Some Interesting eBay Store Numbers

Why are these good things happening to me? That’s what I was thinking yesterday (2/28/09) as I had a real good day selling items from my eBay store. My 7-day auctions were doing their usual, but the store items were rocking. The store had been slow all month, but I’d just written it off to the catastrophically bad economy I’ve been hearing about on the news. Now I had five store sales in one day. So what’s up?

I fired up the eBay store traffic numbers from Omniture that are part of my basic store account. I do this religiously, twice a year like Easter and Christmas. I’m not all that good at crunching traffic numbers, but it doesn’t take long to see a problem. Check out the traffic to my eBay store homepage in January.

Holy Heck, it just disappeared in early January. Around the 10th homepage traffic decreased from an average of 75-100 views a day to Zero. Not one or two. Zero. Low numbers I can deal with, but Zero is a total non-starter. I can’t work harder and improve on zero. Zero visits to my store homepage continued for the rest of the month, and then into February:



Zero. Zero. Zero. Until the last couple days of the month when it suddenly picked back up. Well, this explains my recent good fortune! Here’s one other graph of the store traffic, a little longer term for comparison. Nov 08 through Feb 09:



How can this be explained? I don’t know, but suggestions from twitter buds @aswas and @colderICE led me to investigate whether I had opted-in to the new eBay Stores. I remembered looking at the new eBay Stores but couldn’t remember if I’d actually opted-in. Turns out I had. I don’t remember when and I don’t know if it has anything to do with the traffic decrease. But apparently other eBay sellers have reported traffic problems after opting-in. After discovering that I had opted-in I have now opted-out. Will be watching to see if the traffic numbers climb, although perhaps, judging from the last couple days, maybe the problem is behind me.
A couple other graphs, just to show another aspect of the traffic problem. Here’s Store Searches from January ‘09:



What you see is 10 or 15 store searches a day decreasing to zero, again in early January. Since store items don’t show up in regular eBay searches, store searches are very important in getting any store sales. The zeros continued through February, until, you guessed it, the end of the month:



It’s easy to see why I sold five store items on the 28th.

So, is there some sort of catastrophic problem with the new eBay Stores? Beats me, I’ll let the experts figure that out. I’m just presenting my little bit of evidence. I’ve opted out of the new stores and will watch to see if traffic numbers return to some semblance of normal. But they were headed back up anyway, so who’s to say what is the smart thing to do right now.
The true lesson for me is to not assume facts which aren’t in evidence. All February I was assuming that the slow store sales were due to some worldwide catastrophic depression, when in fact it was a much more specific problem, something that’s probably a lot easier to fix than the collapse of western civilization.