Rolling Server Conspiracy Thread - again LOL

[Deleted]

I'm a small seller and was quite happy to sell 2 items this week.  I'm in NJ and both buyers are in Washington State.  I've been selling for 7 or 8 years, at times a lot larger volume than now, and I have never had a sale to Washington State before!  Now 2 in 1 week?

The icing on the cake?  I have been listing many items forever, at least a year.  The day after one of them sold, someone sent a message asking if I'm going to relist it!  I should have responded "No, buy something else."  lol

The wacky world of ebay.

[Deleted]

I'm a long time believer in rolling servers, throttling, etc. My sales patterns are too clustered and strangely geographically specific to be random.

[deltas*delights]

I'm a believer. I have 1060 items. Tuesday I sold 11 items. 2 yesterday, 2 today. There is no consistency. AT all.

[RetroMonde]

100th member? How cool is that! Coincidence or conspiracy? We'll probably never know... I'm in the rolling server camp roasting marshmallows with the other believers.

Sandra

[Deleted]

This may or may not to have to do with rolling servers. IDK I finally got my listings to over 100 and wow suddenly my sales have taken off. I'm consistently selling and not just the new stuff. It's like I got a small reward for having more items listed.

[chapeaunoir]

I hit 200 items and my sales stalled.

[Deleted]

That wasn't very nice of the server Gods.

[chapeaunoir]

I'm letting them drop back down to 120-150. The more I have listed, the worse my sales are. So it's a lot of trouble for nothing.

[parelex]

What sort of Alfred Dunner or Chico's do I have to perform a sacrificial burn on to turn the sever gods' favorable eye towards my store?

[Deleted]

I'm sitting on the bench with the believers too.

In addition to what others have said, I notice that I'll have spurts where my only sales are in the morning, then a couple weeks later it will be all in the evening. No rhyme or reason to it whatsoever.

[Deleted]

Thought I was on a roll, then suddenly...basically crickets for the past few days. A sale or 2, every other day. I get geographical cluster sales too, so I'm in the "rolling server conspiracy camp." 

[Deleted]

Not sure if it's rolling servers or whether Ebay's algorithm is causing your listings to show at a particular time in a particular place or, if those are one in the same. Ebay has admitted that not everyone's listings are being shown in search at all times. Sales definitely seem to come in spurts, though.

There also are truly wacky coincidences. For instance, I hadn't had a sale in two days and woke up to two. Both are in New York state and both are for black SAS sandals (two different styles). Plus, what are the odds that SAS buyers in my time zone are making purchases after 11:00 p.m.? LOL.

[Deleted]

I "believe" in the rolling servers too, but have almost no evidence to support it. Once or twice a month I have good weeks, the rest crickets sprinkled with a random day here and there with several sales to the same zone.

[denise15601]

I guess I will be the only one who never did believe that.

I check my InkFrog traffic reports several times a day and they ALWAYS show views all over. I know the reports are accurate, since I will see something being viewed and then ca-ching! )

[Deleted]

Something is going on. I had no sales the first week of Feb and I have had sales almost daily this last week. Most to CA.

[Gabi]

I am bit on the fence with that. I agree that sales are on and off all the time. I have days with amazing sales and days with hardly any.

But - I also know that my stuff can not always be on top, on the first page. Someone has to be on the last page once in a while.
And when I search for Chico's tops, for example, and see that there are 1000's of tops listed, I feel thankful to be even within the first 5 pages or so.
Also, I do see some correlations between things going on with my account and sales. If I have a larger amount of returns then normal, sales seem to slow down. Same when I have an open case, received low dsr rating or anything similar. All that might be coincidence, who knows.

Also, it used to be, years ago, when I called Ebay with a question and the csr looked at my store, that my sales went up. I used to joke and say that I'll call Ebay so they can push my on-button.
Now it's the opposite, seems like whenever I call them, they drop me in search. So now I try to bother them as little as possible so they don't punish me with slow sales.

[Deleted]

This is no joke. The majority of my sales are in the wee hours of the morning. I wonder if my night owl hours have a bearing on when they are higher on the list for being seen?

[chapeaunoir]

I don't really believe in rolling servers but there is a case to be made for geo-clustering, which is an inherent characteristic of some databases. Mostly I think that 800,000,000 items that eBay admin now brags about have overloaded the server farms and there are only partial search returns - it's why they are so variable. When I managed a little server farm we had the same problem in a much smaller scale - our servers would overload and some accounts would become, for a time 'invisible', unable to retrieve their data (in this case documentation).

[Desire]

I have always believed in it, even when things sold much faster several years back.

[Deleted]

I do believe there is some truth to it. But I also believe that the primary reason I have or do not have sales is directly related to my amount of input. For the last 3 months, I've done very little other than maintain by relisting and participating in given promo's. My sales have dropped off. Finally a couple weeks ago, I listed maybe 20 items. My sales have gone up $500 over the last 30 days. I view it just like a store front. If I do not go in an "re-arrange" or add fresh items, people stop looking, I stop getting exposure. When I freshen things up, sales start up again.

[Deleted]

I'm a believer! My sales have always gone in clusters. I don't worry too much when I have days with nothing because I know my light will get turned on again eventually.

[Deleted]

I definitely believe in the geo server.  First of all I follow a few people who sell basically the same as me but their sales are consistent.  Mine are not!

There are some people who don't have even as much listed as me but sell a few each day.  When I am not selling much at all I notice that I am getting no sales from CA, AZ and TX.

I will never be able to explain to myself how some people sell constantly day after day.

[kritter]

I get all the sales from California and the northeast.

The rest of the country must not see me at all or very rarely.

[Deleted]

I think the biggest # of sales I've had have gone to CA and NY...and today I got my first sale to Idaho.
I'm currently tied for having my best month ever...and would be over the top, had it not been for 2 deadbeats. Plus one I'm still waiting for payment on. 

[val2525]

Feb 27, 2015 21:44:41 GMT chapeaunoir said:

I don't really believe in rolling servers but there is a case to be made for geo-clustering, which is an inherent characteristic of some databases. Mostly I think that 800,000,000 items that eBay admin now brags about have overloaded the server farms and there are only partial search returns - it's why they are so variable. When I managed a little server farm we had the same problem in a much smaller scale - our servers would overload and some accounts would become, for a time 'invisible', unable to retrieve their data (in this case documentation).

I'm in Chap's camp. And eBay is too cheap to buy/lease more space.

[denise15601]

I agree that the clustering is possible. I don't see what possible benefit eBay would derive from excluding some sellers here and there.
Granted that they do grant special favors to the big Chinese sellers. But I don't think their programmers are that adept at figuring out more complicated programs.
The 5 packages that I just put into my mailbox are from...CA, PA, AZ, NJ and AL. That sure looks like "all over" to me.

[val2525]

It's not a benefit to eBay, but more there's just not enough space (like Chap said). And as long as eBay can show the big box sellers, eBay could care less about the rest of us.

I'm hoping that changes if eBay spins off the Enterprise segment.

[Deleted]

Well then I just don't know how to explain my constant ups and downs. I did have two sales today at Tradesy!