Hundreds of eBay Community discussion board threads and thousands of sellers of all sizes have been saying it for many weeks, but eBay hasn’t listened. Or, if they did, they are ignoring the “noise” from dissatisfied customers.

According to Omniture (the traffic and other stats service provided free to eBay Shop subscribers), so far during July 08, eBay’s own in-site search system has fallen significantly behind external 3rd-party (mainstream) search engines.

The screen shot below, taken from my own eBay shop’s performance stats in Omniture this morning, clearly shows that eBay Search is delivering less visitors that Yahoo – and unlike the amalgamated data for all eBay, the Yahoo stats are broken up by country. (Click the image to view full size)

This is, or should be, a major concern for eBay. All eBay staff have always maintained that what makes eBay such a “vibrant and exciting” marketplace is the volume of buyers they are able to drive to seller’s listings.

In recent months, many sellers have challenged that eBay are continuing to do that – it’s not just that some are losing visibility due to DSR feedback ratings received under a flawed and emotion-based system used by eBay as intrinsic data, sellers simply cannot find their own items when using eBay search, including when they input the exact title they gave to their listings.

Additionally, there has been a lot of discussion in the UK (at least) concerning “tap-on-tap-off” visibility, and “rolling-region” visibility.

The “tap-on-tap-off” issue is evidenced by completely unseasonable and inexplicable feast and famine sales results. Many have speculated it relates to upsetting or praising eBay and staff in the eBay forums, and there has been tentative evidencing that such punishment and reward does happen, particularly amongst PowerSellers.

The “rolling-region” or “geo-clustering” of sales relates to sudden surges of sales (and buyer questions) from within narrow geographic zones, which migrate every few days or each week, such that for a few days, all sales come from SE England, then they come from Central Scotland, then from NW England, then South Wales etc.

It’s not restricted to a user’s home country either. I’ve personally noticed such clustering in relation to European countries, such that for a few days I’ll have a lot of sales in Scandanavia, then a few days later, a lot from Italy & Greece, then from the Low Countries, then from Canada, and so on. I’ve seen similar patterns, in sales, to various regions of the US and Canada too – and noted them regularly for at least 18-24 months, and have memories of noticing the same as far back as 2005.

In terms of geo-clustering, many sellers have reported that it’s not just that they get nomadic sales surges from the “region-of-the-day”, it’s that ALL their sales in that period come from the region they’ve identified during the visibility period. And that certainly hints at a deliberate policy of visibility manipulation on eBay’s behalf. It cannot be attributed purely to localised advertising and marketing activity, the sales yield borders are too clearly defined.

With the now evidenced failure of eBay to maintain its dominant role in providing traffic and customers (above), it’s also time to begin monitoring the third-party search engines to see if they are driving the geo-clustering of sales, and to collect evidence that they are, or are not, the cause. This may be difficult as (for example) Yahoo or Google dot com will always supply more traffic than their smaller regional sites, due to the default habit of always using “.com” when typing into the address bar of the browser.

Perhaps it’s time to begin embedding Google Analytics monitoring code in all eBay listings in order to monitor the IP address and country of origin of each browser, as well as using invoice data to monitor buyer geo-clustering? Is that allowed under eBay rules? Is Google Analytics embedded code compliant with eBay listing rules?

Overall, it appears there are several issues overlapping here -

• Is eBay playing games with general visibility as evidenced by tap-on-tap-off and geo-clustering?
• If eBay is engaging in geo-clustered visibility, whilst continually denying it to their paying customers, are they then not engaged in fraud on a massive scale by knowingly advertising one level of service, while deliberately providing a far lower level of service?
• Has eBay now fiddled and tweaked the site so much, that for now at least, it is a broken tool for buyers trying to match their wants to what’s available, and if so, should they not be offering refunds of fees or other substantial compensation for paying customers?
• Is the eBay infrastructure under such strain that they shut users out of portions of it from time to time rather than dip into their war-chest to upgrade and expand that infrastructure?
• Will eBay give honest answers to any of the above, and would users believe them if they did?

Time will obviously tell, but until it does, how many buyers as well as sellers are eBay willing to alienate and disenfranchise from a previously functional system? EBay appears to be failing in its landmark function, and surely that cannot be allowed to continue?

Ed