This week we came up with a new slogan that we hope will ring throughout the online selling world: “The best way to sell is whatever way you enjoy because it’s the only way you’ll keep doing it.” Maybe this will end the debate!
No way! Of course sellers will never stop arguing about the best items to sell and the best way to sell them, but at least let’s acknowledge that nothing matters if you don’t enjoy what you sell and how you sell it. We’ve all seen example after example of people who try to sell online and fail miserably because they try to imitate someone else’s business model. Making money is not enough. There must be love involved if you’re in it for the long haul.
On another note- Our friend, Marc, confirmed that eBay is now taking down old listings! What! It’s a Catastrophe! Let’s Freak out!
Wait, what? Let’s see what actually happened. Marc said that he was eating dinner and received a message from eBay saying they removed 1000 of his listings that were older than 12 months. This is what the message said:
Listings that haven’t generated interest, after being active for a long time, can clutter the site and make it difficult for buyers to find what they’re looking for. This can be unfair to other sellers when their listings are difficult to find. Therefore, we’ve done the following:
– We removed any listings that have been active for 1 year or longer without sales. A list of removed item(s) is available further down in this email.
– Any fees for listings that were ended early for not following policy won’t be credited to your account.We recommend that you don’t relist these items unless you first take steps to improve the likelihood of sales. Please also make sure that items don’t automatically relist. Listing fees may not be refunded for subsequent removals.
To increase the chance of your items selling in the future, we recommend that you consider the following best practices:
– Reduce the price of the item.
– Add images.
– Include pertinent item specifics.
– Offer free shipping.
– List the item using the Auction format.To help you, we have compiled recommendations for improving your listings. For more information on listing best practices, please see: http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/searchstanding.html
Okay, this looks pretty bad on the face of it. My worry was that eBay was removing listings and he’d have to retake photos and write all new text. But all Marc did was hit “relist” and made all his listings active again. No big deal. There’s no way for eBay to know if you updated info. They just made a hoop he had to jump through.
So why is eBay doing this? We assume eBay wants people to look at their old listings. Great, that’s fine. But sometimes items just take a long time to sell no matter how cheap you make the items. And who cares how long an item is up as long as the seller is willing to pay the listing fee? Unlike Amazon FBA, eBay isn’t storing any of these items. It’s just a giant database in the cloud.
We have plenty of items over 12 months old, but eBay hasn’t taken any action on us yet. But if they do, we feel no stress since we can just relist. I guess this issue gives credence to the sellers who use 30-day listings and then just relist using “sell similar”. The items are the exact same, same photos, same titles, same descriptions, but they just fool eBay into thinking they’re new items. Is this the new game we must play? eBay hasn’t given anyone much info on this new push, so we’ll see. As always, it’s often less a big deal as it seems at first. The wheels of commerce keep on spinning.
Join the conversation on the forum>>
Our Store Week May 21-27, 2017
Store #1
Total Items in Store: 5,743
Items Sold: 61
Cost of Items Sold: $76
Total Sales: $1,983.49
Highest Price Sold: $120 (vintage lamp)
Average Price Sold: $32.51
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $24
Number of items listed this week: 110
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Bonanza/Trugether:
Sold 2 items for $30
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Store #2
Total Items in Store: 1272
Items Sold: 17
Cost of Items Sold: $40
Total Sales: $486.21
Highest Price Sold: $34 (leather wallet)
Average Price Sold: $28.60
Returns: 0
Number of items listed this week: 0
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Home › Forums › Scavenger Life Episode 312: Is eBay Removing Old listings?
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