eBay Blames End of Lockdowns for a 'Little' Drop in Sales - EcommerceBytes

Summary

eBay said its sales as a whole have decreased a little, blaming it on the end of lockdowns worldwide and saying it saw the decline "across the board with online sales" in what appeared to be a reference to an industrywide trend.

eBay said its sales as a whole have decreased a little, blaming it on the end of lockdowns worldwide and saying it saw the decline "across the board with online sales" in what appeared to be a reference to an industrywide trend.

The response from a forum moderator came in a thread that a seller started on the eBay discussion boards on May 18 titled, "Sudden drop in sales May 2022." The moderator had compiled a list of sellers who asked eBay to look into why their sales had dropped and forwarded it to an "appropriate team" for review.

On July 29, she reported back to sellers who had kept the discussion going since mid-May and who requested an update:

‎07-29-2022 09:27 AM

Hello all! I've heard back from the team investigating the concerns about a drop in sales and they said the following:

"The change to view counts has done nothing to impact raw view count numbers. Listings are still going to get the same number of views as they would have previously, subject to site-wide trends. We have not impacted or changed anything on the buyer's side. The change in how we count views itself doesn't impact buy-side impressions, page views, or conversions. It's just a selling reporting tool that filters out what we consider to be inhuman traffic, and reflects that number to our sellers.

"However, we recognize sales as a whole have decreased a little. We speculate this is related to the end of lock-downs across most of the world as we see this across the board with online sales.

"Where do we go from here? We'll continue to run site-wide analyses from a Data Analytics perspective. If anything outside of the normal and somewhat expected decrease in sales given what's been noted above, then we'll work to implement measures to solve for whatever is found, in an effort to ensure we're doing what we can to help connect buyers and sellers."

Sellers responded with appreciation for the moderator in reporting back but appeared dissatisfied with the response itself. Note that it's highly unusual for eBay to disclose even general changes in sales outside of quarterly earnings reports, as helpful as it may be to its sellers.

On Friday, a seller started a thread about another issue of concern: a drop in Promoted Listing ad impressions. The response was mixed - some sellers agreed their impressions were down too, others said they hadn't seen any decline.

Both threads are well worth studying to understand what eBay sellers are reporting in terms of visibility to their listings. eBay executives will be sharing key metrics including Gross Merchandise Volume during its quarterly earnings release on Wednesday and may share color behind the numbers in its earnings call with analysts.