The most important commodity in business is information. For a seller on eBay, information about the buyer and what the buyer is doing is worth its weight in gold. While eBay’s site tracking service is down, this guide will show you how to compensate for the lost data, with the hope that the tracking service is up soon.

The service that eBay employs to give site statistics to sellers unfortunately hasn’t been functioning for weeks, and the data is still unreliable – which means that the data from the traffic monitoring service of eBay can’t be relied on for critical business decisions.

Sellers are, thus, fumbling in the blind when it comes to understanding who visits the stores, and what they are doing there. Sellers can’t make any decisions based on the data they get, because if they rely on the data they will be making critical and harmful decisions to their businesses!

Luckily, there are options to ameliorate this situation.

Auctiva to the rescue
Auctiva is a third party service that lets users list auctions on eBay, and they let users design pretty listings. But since Turbo Lister is doing a pretty good job for me, that’s not so important – and if I’m to serve as a model for taste, pretty listings turn me off from buying because I get the feeling that the lister is trying to impress me with dazzle rather than with content.

However, with the membership at Auctiva you get access to the tracking system at Sellathon.com. Now, Sellathon only tracks the ‘auctions’, and not the store items. But if you choose to go with Sellathon through Auctiva (the service is free, btw) then you will at least have reliable data for the auction section of your business.

Monitoring the store inventory
There is no way to get around the blind spot that is the store items as far as I can tell, without actually paying a service to do that job. But the gist of this article was to try to find free alternatives. If anyone knows of a free alternative to seeing the store traffic, they’re welcome to drop me a note.

Until then, we can however now lift the blinds somewhat. The secret there is the so called RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and chiefly it is used by the blogsphere to circulate blogs. This can be used to sellers’ advantage to by treating the store as a blog.

There is a free service called FeedBurner that collects statistics for blogs, and which can collect traffic data for all your users that subscribe to your store page as an RSS feed.

This is actually useful quite apart from being a quick fix to the traffic measurement collapse on eBay since these users aren’t grouped previously. They are invisible to you unless they trek over your pages, and when they do they get lost in the other traffic data. With an RSS statistics tool you can collect data on this group exclusively. You can get to see how many of your buyers subscribe to your feed without subscribing to your newsletters. Remember, these are potential buyers that are interested enough to bookmark your page in their browsers.