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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Endeavor, post: 2478483, member: 60292&quot;]I think the eBay experience is good for small sellers and educational for someone new to online selling, but you will find that selling on eBay can be quite frustrating too. The frustration isn&#039;t with buyers (at least not for me), but with eBay itself. If your item doesn&#039;t sell in it&#039;s initial offering or after it&#039;s first relist, they start to bury it in Best Match search results. In case you&#039;re unaware, Best Match is the default search sort setting.</p><p><br /></p><p>I wouldn&#039;t have a problem with this search manipulation if I wasn&#039;t paying a monthly fee for a store, but since I am, I would like eBay&#039;s search engine to rank search results based on relevant keywords provided (as in actual &quot;Best Match&quot;). To the best of my knowledge, I don&#039;t believe eBay discloses their search manipulation practices either. It would be nice if they did that too.</p><p><br /></p><p>I am also convinced that eBay throttles sellers monthly sales using this search manipulation, especially for sellers who do mostly Buy-It-Now, but they also do it to auction listings. I can predict with near certainty what days I will sell items and which days I won&#039;t (and for how much). The throttling appears to be based on your current monthly sales total. So if your average sales per month is $5,000, don&#039;t expect it to be much different the next month (even if you were to triple your listed inventory). So for example, if halfway through the month you are below your average at $2300. You can expect that you will sell $200-300 on the 16th or 17th to put you back on pace with your monthly average.</p><p><br /></p><p>How does eBay keep or put you back on this pace you ask? They will &quot;Feature&quot; your items on main pages such as Item Category page or Home page, to name a couple, along with bumping up (or removing blackout) of your items in search results. You will also notice that if on the 1st day of the reporting month someone buys an item at $1000, you will go several days without selling anything since you are ahead of your pace. eBay will bury or blackout your listings. It&#039;s sort of like communism. Great for beginners and small time sellers to get a piece of the action, but for experienced or ambitious sellers who want to grow their business they get shafted. Especially those sellers who are paying eBay a monthly store fee.</p><p><br /></p><p>As aforementioned they will also throttle auction listings. So if you&#039;re selling a coin that normally goes for $100 (based on previously closed sales), the only way you are going to get more than that average sale price is if early bidders (early as in when the price was still below $100) get into a bidding war. As soon as the bid price gets to the average closed sale price, eBay will bury or blackout the listing in search results.</p><p><br /></p><p>It seems to all be part of their keep the buyer happy business model. They don&#039;t want buyers to have any remorse. It also has to do with what is best for eBay&#039;s bottom line. Again I have no problem with eBay doing what they feel is best for their business so long as they don&#039;t shaft sellers who pay them monthly store fees by not being clear about their search manipulation practices.</p><p><br /></p><p>EDIT: Someone on eBay&#039;s community forum brought to my attention that eBay does admit to this search manipulation in their Terms of Service. Of course it&#039;s not something that is highlighted but it&#039;s in the fine print.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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