eBay Unwraps Personalized Selling Stats For 2024: Is Every Seller In The Top 5%?
eBay sent out personalized messages to sellers today, celebrating their individual success on the platform in 2024 - but some sellers say the math doesn't check out!
The questions started in the UK community one some eagle-eyed sellers noticed not only did the stats eBay provided not match where they believe they actually in certain categories, but somehow every other seller they talked to was also told the exact same thing - that they were in the top 5%.
padanpcparts
We are in the top 5% of a certain category - our first item sold, highest earning line, busiest day, number of buyers and number of item views
Amazingly, so am I in one of my categories. Which - considering that I am in the process of bailing out of that category because sales are so poor there that I haven't bought anything in that category for the last 3 years - is really depressing.
If I'm one of the top sellers in this category, and I can't make it profitable, then how badly are my competitors doing? I strongly suspect most of them are actually selling their items as "private" sellers, to avoid the ruinous fees.
But as it doesn't seem to say how eBay have calculated these statistics - items sold, average selling price, percentage of listings sold within 30 days - it's pretty meaningless really. My sales in that category, over the year, are something like 95% under £15, and 2% over £200.
I deleted it, but i'm now soooo soooo ecstatic with anticipation i'm going to look in the trash and see if i'm in the 5% club.
Realistically i know what club i'm in and it's nothing to do with 5%.
Every single person I know so far is in the top 5% of their category.
Also (mentioned elsewhere already) very telling that my top day for sales was way back in April. Very telling indeed.
Cool - Despite ending my shop and reducing listings by over 50% back in April
I`m still in the top 5% . The rest must be really struggling. Either that or eBay looked at my website by mistake.
I could go on by there were over 30 responses to that thread, most of which confirmed they too had been told they were in the top 5% of their respective categories.
Unsurprisingly, sellers found this a rather strange coincidence, so they asked eBay staff about it since the UK community still has a weekly chat sessions (unlike the US, where the practice has been discontinued).
community-teamebay
A seller asked:
Can you explain why it seems like every single seller that received the email about the eBay yearly round up is being told they're in the top 5% performers in their category?
Is this is a glitch, or is eBay cherry-picking selected categories to blow smoke up our backsides?
Marco@eBay responded, saying just because a few sellers in the community all happened to get the same result, that doesn't necessarily mean all of the millions of sellers across the platform did too.
If you as a seller received an email stating that, then that is because you are.
Just because you are seeing a some sellers commenting about this, it doesn't mean that you're covering all the multiple sellers we have on site.
While that may be true, it's also dismissive and honestly rude not to at least acknowledge that what sellers are seeing is in fact kind of odd and it's a reasonable question to ask.
But wait, there's more! Apparently it's not just UK sellers who are in the top 5%, I've now heard from multiple US sellers who say their "personalized" 2024 selling recap showed they were a top 5% seller when they know there's no way that's actually accurate.
To make it even more fun - the seller who sent me that screenshot says they checked their Listing Quality Report and it shows they're ranked 216 out of 2,660 sellers in that category for GMV, which would be about ~8%.
So, which eBay stats are we supposed to believe? Are these two sources of data just measuring different information?
It may seem a minor quibble since the year end recap isn't published anywhere publicly and doesn't impact sales in any way.
But obvious discrepancies in data in one place naturally lead to questions about whether other data can be trusted - and that is a much bigger problem for eBay.
Check your eBay messages for your personalized 2024 selling recap and let us know in the comments below if you too are in the top 5% or if you got a different number!
