eBay UK – Another unannounced visibility cut?
By Ed | November 17th, 2007 | Category: International Trade, Sales & Mktg, eBay UK | 3 commentsWhen eBay UK flipped the switch on UK to US visibility back in February, there was no announcement, and it took about a month before they finally admitted what they’d done. During that period, the then Head of UK Search & Finding, Richard Ambrose, even tried to switch the blame to Google changing their algorithms. Finally they had to come clean and Mr Ambrose appeared on BBC TV Working Lunch to try to explain it away, unfortunately the BBC interviewer was too lame to grill him correctly or fully.
Now it seems eBay may be repeating that methodology and practice.
Threads are appearing on eBay UK forums questioning where the traffic has disappeared to since early October (again about a month after the apparent drop). In a PowerSeller discussion thread, the thread starter asks, “Sales suddenly dropped about the 1st October and haven’t really recovered. Did something happen to visibility or something at that time?”, and a 10,000+ feedback PowerSeller stated, “First 3 days of Oct absolutely fab then the strikes hit and it fell on its nose. My sales havent recovered yet”. Another seller stated, “… i am down about 150+ sales since start of october”.
A BuildaSkill member and eBay PowerSeller has posted some revealing data in our forums. It’s quite damning in the context of showing that eBay has indeed “flipped a switch”, but inconclusive on its own. However you can add weight to the argument, for or against the hypothesis, by adding your comments to this post, or in the BuildaSkill eBay forum.
Ed
Just added a long post in the forum, which looks at this from another angle, prompted by an “Ed” comment in one of the posts.
And don’t forget the original blog post here concerning DSR’s in feedback and how they’re going to be used against sellers, plus the two incidents that chopped visibility of my listings in response to postings I made on public blogs / forums.
eBay is not as subtle as they think, and their petulant actions soon become known to the world.
[...] such incidents include the infamous cutting of trans-Atlantic visibility last February. Initially he posted a query thread asking who had seen traffic reductions (because “Google [...]