Did Ecrater or Google recently change search ranking results

[CentralStateMower]

hello all,

First time to post in the forums...This is prime season for my items (Outdoor power equipment parts) and so far sales have been sparse this year. Last year's sales were much better.

Just trying to find out if I missed something major that happened recently.

Thanks,
Mark P.
Central State Mower, LLC

[MoonwishesStore]

Do you keep up with the forum here? Last month to help combat google's reign of terror in making sellers pay up for the privilege of appearing in google shopping, ecrater started a new fee schedule that you can choose higher FVF if you want to be seen better. Also ask yourself what kind of promoting you are doing for your store. Ecrater has always needed sellers to promote and market their own stores and even those who got by without doing it have had to face the sad fact that in recent years if they didn't they don't survive.

There is an announcement about those fees, but I'm on my laptop and it freezes if I jump around different screens to much to find the link for it. It is a current topic though so should be easy to find.

[cosmicray]

@CentralStateMower

Something changed back during February or March. I am not sure what it was, but something happened. We are still feeding to Google Shopping. Plus we now have the ability to have sponsored ads. The ads are keyword based, leading to listings, but the ad rate is on a per-store basis, and not per-listing. The ad rates are in 4-tiers from 2.9% to 12.9%. These ads will appear on Google, Yahoo and Bing. For more information, check out the long thread about this.

http://community.ecrater.com/viewtopic.php?t=35630

[tigercreekgifts]

Mowers, are you aware of the new fees? You seemed to refer directly to the search when asking about lack of sales. Not only did google and ecrater make changes as others stated above, but regardless what you choose ecrater now has a default 2.9% marketplace fee. When you get an order from the marketplace they charge a 2.9% fee on the item price (they don't count shipping charges). Paying the fee is optional but if you don't pay, your items will be removed from google shopping and your items in the ecrater.com marketplace will be pushed several pages back, sometimes on the very last page and very last spot in each category. I think ecrater said, the more you don't pay, the more your items will slowly fall back in position and rank until eventually they might remove you from the marketplace all together.

Are you aware of the new fee? I was asking because if you weren't aware and you never paid the fee on previous sales that could be why you have a lack of sales. Have you checked the marketplace to see if your items on the last page of each category you list in? You might wanna do that, and also check your OPTIONS in your admin panel and make sure you don't have "send minimum buyers from marketplace" accidentally checked. If you check that box, your items instantly go to the back of the line.

[CentralStateMower]

Thanks all,

Yes, I was aware of the eCrater 2.9% marketplace fees but, I WASN'T aware we now had options to increase the level of google search advertising percentage fees if we choose.

That would explain (at least in part) why sales this year have been sparse compared to this time last year...

Thanks for filling me in!

[SheilaDeesPostcards]

@ CentralStateMower, glad you posted. I took a look at your store and bookmarked it in case of future need.