I've been a Seller (and buyer) on eBay for a decade now. I have been a PowerSeller for the past three years, never had a negative, have the latest little icon for Top-Rated Seller, DSR's are 4.9, 4.9, 5.0, and 5.0, blah, blah, blah.

In spite of all that, my sales have dropped nearly IN HALF during the last couple of months. For the first time in three years, my sales dipped below the minimum for PowerSeller. The icing on the cake came when my two top selling items, which I used to sell 4-5 per week, have now dropped to maybe 2-3 a month!! So I did a little search of my own and (gasp!) my items appeared on PAGE 15 of the search results!!! Tucked away neatly, with SEVERAL of my other listings way back where no one will ever see them!

I went to My eBay and did a "search visibility analysis" and got this nifty little chart that has percentages for such things as sales/impressions, unique click-through rate, and sales/unique click throughs.

Is this supposed to mean something to me??? I'm sorry, but I just don't have any more time to spend on eBay's ever changing policies. I wish I got paid for the countless HOURS that I had to put into changing all my listings manually to get rid of first the money order/personal checks, and then again, for the insurance option.

Now I'm going to have to take a college course to understand this impressions garbage? From what I can tell, the more a potential customer 'looks' at my item, maybe to purchase or compare, the further back eBay will boot it. But they decorate my ID all up with these cute little icons to tell customers to check out my stuff!

I then tried to "find my listings rank by keyword". I typed in the main two words used in my title. The response came back that "The keywords that you searched for didn't return your listing. Please enter keywords that match the title of your listing."

This is totally insane! For crying out loud, put it back to listings ending soonest and forget all the GARBAGE and analytical crud so we Sellers can list our items, have customers look at them and make a few sales!

I even received an email from a potential customer ASKING me if there was a way he could do a buy it now for my item! I gave him the listing number, but wanted to tell him to just go to PAGE 15!! This item has always appeared on page 1 or 2 before this last round of changes.

Am I missing something important or really easy to see that I'm just not figuring out? I'm totally at a loss here. For being what eBay ranks as such a pristine Seller, then why are they making it so HARD to sell something???