspkin]

It seems to be a big issue lately with lots of big seller complaints (for lack of sales).

I'm seeing drop shippers being hit hard.

It's the first I'm hearing it called "shaping" though, that's new

[Sunspot144]

One odd phenomenon I've noticed about buyers is that there will usually be multiple sales following the first purchase over a relatively short period of time. Ebay adds that '1 sold in 24hrs' tag and for whatever reason people seem to be more inclined to purchase it if others already have. Blame the pack mentality. If ebay even bothers to add the tag they must know what they're doing.

Also I'm not 100% sure on what to make of it yet - when I averaged all my sales for the past 8 months (~16k/mo so valid data) by day, they all averaged out to pretty darn close to the same. So first monday of the month I'll do $325. Second monday $300. Third $650. Fourth $425 etc. over 8 months was about the same sales volume as any other day in total. Kind of weird.

[phaz0rz]

They without a doubt shape traffic (to use your term).

One of my accounts is limited to $100k annually regardless of what I list or how I handle the account. I'm 99% sure of it. Coincidentally, it has a monthly dollar limit way above that amount. I've checked my dashboard daily for 3yrs and without fail my "sales in last 12 months" are always between $98-100k, despite this account having the potential to sell 10x that amount.

Moral of the story - they are constantly playing around with site traffic, and sellers generally have no idea what's going on.

[Sunspot144]

OP do you monitor your Click Through Rate (CTR) from your seller dashboard? Would be under the performance tab. Given ebay doesn't fudge this data - don't think they'd bother to help new sellers / rotate larger sellers beyond the 'new listing' bump in search results - with so low sales you might see drastic spikes between your CTR and total transactions.

Outside of Cassini there's google shopping which once you're on the front page you'll see a boost in traffic. My CTR has always been a steady (on average) 2% and despite this sales fluctuate to the point I can't see any real distinguishing patterns even after 8mo. To reference my earlier post, if sales by day over 8mo average out to the same dollar amount in total, would need programmers to write monitoring algorithms that split your traffic per item, per seller, per day to continuously adapt to a future equal sales volume. Ha, maybe!

It's really chance and I say this because there's a phenomenon I like to reference with birthdays.

You take a crowd of people and go down the line having them name of their DOB. You'd think that the chance of two people have the same birthday is really unlikely, but the math says that after you've had about 30 people name their birthdays, two of them will be identical.

Imagine a row of baskets with birthdays on them. There are pong balls that represent the named birthday and these fall into their corresponding baskets. There's an equal chance between each ball that it will fall into one of the same 365 baskets, and based on that, less than 30 times two pong balls will eventually fall into the same basket.

If you apply that rule to your sales, the you'd be able to explain why some days you'll get 0 sales, and others 6 sales.

TL;DR - you missed out!

[sam999]

Thanks for the replies everyone, I definitely agree with the pack mentality sales though it doesn't always seem to work that way.

Phaz0rz it's interesting you mention a 100k per year limit as some months I hit a seem to hit some multiple of 1000 almost exactly when sales cease.

I don't monitor my CTR but it's averaging 2.0% too despite the sales fluctuation. Funny you should quote that algorithm as it's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind! I feel like there might have to be some kind of mediation algorithm for retention of occasional sellers. After all there would be no Ebay as we know it without power sellers and bob down the road both able to get decent rates / sales on goods, on average.
A lot of my items are niche and certainly not things that one would impulse buy. For these reasons I'm not so sure it's purely a probability phenomenon.

[aspkin]

Originally Posted by Sunspot144

One odd phenomenon I've noticed about buyers is that there will usually be multiple sales following the first purchase over a relatively short period of time. Ebay adds that '1 sold in 24hrs' tag and for whatever reason people seem to be more inclined to purchase it if others already have. Blame the pack mentality. If ebay even bothers to add the tag they must know what they're doing.

Also I'm not 100% sure on what to make of it yet - when I averaged all my sales for the past 8 months (~16k/mo so valid data) by day, they all averaged out to pretty darn close to the same. So first monday of the month I'll do $325. Second monday $300. Third $650. Fourth $425 etc. over 8 months was about the same sales volume as any other day in total. Kind of weird.

Woah! Imagine if eBay 'shaped' your sales based on your seller limits?? That's entirely possible with their system now (they can drop your listings to 2nd 3rd 4th page results), lower your sales and bump it up to your seller limits. That's interesting..

[sam999]

Originally Posted by aspkin

Woah! Imagine if eBay 'shaped' your sales based on your seller limits?? That's entirely possible with their system now (they can drop your listings to 2nd 3rd 4th page results), lower your sales and bump it up to your seller limits. That's interesting..

This could be yet another variable to feed their shaping algorithm.

[Verificationguy]

every year in april my sales drop spring break i guess who knows

[Sunspot144]

Originally Posted by Verificationguy

every year in april my sales drop spring break i guess who knows

Have to agree here - a google search will show you other sellers noticing a lull in their transactions late first quarter and into second quarter. Speculation is people are outdoors more, tend to spend less time on the computer, take more vacations, etc. They'll start picking back up come Halloween and boom again pre- and post- christmas.

Also to share some data (note, I should clarify the by-day totals are in terms of # of transactions and not $$ amounts.)

By day, over 8 months i.e. 32x total Mondays, 32x total Tuesdays, etc

Monday - 1143 sales - 14.275% of total sales - 35.719 avg # of sales on Monday
Tuesday - 1156 sales - 14.437% of total sales - 36.125 avg # of sales on Tuesday
Wednesday - 1083 sales - 13.525% of total sales - 33.844 avg # of sales on Wednesday
Thursday - 1151 sales - 14.375% of total sales - 35.969 avg # of sales on Thursday
Friday - 1181 sales - 14.75% of total sales - 36.906 avg # of sales on Friday
Saturday - 1110 sales - 13.863% of total sales - 34.69 avg # of sales on Saturday
Sunday - 1183 sales - 14.775% of total sales - 36.97 avg # of sales on Sunday

Conclusion? The averages are strikingly similar in number but there are no distinct day(s) (on avg) where I got more sales. For a very long time I always thought my Mondays and Thursdays were the busiest days, but then I had lots of average Mondays/Thursdays, so it all broke even in the end. For a fair number of listings I'm front and center on the search results, I check periodically and the listings never leave the first page.

Google shopping however I can't seem to figure out. One day I'll be first page, the next on the third, without any real drastic changes in # of sales for that product.

Also actually, OP, if what you sell you have multiples of, put all your listings to a quantity of 1. Buyers are a LOT more inclined to buy from you if you're on the cheaper end of the selling price and there's only one left. Ebay will slap on that 'Last One' tag to all your listings. People put themselves under a lot more pressure to buy because they might miss out. Great way to get your listings ranked. Tested and verified!

[sam999]

Thanks for sharing your data, nice to see such a good discussion.

Actually this leads me on nicely to another point.
I already set qty to 3, (not 1 as then the auction disappears after a sale and results in downtime until I update qty, I don't have a online software to auto manage qty).

Obviously if you raise qty too high sales will dip as scarcity sells. But even changing qty up from 3 to 4 my sales/time dip by around 30-40% every time. I've tried this about 5 times and compared it to a qty of 3 each time. Again, I don't think this alone can be attributed to buyer habits...

[e2free]

It's definitely something with eBay system I have perfect account top rated from past 5 years and sale keep going down and down my item appear on search 1st or 2nd called eBay many times about drop they don't know either

[Sunspot144]

Warm weather. Taxes. New leases. A Google search will show that the majority of low sales posts are first quarter.