Recently I discovered eBay reports that I did not see before. It came to me when I was looking to find why eBay sales dropped. I was aware the prices and postage have gone up. Additionally, eBay Top Rated status was lost.

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With page views report as shown above, I can clearly see page views for the month of April were dropped by 17% compared to previous month and 48% lower than previous year. This made me realise something is terribly going wrong. I need to increase page views if I want sales to increase. These could be various factors and I need to start working my way through:

1. Higher Price: I cannot avoid price rise. What I can do is give customers good value with multi-buy deals. It is win-win situation for us. Customers get better single price and I get better basket value increasing my %of Return.
2. Higher Postage: I have reflected recent changes in the postage cost which I must to keep businesses going. What I can do is find my optimum postage cost and charge minimum possible so that my sales keep coming. Additionally I need to find ways to reduce the packaging cost with recycled cardboard and so on.
3. Optimising Titles: I need to optimise product titles. This a long run process however, I have now planned to do at least 10 a day.
4. Item Specifics / Barcodes: I need to complete item specifics so that mobile buyers can find my product when they narrow their search. I need to fill up barcodes & brand so that my products are available on Google Shopping.
5. Keep my Top rated Seller Status: It is widely known that eBay Top Rated Sellers get priority in search. Chat with eBay customer support was helpful. He emphasised the fact losing status dropped us off from the search result. The reason I lost this status is due to low ratings on Item as Described and Dispatch time. I know now I need to revise my listings and dispatch my orders as quickly as possible. I will revise my listings on long term basis, may be 20 a day. I need to increase the order fulfilment time to 2 days for the stock which is delayed in fulfilment. Customers now see expected date of delivery and if orders don’t get delivered on time you have seen what happens!

Lot of work to do but it worth doing it. If found a simple way out of this. Plan them out on Gantt chart.

I must say there are various other reports you can dig out from FREE “Omniture Traffic Reports“. Here the list:

– Page Views
– Visits of 30 minutes or more
– Daily Unique Visitors
– Storefront homepage views
– Most popular pages – including shop pages
– Most popular fixed price listings
– Most popular auctions
– Keywords used to search your store
– Keywords that drove traffic to your store

I hope you will enjoy going though these reports and find some use of them. Here’s eBay’s step by step guide to get these reports –> http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/sell/traffic-reports.html

I know you have limited time on hand. However, I would encourage you to Track Your Success by allocating a day to get the information you need to grow your business. These reporting tools help you improve your selling strategy, save time, and boost sales.