I’ve sold things on Ebay for over a year and always managed to make ends meet. Around the time they made changes to the site this spring, my sales dropped sharply for no reason, cutting my income in half. I assumed maybe it was the economy and added more listings to make up for it.
Over the last 2 months, it’s only gotten worse; I go several days without a single sale when I was making 10-20 sales a day on average a year ago. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was until a friend looking for one of my buy it now items couldn’t find it in the search engine and mentioned it to me. I got suspicious and asked several friends and family members to try and find both my buy it now and auction style listings on their computers by searching for the names, but none of them found anything until I gave them listing numbers. No wonder my sales have fallen to nothing; people can’t buy something that they can’t even see!
I wrote Ebay twice and got automated responses about how items that have just been listed take a while to show up, but some of these are items that I had up for over 2 weeks! My items aren’t just buried in the back of the search results either; some of the items I sell only return a single page of results, which I’m not on anywhere. Not a single person that works for Ebay has contacted me, and nothing has changed. I went into the forums and found several other sellers with the same problem and none of them had resolved it either. Many of them were talking about giving up on Ebay completely and abandoning their small businesses.
Meanwhile, they’re trying to charge me seller fees for items that nobody can find. If they aren’t going to take me seriously and fix this issue, should I try to file a dispute with Paypal to recover the fees that I’ve been charged? Is there any legal action myself or the other sellers in this situation can take to recover our losses?
Did you read my post? Like I said, it’s NOT because there are more sellers and I’m being pushed back in search. Some of the items I sell are unusual and don’t have a lot of competition, only producing a single page or less of results from other sellers when you search for them by name. How can it just be that they’re being pushed back in the search when there’s no more than one page of results and I’m not on it anywhere?
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