How many auctions are you closing successfully?  I just received the results of a powerseller survey from a large research firm, and the results are more than a little disturbing.  If this survey is correct:  Nearly 70% of all powersellers are successfully closing less than 40% of their core auction listings.  Sort of makes you think about why ebay is running all of these listing promotions over the last two months.

  Ebay knows what all of us sellers know - Sales are in a slump.  Traffic is down, and so are sales. 

  Some of the obvious reasons are:

1. More and more people are trying to sell the same items.
2. Costs are up - Postage costs are up over 25 % on my items, and I am discounting my shipping to the point where I lose fifty cents to one dollar on every item I ship - Because ebay is telling everyone, high shipping costs are bad, and ruin the shopping experience.
3. Listing fees are up.  To sell an item at $9.99 or less it costs eighty-five cents (40 cents listing / 10 cents buy-it-now / 35 cents gallery), and if your item sells for $9.99, ebay gets another 50 cents in final value fees.  That comes out to a 13.50% cut, before Paypal fees.  Ouch!
4. Buyers are having a hard time finding the right item, because search results are not always good.  For sellers, sales have slumped ever since ebay took store items out of the regular search results.  Sure they return some store listings, if there are only so many regular listings, but when they showed all of the store listings, after regular listings - store sales were out of this world.
5. Ebay tools are going down more often as the site becomes more crowded.  Sometimes listing tools are affected, other times it is picture hosting, or other glitches.
6. Category changes affect all store owners, by making it necessary to update all store items.  Not a problem when you have fifty or one hundred items, but try it with one thousand or ten thousand.
7. Some of it is simple supply.  When I first started selling on ebay eight years ago, most of the items I sold were unique, and no one had seen them offered before.  Today I have offered most of the items five, maybe ten times, and the uniqueness has worn off.  Now it comes down to price.  People are more reluctant to bid items up, because they are accustomed to see the same unique items come up for auction time and again.
8. Another factor skewing prices is people selling below cost, just to unload items they overbought.

The fact is ebay is a buyers marketplace.  Just because I think an item should sell for ten dollars or fifty dollars is no guarantee it will.  It is what buyers are willing to pay right now.  A half hour from now that can totally change, as two or three bidders get caught up in an insane bidding war. 

  My personal close rate is between 15% to 20%.  The only way I can get it up is to run more core listings.  A lot of months my ebay store can kick in several thousand dollars in profits, but without regular listings - It would not happen. 

  I guess I'm not faulting ebay.  It's a great market place, and I've made a lot of bucks selling on it over the past eight years.  My thought is that we all have to work together to build the marketplace.  Recent feedback changes should make evaluating sellers easier for ebay newbies.  The star system is pretty simple to understand. The move to shutdown sellers with feedback problems is also a good move.  Eliminating scams and problem sellers should make things better for everyone.  Just take a look at the top ebay guides - They're all about scammers, shipping overcharges, and avoiding bad sellers.

Close rates are important to all of us.  And, I think its something ebay and all sellers really need to take a good look at.  If we can eliminate more of the problems in the marketplace it should help all of us sell more, more profitably.