Some quick eBay news links this am...

We're a couple of days into fp30 and confusion continues to abound. I'm working on some details around what we're seeing with Finding+fp30 here already and I owe you epiii - the UK changes.  Until then here are some quick links to some news items today you may not have seen:

• StumbleUpon a buyer? There are lots of rumors swirling that eBay is selling StumbleUpon which they acquired for $75m a little over a year ago.  Apparently traffic has plummeted from 4.4m users to 1m users since the eBay acquisition - ouch.  Last May, I thought this would be interesting to integrate as a recommendation engine.  Well nothing ever happened so I think this makes sense.
• UK Webinar. For all you UK readers, we are hosting a free webinar for customers, and the community highlighting the eBay changes Monday September 22 at 1pm local time (GMT I believe).  Rafael Orta from eBay will be there to answer your questions. Register Here. This will probably be of interest to all of you cross border trade (CBT) people that are selling in the UK as well.  Their changes are vastly different and some would say even more aggressive around fp30 than those in the US so it's important to understand them if you participate in the UK marketplace.
• Town Hall. eBay's hosting a town hall today (with short notice I might add) from 11:30-1pm PT hosted by Stephanie Tilenius. As mentioned, fp30 is very confusing to everyone and I bet the focus of this call is to try to clear the air on the new format.
• Eric Shoup - GM of stores+prostores has left eBay.  I met Eric several times and thought he was a solid player so I'm sorry to see him go.  What's worse is he's going to a geneology company so we have no hope of continuing to work together as we have with lots of other ex-eBayers that are at other partners like google, yahoo, etc. Best of luck to Eric in his new gig.
• Search (ok, Finding) Finding on eBay just seems systemically broken.  They are changing so much so frequently that I can't get a consistent result day after day. For example, yesterday I was trying to show a reporter how the catalog is integrated in eBay and I literally could not find a single catalog item in the new or old finding experience.  Where the heck did that go? We're constantly seeing weird things like TES upside down, FP's at the back of search, etc.  While I think Jeff King and co are very sharp, something is going on behind the scenes that looks to have destabalized things to the point where Finding has turned into a new search each day.
  
  • Some days the deduping is on, others it's off.
  • Some days things are inverted
  • Some days the 10 listing/seller/page is on, others its off.
  • DSRs seem to count sometimes and others they don't
  • Sellers that create multiple IDs see a new ID with 1/4 the inventory have 2-3X the conversions of those that are multi-million/yr long-term accounts with eBay.  Nobody knows why.
  • Indexing of the new fp30's seems to be 6-12hrs behind so it might as well  be a fp29

The bottom line

Search chaos results in seller chaos- Search is the Yin to the seller's Yang.  Sellers can't settle on a strategy with search changing. If you want to learn more about this, just go to this forum and spend about 20hrs here reading all the problems people are reporting with search.  It's easy to take the position that these are a bunch of wackos and there is definitely some noise/signal ratio problems here in the eBay forums, but peel that away and you find many many reports of finding just plain 'broke' as we say where I'm from.

I sincerely hope eBay can get this resolved or at least stable to some degree before the holidays or we'll (continue to) have complete chaos.

SeekingAlpha disclosure: I am long google and eBay

Comments

[Bill]

Personally I think eBay is being run by a bunch of lunatics or they do have a plan and we (all of us) are not in it. If that is the case and they do have a plan that would be the same as trying to get the United States to drive on the left side of the road or Wal-Mart saying that we are not selling this junk any more and we are just going to deal in high line merchandise.

As they follow this path eBay will not be around 3 to 5 years from now and all of the different groups of sellers will be fragmented in specialized selling venues.

Well it was fun while it lasted.

Bill

[Chris]

This post off the seller boards - assuming it's true - does a lot to inform the current confusion:

http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=510017062&tstart=0&mod=1222147577859

I didn't know that the new Finding involves an algorithm that considers not only other listings, but buyer behavior as well. This type of Web 2.0 (3.0?) dynamic might yield good results, but it represents a full-spectrum reversal of the way search has previously worked, rendering obsolete most search best-practices that are now practically muscle-memory to most sellers. I wasn't aware the change in search functionality was so dramatic. I generally roll my eyes at all the naivety, whining and doomsaying on the seller boards, but this is an issue of some concern that shines some light onto the mess of the way eBay is handling changes.

It's likely (OK, it's remotely possible) that eBay might have a grand vision in mind, some sort of epic functionality that will bring about a revolution in search technology, but this slow and fairly painful implementation - marked by the toxic combination of inconsistency and a dearth of useful communication - is the main problem and threatens to destroy both the buyer and seller experience on the platform enough so that by the time the project is complete there will be nothing to salvage from the wreckage.

[Payam]

I echo Janez's experience.
Since Wednesday morning, our sales & conversions dropped by MORE than 50%. We are Standard in Search and have at least all 4.6's across the board.

[Dustin Jones]

Maybe it's just me but I am trying to think as if I was ebay.

" * Some days the deduping is on, others it's off.
* Some days things are inverted
* Some days the 10 listing/seller/page is on, others its off.
* DSRs seem to count sometimes and others they don't

Like you said, sellers are fatigued. Some have changed and some haven't. They are probably rotating the best match so that those who have made no adjustments dont go out of business overnight, but get a clear sign that if they want to be successful in their marketplace, change is necessary. I would expect over time they will kick it up a notch to more reflect the changes they are trying to achieve ...as well as improve on the data they learn from implementation.

[fruity]

I think upper mgmt & marketing might be pushing hard on deadlines, to the point where the technology guys are under pressure to roll out at any cost. Remember, techs don't like to deploy without testing, because they're the ones who have to fix it.

You big turkeyheads up there better cut the techs a break. Cuz if they end up leaving, none of you will know how to fix anything. What are you going to do then? Put out another IT Sponge commercial part deux and hope we get so delirious we accidently start buying

"Sellers that create multiple IDs see a new ID with 1/4 the inventory have 2-3X the conversions of those that are multi-million/yr long-term accounts with eBay. Nobody knows why."

I know, I know!! That is the new seller switch. Message me and I will rat eBay out!

Hey, I know those boardies there! For all the outsiders looking in, eBay place MAKES you crazy. You try being a small biz and living in daily change at eBay for a few years. They are trying to get answers and guidance and if ebay communications actually wrote announcements that explained the impact of change this wouldn't be happening!!

[Dave]

Search is a disaster for sellers and really egg on the face for eBay. Some days our free shipping items are at the top of their categories, somedays free shipping doesn't seem to make a difference. We have stopped our converstions to free shipping until we get some stability and see that it makes a difference in our search rankings instead of (hopefully) our DSRs.

We have switched many items to FP30. Now we may have to go back and add shorter listings as well. If this keeps up and time ending continues to dominate search results, FP30 may be nothing more than an expensive version of the eBay store with somewhat better visibility in search. Good for eBay revenues; a waste of time and energy for sellers who have converted hundreds of listings.

[Anonyous Platinum Power Seller]

Janez, I'm seeing the same thing with my listings. I would usually show at the top of searches for the last 6 months but now listings with higher shipping charges / lower DSRs / higher prices are showing up ABOVE me in search while I am pushed to the second page.

Sales have plummeted by about 50% since Wednesday and I continue to report problems to my Account Manager who is increasingly hostile in return. I am a software engineer and so usually these types of things are easy for me to decipher and implement but this time ... I'm at a total loss.

From a Platinum Power Seller and 11-year eBay veteran: eBay is currently broken and sellers are investing in other distribution channels

[Dustin Jones]

We have seen in increase. Maybe this is because we have more items in stock now. Also we just got our search standard increased by ebay as well. THIS HELPS BIG! Our DSR stars are 4.75 (ebay rounds to 4.8) or higher and feedback is at 99% for the month.

We also have taken advantage of ebays policies and see they are rewarding us even thus far (I doubt it will last forever). Buy it now .35 cent listings are yielding MANY more sales than before.

Featured FP30 --- wow I dont even get into it what its done for a few of our listings. I have one phone that we were used to selling 2-4/day. The FP30 listing comes up for MEGA popular keywords (I contribute this to sellers not catching on to the system yet) ...but its selling 10X as many phones per day now at 30-35 psc from a single featured auction for a cell phone.

Try tying in "Motorola Cell Phone" , "Motorola F3, cell phone, unlocked phone and unlocked cell phone ....keywords that are very popular in our category. Guess what? our auction comes up first. We are the only ones on board with this item on FP30 featured right now so I take it we should be able to carry this velocity FAR since no anyone else that tries will be days behind in rank (and about 120 sales less from the ONE auction) ..maybe others dont have the QTY in stock to spend the $100 (sure am glad we bought 1500 of these)

Other single items we haven't featured are NOW actually worth the risk to sell from our normal selling platform. I dont like having to compete with eforcity/accstation/itrimming umbrella company when their stuff is spammed so often, generic and low cost. Now we have the chance at even exposure and our cost on these items is dirt cheap. If they dont sell, we waisted .35 cents ....not $80 cents X 10 and only having a 25% success ratio on them.

I think for some its helping, others ive heard they are not making out so well. I dont expect this spike to last forever but Ill ride with it as long as we can.

My BIGGEST suggestions for small and large sellers to receive MAX exposure is your DSR, FEEDBACK and LOW ratio of disputes (under 99%). AND EXPERIMENT with different techniques and research tools!

[Jim]

They need to get Google to help them with search engine.

[Jim S.]

Indexing of the new fp30's seems to be 6-12hrs behind so it might as well be a fp29

It's not only the FP listings, same applies to store listings. It's been taking 5-6 hours for my store listings to be indexed.

[Janez]

Scott, I'm very concerned about Best Match. My sales have dropped off dramatically starting Wednesday morning as well as my views. I have seen about a 50% drop off on both. I'm a BIN seller and have been for years. I really don't know what strategy to use; move to 30FP, stay 7FP, add auctions??? Right now I'm doing all 3. Last night I had 6 7FP listings ending with 500 or so items on Ebay Search. With 43 minutes left for my items, I found them on page 12 of 13! I use to be on the first page, on most searches, even with BM now I'm luck to show up on page 4 or 5. Ebay needs to tell us how BM works and what is more important (feedback, cost, shipping price, etc). What burns me up most is the sellers that are ahead of me. Well below my ratings. I have reported this all to my Top Seller Account Manager. Hopefully this gets resolved soon.