Learned something on eBay today

[DSLiverpool]

Not teaching anyone to suck eggs in fact I`m crap at sucking eggs but .....

Product reviews on eBay and Amazon are very strong sales persuaders and any solid strategy for either platform should encourage buyer reviews.

So my "experiment" account has an item with 38 reviews only one of them 1/5 the rest 4 or 5 /5 it has sales of 1300 in 10 months and is 3 times the price on other (exactly the same) items on eBay. The listing has had little or no attention but has a 5% sales listing promotion with eBay and a multibuy on 1/2/3/4 units - it sells 10 a day ish at present.

On Sunday the sales dropped, I looked at it on Weds to see the reviews had vanished - the gold stars under the listing title and price had gone. This had a very severe impact on sales virtually dropping them 75%.

Now this item had EAN not required in the original listing and I thought it might be a purge but looking at the Chinese seller's items they had no EAN and had a few ratings. Then more sinister thoughts about competitor action etc.

Got eBay to call me and the first guy was newish and was puzzled once I managed to explain the issue, I called gain following day and got a more experienced person who knew the scenario and said they would be reinstated within 72 hours as its a weekend.

Just thought I would mention it.

[Mr Pointy]

Your post is very confusing with 'competitor action' & 'EAN' but description of what is actually going on. While it might mean something to the ebayers It's a bit meaningless to those not in the know.

[Frimley111R]

So your ratings dropped off and ebay said they'd put them back? Why did they drop off?

[mickytruelove]

We have spent months trying to figure out why customers cannot leave reviews on our ebay listings. Loads of different answers from ebay customer support. The most sound reason being they have not been added to their new catalogue yet but i have no idea if that was just an answer to get rid of us phoning.

We have wasted so much time with ebay issues like a listing being removed because a competitor claimed it infringes their intellectual property rights. They then agreed it was a mistake and ebay relisted the product but without the record of 500+ sold and any search ranking.

[DSLiverpool]

Frimley111R said:

So your ratings dropped off and ebay said they'd put them back? Why did they drop off?

Only dropped off one item (we only have 4) but it was the best seller and one I use as an example to illustrate how sub-niche targetting means you can charge far more than the same item on the same platform.

The girl I spoke to today was not surprised they had dropped off and assured me it was nothing sinister but suggested I put an EAN on the listing (which would mean starting again on the reviews), she said it "just happens" mainly on a Friday and she had a template email she sends to the review team to get them reinstated.