Requirements for Uploads to Google Shopping

[banrigh]

By increasing the threshold they have now reduce sales which in turn is now reducing their profits since the number of seen listing has probably dropped by an easy 20 - 30% on GS. The easy fix would have been to inform us they are increasing fee's to cover the costs of GS visibility but we get no information and the sales on the site drop. It's possible they are thinking like the CEO of *bay who has set his goals on getting rid of low value sellers and buyers!!! and look at the state they are in now, Massive loss in buyers, massive drop in amount of sales, GMV down everything down, except fee's which are going up. The point is Higher value sales are great for a site but the large volume of Low value sales make up a bigger number of the profits than they thought, so cut those out and your only losing not winning

I would have gladly paid a higher FVF or a fee to upload to Google Shopping. Instead they choose to cut their nose off to spite their face.

[theElench]

The first thing I noticed was an extreme drop in sales starting in April. Since April, sales have not recovered. I can check Google Shopping by typing in 'banrighs' in the search. My stores have banrighs as part of the name. Looking through the results I noticed nothing under $3.49 was there. I had suspected that eBid had changed their listing requirements, but I couldn't find it mentioned on eBid anywhere.

This is not a Google Shopping requirement, it is one set by eBid. I know it costs them to upload to Google Shopping, but I wish I had been informed of the change. Sure, they are saving money by uploading less or higher priced listings, but since my sales have dropped considerably, my monthly invoice is quite a bit less in money they receive from me. Not sure they are gaining anything here. I would have raised fees by a percent or two since they are so much cheaper than all other sites.

I've just looked at the "Help" Page, FAQS and it does say £2.50, but I wasn't aware of the increase until I read your post. If there was an announcement, I must have missed it.

I'm not taking sides on whether or not the increase is warranted as virtually all my listings are priced above the minimum requirement. But presumably The Management keep records of how many items with lower prices they upload, how many of those uploads result in sales and how much the site makes from those sales?? Again I presume that The Management has saved more in upload fees than it sacrificed in FVF? But I do agree changing criteria could have been prominently announced as it will effect what and how sellers will list.

As always I don't support across the board fee increases. Not everyone has Seller+ Lifetime membership with no listing fees and 2% FVF (?). For many like myself, with lower numbers of items to list it isn't cost effective. Using Platinum Listings I already pay 5p listing fees + 5% FVF and use some of the savings to discount both my prices and postage. IMO adding another 1% - 2% to FVF to lower the upload threshold for thousands of lower priced items won't do anything for my sales or those of others like me. Perhaps sellers of lower priced items would be amenable to a "GS Upload Fee"?

[theElench]

I just had a quick look at GS and searched for my ebid user name and ATM I have 232 visible items. Quite a few less than I've listed on ebid>

Their lay-out has changed since I last looked at it and I couldn't see any obvious way to see "ALL" listings in results. Instead of finding my items scattered over many pages, my items in the search results were reduced to two. One in the results and another on the Carousel strip further down the page.

As I'd already searched for my user name, I wonder if I only saw those two because of the previous search?

I'll be looking again soon (without searching for myself first) as, if this is all the exposure I get to random browsers I would expect that my sales here will be reduced considerably.

[BordersBargains]

theElench you make a good point about non sellers + users, I doubt many people would try it out if the fee's were higher. I just can't see this change helping at all and sellers who do typically low value items likes Stamps, Postcards, Patterns etc but high turnover will now see less sales meaning less profits for the owners! and the one thing they seem to always forget is - - - The site is still unknown to the vast majority of buyers around the world. The only advertising sellers really see here is on GS, the majority of the sales are from people clicking on an external link via GS etc or the places we have to populate ourselves and most are one off buyers who saw the cheaper item on Google vs places like *bay etc. The owners already stated they can't afford to do any proper advertising! Well this won't work IMO and the only way to grow is to get noticed, this change will created less awareness.

[banrigh]

theElench you make a good point about non sellers + users, I doubt many people would try it out if the fee's were higher. I just can't see this change helping at all and sellers who do typically low value items likes Stamps, Postcards, Patterns etc but high turnover will now see less sales meaning less profits for the owners! and the one thing they seem to always forget is - - - The site is still unknown to the vast majority of buyers around the world. The only advertising sellers really see here is on GS, the majority of the sales are from people clicking on an external link via GS etc or the places we have to populate ourselves and most are one off buyers who saw the cheaper item on Google vs places like *bay etc. The owners already stated they can't afford to do any proper advertising! Well this won't work IMO and the only way to grow is to get noticed, this change will created less awareness.

The FAQs page is wrong in stating the minimum amount for US sellers. Many things on the FAQs page are outdated.

Raising the FVF for at least Gallery listings by one or two percent could be a solution. I am not talking about raising fees across the site. In comparison with other selling sites, such as Mercari, sellers can't afford to list low priced items there. eBid has never changed their 2% gallery fee. When Mercari wants 10% FVF which does not include the handling fee for your sales money. There is still plenty of room to be the cheapest selling site.

[theElench]

@BordersBargains

I do see your point. The more ads. with "user / shop name" and "Ebid" seen on GS raises awareness of the site. Just adding the three examples you quote of lower priced items gives a total of 1,119,434 (and I can think of more categories where low prices would be common). The Home Page says "Browse 2,784,679 (UK?)Items" and "3,545,899 Worldwide" that means getting on for ,possibly, either one-third or even nearly one-half of ebid's items won't be uploaded to GS, significantly reducing how effective exposure there will be.

@banrigh

My objection to raising fees to pay for advertising is based on what has happened on obay. Everyone pays higher fees but naturally the site spends the money on what it thinks will the greatest increase in sales. So sellers of collectables, second-hand, low value items see little benefit as the revenue is spent advertising new goods. But I agree that there must be some way to fund increasing visibility, without unduly increasing fees for those that benefit the least. I don't want to be put in same position as I'm in on abay -- paying high fees that boost the sales of High St. corporates, while my type of goods are ignored (or even hidden). Wouldn't The Management here be tempted to follow the same path? Putting the advertising revenue into higher turnover categories?

Going back to GS specifically, I'm now rather confused. Today I probably clicked on a different GS search result so went to a different page. The format was more or less as I remembered from months ago. Yesterday, when I spoke of a "new format", had I inadvertently been looking looking at a mobile app. or something similar?

Today I searched "walther art deco glass" = 0 results.
To widen the search "walther glass" = 0 results. I have items that should show in both results.
Searched "art deco glass" and got (the usual) 10+ pages of results with my items scattered through them.

BUT. Since my search yesterday for my username, GS has added "theelench ebid" to the "Seller" list in the left hand side-bar, but still no Ebid. I wonder if this is effecting the results I'm being shown?

Would either of you please do the same searches to check the results I was given?

[BordersBargains]

WTF nothing at all is showing on google shopping for both searches, I even tried walther and nothing but it's fine on the other sections. That's weird

[BordersBargains]

I asked others to take a look and same results. So this is going to be an issue for people selling Walther items since our listings are really only seen on GS

[BigKidsAttic]

I've just checked my store name on GS, and while I can find stuff of mine, I cannot find anything less than £2.50.
Don't know if this is relevant, but it's not always my pic that shows up as one of my results, especially if it's a "compare prices" item meaning there is more than one seller of that item.
Although I did see an itme (not one of mine) that showed up in my search results that was for £1.99.

[BordersBargains]

Just did my user name and I get less than two pages on GS out of almost 900 items that's pretty crap