Did Your eBay Sales Drop Off a Cliff in 2016? This May Be Why…
In the performance – Traffic tab in seller Hub I was looking at something else and noticed that back in August page views from outside eBay dropped off a cliff.
Intrigued I looked a bit closer:
Traffic a year ago, in March, shows around 50% of traffic came from outside eBay, dropping to 25-30% in April/May.
But on August 18th this plummeted to around 5% on average, a level sustained up until now with numbers never going higher than 10%.
This is interesting but I thought initially could be explained by a cut back in the client activity off eBay, less engagement on Facebook for example.
Except I checked with a number of other client accounts, and found an exact correlation in percentages – off eBay referrals much higher in March last year, around 40 – 60% as standard, dropping to 25 – 30% by May, and then plunging down on August 18th 2016.
For at least some of my clients there was an unexplained drop in sales at the end of August/September, which at the time I filed under “Don’t know” – but this may explain it.
Anecdotally, other sellers are reporting both no change to sales, and a drop.
Officially eBay is saying that it’s merely a change in the way they report traffic, but it’s also been suggested that eBay has lessened the frequency of ads on Facebook and Twitter, and that this accounts for the reduction.
If you have enjoyed reading this post, check out my other insights into eBay here – eBay Blog
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