FP30 + Finding - Episode II (Attack of the Recent Sales)

This is part 2 of a multi part series. Part 1 is here, please make sure to read it first.

As I write this, we are a mere 4 days away from FP30 and sellers are now really turning their attention to the new format and what they should do when it arrives.

In this installment of our "FP30+Finding" series, I wanted to focus on the topic of recent sales.

Why are recent sales important
In Episode I we talked about how auction listings are primarily TES driven and FP30 is recent sales driven.  Thus recent sales is a sellers lever for getting higher search placement.  Therefore it is extremely important.

What are recent sales?
Here's how it works.  You have a FP30 listing with multiple quantities (let's say 100) of an item. You obviously start on day 1 with no sales, and then as you get sales, you receive a recent sales 'score' (details unknown, but pretend it's a scale of 1-10).  What's important is the relative recent sales for your listing vs. the other fp30's you are competing with for traffic.

A very important nuance (that could change) is that recent sales is a 7 day window. In other words, it looks 'back' 7 days to calculate recent sales.  Allow me illustrate with an extreme fictional example.  SellerX lists a fp30 on 9/20 with quant=200.  On 9/22 (day 2) the seller sells 50 and then on 9/30 (day 10), the seller sells 2 items.  the recent-sales looks back 7 days (9/23-9/30 in this example) and thus the score is based off the 2 items and does not include the 50.   Had the 50 and 2 happened within 7 days, they would have been considered in the recent sales score as they would be in the 7 day window.

Do recent sales benefit large sellers because they sell more?
One misperception out there I keep hearing from smaller vocal sellers is: "recent sales favors large sellers because they can list more".  This couldn't be further from the truth because recent sales are for a 'listing' and not for a 'seller'.  Let me point this out with an extreme example:

SellerX (big seller) - lists 1m items with quantity 10, let's say they are DVDs. SellerX has the Little Mermaid for $39.99, but every other item for .01 BIN and free shipping.

SellerY (small seller) - lists 1 item with quantity 10 - it's a Little Mermaid DVD for $29.99 with free shipping.

SellerX and Y put their DVDs into fp30 starting on 9/20.  SellerY sells 5 in the first 7 days and sellerX sells 2. 

A consumer searches for little mermaid.  Little ole SellerY's listing will be shown ABOVE SellerX's because the LISTING has more recent sales, even though that seller is selling $3m/m in other DVDs.

What about relists?

If you have a fp30 with lots of quanity listing humming along selling 2-3 items a day and it ends, what happens?  The good news is the recent history carries through to a relist IF:

• You do a relist within 7 days of listing end (It will go back and pull the last 7 days of the listings recent sales even if you're 7 days past end of listing)
• You don't change anything - it has to be the EXACT same item.  

For those of you using third party software like that from ChannelAdvisor, you'll want to make sure your vendor is correctly calling the eBay relist APIs to make this work.  Until fp30, "relist matching" wasn't important, but it sure is now.  Yes, CA will be ready for this very shortly.

What about updates to live listings?

Let's say you have a fp30 chugging along with quantity 100 and it starts to sell down and gets to 2 items.  You receive some more inventory so you bump it back up to 100 on day 22 - what happens to recent sales?  Another frequent updated with these fp30 listings is changing the price.

Ebay tells us that the recent sales is not disrupted by any updates.   Note that this is ripe for gaming (start something out at a penny and then jack up the price to $1000 and benefit from the 7 days recent sales at a penny?) and I bet eBay will quickly make it such that a price change (I'd say increase only is smart) clears out the recent sales.  This will be interesting to watch and see how sellers 'optimize' this part of the system.

What's this mean for my strategy?
Ok hopefully your head isn't swimming and you can see how this is essentially a completely different way of thinking than auction/TES listings.  Here are some strategies to consider:

• Keep a mix of auction+fp30 listings - remember that Finding will show auctions+fp30 in a ratio based on demand for every search.  Your top sellers will still need auciton exposure - use BIN+high start if you hate true auction.
• Consider moving your store listings to fp30.  I agree with media+auto parts sellers who believe fp30 will be the death of eBay stores.  There will be enough fp30 inventory out there that store visibility goes to zero.  Thus you'll want to get in front of that ASAP to build your recent sales and stay competitive
• Consider 'cross polination' strategies.  Start a $NR auction for 1 and link it to your fp30's and drive as much traffic from the auction to the fp30 as possible (run multiples so there's strong TES peak time coverage).  This will amp the recent sales of your fp30
• One concern I share with fp30 that most sellers have is that it blows the perception of scarcity.  When a buyer finds a listing and in there it says: "this seller has 9 trillion of these available" as a buyer you tend to think there's room to wait and let the price come in on something like that.  Ideally eBay would solve this and say something like "available" or "in stock" vs. "1000".  Until that time you may want to do some experimenting with smaller quantities that you update frequantly. 
  
  • Example, you have 200 widgets.  Instead of kicking off a fp30quant200, you kick off a fp30quant20 and every three days look at adding 20 in there.  This is probably more work than its worth, but something to consider.
  • You could also have 3-4 fp30's.  They would be de-duped, but if one sells out with quant20, the other will now show.  This of course incurs more listing fees and doesn't transfer recent sales between the concurrent listings, but you could transfer it via relists if you wanted to 'tag team'.
• fp30 is terrible for products with choices (e.g. shoes with size and whatnot)  I honestly don't have any advice for you but to keep listing each size separately for now.
• Other than the 'perception of strategy' angle, there is no reason (and in fact it is wasteful for recent-sales and listing $ due to de-dupe) to have multiple listings for the same product in fp30.
  • This is a different mindset for sellers because TES trained us to list things every day to make sure we had a TES for that day.
  • The exception to this rule is title optimization.  Sellers frequently list the same title with 2+ titles to get more keyword exposure.  For example, you may have a SKU (back to the future movie poster) that you want to list as:
    • Back to the future movie poster 1985
    • Robert Zemeckis back to the future
    • Michael J. Fox  Christopher lloyd back to future
    • etc.
• Consider using featured for new products to kick-start recent sales as you won't have a history there.
• Make sure you kick off your strategic fp30's on 9/16 when they go live. Let's say your competitors do this and you don't get around to it until 9/22 (6 days later). There is a scenario where:
  • Your competitors have a 5 day start on recent sales
  • Thus your items are disadvantaged out of the gate and starved off
  • You are
• FP30+recent could have you rethink or balance your DSR/S+H strategy.
  • For example, the boost from a lower core item price (move some to S+H) could boost recent sales and thus outweigh the loss of discounts from potentially lower DSRs. 

Until Episode III...
In our next episode we'll take a look at what's going on with FP30 in the UK.  They have a very different implementation there and history has shown that eBay frequently moves things between countries as they learn more so it gives you an edge to know what's going on in the UK and start thinking about what would happen should those changes come to the US.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long Google and eBay

Comments

[lavenderlady]

CMcNatt, I'm with you! The abbreviations make me crazy too! Footnotes or a sidebar article with the meanings, something, anything, would really help sometimes!

[SallyDickson]

I know you said 'not to list everyday', but in fact you do still have to list everyday.

On Ebay UK, I have been watching the new Best Match listings all this month, and I think it benefits myself ( a small seller ) because my unusual stuff gets listed more often. To see how it benefits small sellers try comparing 'Best Match' to 'Ending Soonest' to 'Lowest Price incl P&P'.

However the amount of listings I receive on the first page does depend on how often I list the product.

This is because BIN 3, 5, 7, 10 day contine to exist alongside FP30. So the first page of listings for 'Pink Bob Wig' includes 50 different listings including 3 different products from myself, but ONLY if the Fixed Price listings are finishing within 36 hours. None of my FP30 listings make it onto the first page. (In fact nobody's FP30 listings makes it onto the first page, but that may change post Sept 24th)

Obviously 'Pink Bob Wig' is quite a general term.

Thats my experience, what about anyone else?

[EventHorizon1984]

"Do recent sales benefit large sellers because they sell more?
One misperception out there I keep hearing" Scott Wingo.

Is not a "misperception".

To clue in the readers, Wingo's false premise is a Diamond seller will post ONE item, just like a small seller. So competition is fair. In a one-on-one competition the variables are price, etal, and if the item is found in eBay's Best Match.

In reality the large volume seller would post "quantity 100" flooding out the small seller's ONE item. But then Wingo does call a one-on-one competition "an extreme example.'

In the context of this article, one-on-one is extreme. The rest of Wingo's article sites inventory of "quantity 100" and "you have 200 widgets" and "1000" and "this seller has 9 trillion of these available". These are not small seller examples. These are examples of large volume sellers.

"This couldn't be further from the truth because recent sales are for a 'listing' and not for a 'seller'." Scott Wingo.

Based on Wingo's favoring of large volume seller examples, he trashed his own conclusion.

Wingo's advice might be applicable if you're a large volume seller, but if you're not look elsewhere.

[Fruity]

I don't know where you are quoting me from Scot. That actually seems a bit strange I would say something like that but maybe you'll reply to my email I sent you or something let me know where I'm saying that. I think you are taking me out of context because I'm pretty aware that FP30 is for the listing. But it is directly beneficial to those who have multiple quantity and that lots of the megasellers have VOLUME compared to the small sellers who have limited stock. So obviously bigger sellers can list more FP30 w/ MQ and gain a better advantage. They can also duplicate those same products into different types of listings whereas smaller sellers with limited quantity have a limited window of options. Maybe you are not understanding how I am writing or something.

[Chris]

Yes most small sellers are disadvantaged with the velocity portion of this. A lot of small sellers only have one or just a few of each item, so if they sell it they have no more. But if large sellers have multiples of the same or similar, then the small sellers will be heavily disadvantaged. Your ideas work for middle of the road sellers, but this will definately harm small sellers.

[tj]

What a complete load of nonsense.
You can always count on eBay to completely screw-up a simple process & that process is basic….people want to sell items to other people…why oh why are all these algorithms etc etc etc even needed …it is all down to supply and demand in the real world

eBay you are a joke

[no name]

I noticed you are a "long". Can you say why?
Seems like article after article has been negative on eBay. You have a great source of data as your customers use eBay and Amazon.

Is eBay going to meet or miss Q3 ? The currency exchange is hurting eBay.

I think eBay is still a cash machine and even if GMV is downward trend they are making the right changes. It be interesting to see what happens next week with the new structures in place

[Drew11]

God what a mess. Thanks for breaking it down.

[TekGems]

> Do recent sales benefit large sellers because they sell more?
> One misperception out there I keep hearing (from fruitcats!) is:
> "recent sales favors large sellers because they can list more".

Large sellers benefit from recent sales more because they have a wider selection of SKUs. If a few SKUs do not perform well for them, they have a lot of other SKUs that can compensate. But for small sellers that have a limited SKU set, a lowering of rank can be devastating. Buy.com may have 1% de-ranked, but for a small seller it could be 10%.

[CMcNatt]

I appreciate you great insights and suggestions but the abbreviations drive me crazy and make it impossible for me to completely understand what your are trying to say. I'm not a complete newby and there may be someone else out there who is having the same problem.