What Happened To eBay Sales? (Why Have They Gone Down)

Many individuals use eBay to turn their passion into a fantastic alternate source of income, or even a full-time job. Lately within forums there have been complaints about eBay sales going down for some people. This is very unfortunate and in this blog post we will go over some reasons why this may be.

Answer To The Question What Happened To eBay Sales:

There is no exact reason your eBay sales may have gone down. Could be something on your end (sourcing products wrong), or it could be something on eBays end. We will go over each one therefor you can figure out where the drop in sales is coming from.

Sourcing Products Wrong:

The first thing you need to pay attention to is whether or not you are doing anything differently when it comes to your eBay business. If you have changed your daily routine, then you may need to change it back in order for things to get going again.

Make sure the products you’ve been getting are high quality like they have been from the beginning. Some people when they get a lot of sales on a regular basis, they begin to take it for granted and start to buy lower and lower quality items. Always try and aim for the best products you can get, even if it costs a little more since you will definitely make up for it in sales.

Remember that even small changes may have big results when they come to eBay sales. If you still think things are going wrong on your end, start looking at other places.

eBay May Be Changing Things:

eBay every once in a while changes some things within their algorithm. This is normal for social media sites, google and other popular platforms. Things may have been going well for you, and then all of a sudden eBay decides to change things up a bit in the search engine results.

If this is the case you need to make sure they didn’t change something to the point where you need to change up your listing strategy. Always keep a steady eye on announcements in order to keep up-to-date with what eBay has to say.

New Payment Method:

eBay rolled out a new payment method not too long ago. It used to be that eBay had a partnership with PayPal and every sale you made went through PayPal, at least you were harvesting the funds from PayPal. Now eBay has it’s own payment method called managed payments.

Many people are suspecting that this new payment method has been causing a drop in their eBay sales. Although many people are saying this, there’s no evidence to back up whether it’s true or not and it most likely isn’t.

Some people may have just switched over to the new payment method around the same time their eBay sales dropped, which could’ve been the reason for this coincidence.

Statistics Not Showing Up:

There are also a lot of complaints about statistics showing 0 organic traffic on their listings. This is also creating the belief that eBay isn’t showing their products as efficiently as they once did.

What we’ve come to find out through looking a different forums is that the people that have these complaints end up getting their actual statistics many days later. Sometimes eBay just gets behind in relaying the statistics which can happen from time to time.

People Are Promoting More:

eBay is a very competitive marketplace. Many people within the platform pay for their traffic in order to get more sales. As time goes on more and more people pay which gives the people who don’t pay for their traffic less sales.

As you can imagine, if someone pays for their traffic on eBay they’re going to be making sales and the ones who don’t pay are going to get less sales. This is causing some people on eBay to believe that something has changed on eBay’s end in order for them not to receive as many organic sales as they used to get.

Google Updates

Google has updated to favor more informational content rather than buying links and keywords. This has caused a drop in traffic for eBay which would explain why people aren’t getting as much organic traffic as they used to, since eBays Google rankings have gone down a bit over time.

eBay isn’t the only sellers platform that has taken a hit from Google’s updates. Amazon has been known to have a drop in traffic as well.

You May Be In an Overly Competitive Category

Some categories on eBay are very competitive and some are not. If you’re selling a product that’s overly competitive, chances of your sales becoming organic will gradually decrease as time goes on. When this happens you should increase the amount of money you spend on advertising or slowly start selling products in a different category.

What is The Future Of eBay?

Although here and there sellers may experience a drop in sales, eBay is going no where fast. It has a very loyal and strong user base and will continue to grow for many years.

The platform has had its problems but it has been a reliable source for online sellers.

Just go on Youtube and see how many people make a living off of reselling on eBay. People are making many sales through the platform and this isn’t going to stop.

Conclusion:

The reasons I’ve listed above are from frequent eBay sellers within forums explaining why they think their sales have gone down. I don’t know the exact reason. If you know more information, leave a comment below!

Although there are some weird things going on with eBay’s platform right now, all you can do is stick with your process and make sure you’re doing the right things to get sales. Always check their terms of service and make sure you’re doing things by the book to avoid any problems within the platform.

Did you find this blog post helpful? Don’t forget to share it!

Take a look at our other most recent blog posts below:

What Happened To eBay Sales? (Why Have They Gone Down)