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For the last 6 months or so I’ve attempted to consistently list a certain number of items every single day. Following the “draft bank” method outlined by dailyrefinement on youtube we started at 5 then 7 and now for last few months have been doing 10 every day. Trouble is, I think we have peaked both in my ability to acquire enough items to keep feeding the ebay monster and our ability to list and ship the items every day. I do have another business so I don’t work a full 40 hours a week on ebay but even if I did I think 20 items per day would be our max and that is with my brother doing all the shipping and helping with some of the listing. I primarily sell model trains now and they do tend to be time intensive to list due to the poor condition of the items when they arrive. I know others on here have adopted the daily listing philosophy, I’m curious how many you can consistently list and if you’ve tried to push yourself to grow the number ever higher.
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You just gotta do what works for you. I carve out time to ship during weekdays and that’s about it. I don’t list every day because I don’t have that kind of free time every day. My listing has to be done on the weekends. I also would prefer to just get things listed rather than pace them out through the week. I’d rather they be available to sell all week rather than waiting a week to trick some algorithm that may (or may not) care.
If 20 a day listing and shipping is your “reseller nirvana” then that’s your sustainable model. If you need to dial it back, do that. Improve your efficiency in listing and shipping frees up more time. If you need to develop better sourcing routes to “feed the beast” then work on that. Most people that get to the point of listing 20+ items a day end up with suppliers that bring them inventory. 240 quality items is ALOT of items!
Side note, if you are big into trains then you’ll love this:
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I also would prefer to just get things listed rather than pace them out through the week. I’d rather they be available to sell all week rather than waiting a week to trick some algorithm that may (or may not) care.
I’m fairly confident that the algorithm cares about listing every day (or most days), but I also agree with you that there’s no point in spacing out new listings so you have a few items every day. Get stuff listed. Don’t leave things sitting in drafts when they could have already been packaged up and on their way to a new buyer.
But as you and I have learned, once your inventory reaches a large enough point (1ooo listings, maybe?), go through a handful of your oldest listings (especially the ones with zero watchers), end them, reprice them and sell similar or relist. Buyers can be fickle and sometimes a $10 difference in price will get them to buy. Sometimes an item showing up as new in a saved search gets your listing visible to a buyer who wasn’t searching for it three months ago. Sometimes if your item is not that unique, it is overpriced now compared to six months ago.
It’s so fast to make changes in the bulk editor now that this should be a part of the weekly routine for any seller with a decent sized store. Even if you only end, reprice and sell similar on twenty items a week (four batches of five items), that’s over 700 “old” listings a year which you’re making “new.”
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I list 5 items a day during the week and 1 item on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday I take the time to go through the items with item specifics dings and try to get them updated (at least enough to remove them from the ebay list). On Sunday I promote all the items I’ve listed the previous week. The weekend is when I put together my drafts of new items. I do that once a month or twice depending on how busy my weekend is. This is manageable for me.
I just hit 2500 items. Not sure how much more new stuff I will list going forward. I have about 600 items that I need to photograph. I might try the ending and relisting items thing for a month or 2 and see if that makes any difference in sales.
I sell an item a day on average. I spend 3 hours a week on Ebay. I have a full time job so Ebay is very much a side hustle for me. I’ve built it up slowly and now it requires minimal effort to keep it moving.
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I source Mon-Fri and usually list what I get each day, so an average of 6 to 7 items. The breakdown is usually 2.5 hours of sourcing followed by 2.5 to 3 hours of prepping/testing/listing. I’m in electronics, so certain items demand more time. There’s a lot of variables that can slow things down, like whether or not I can shoot all the items in my photo booth, or if I need to clean up something. All leftover inventory gets listed or backlogged on Friday. Shipping and bookkeeping happens in the evenings, usually 1.5 to 2 hours Mon-Thur + Sun.
I manage around 500 to 525 items in the store at any given time. With outliers, the average age of sold items is somewhere in the 45 to 60 day range, but it’s common for stuff to sell in 2 weeks.
There’s a few bottlenecks in my approach right now, namely lack of space and help. I’m satisfied with the current results, but I know more is possible.
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When you say electronics, do you mean video games? Stereo equipment? Computers?
Where do you do most of your sourcing? What kind of COGS do you have, assuming you pay up for quality, fast selling items?
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Just about everything. Cameras, power adapters, VCRs, CD players, stereos, musical keyboards, etc etc. If it plugs in – and fits in my vehicle – I’ll sell it.
I source at a Goodwill Outlet (the “bins”) where the price is determined by weight (right around $1.60/lb.) COGS averages $120/week. New inventory averages about $130/week.
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@Jay For many many years I was a sporadic lister. I’d find the time to power through a chunk of items and get them all listed, then slack off and not list for a while. When I was just doing this more as a hobby that was fine. When I quit my day job to start my IT business I kept the ebay sales going and would get one good batch of items listed per week. I noticed that sales would be good for a few days, new items and old would sell, then kind of slow down to a trickle. The longer the period between listing, the slower the trickle became.
I came across the daily refinement guy and was really impressed with his sales volume. I figured I’d try his method and see if anything changed. Instead of pushing out all the items in one go, I made drafts and then would push out 5 a day, every day without fail. I wasn’t really listing that many more but was putting a consistent number up every day. I have to say this did make a difference! I was consistently selling stuff and not just the new stuff I listed. Over the past 6 months or so I’ve kept up with the daily listing method and at the same time my inventory has become more homogeneous as I’m only listing model train items. I have found that my daily sales will grow to be, on average, just a little less than what I list daily. When I was doing 5 a day, we quickly grew to selling 4-5 items a day but not much more. Now that I’m doing 10 items a day, we tend to average around 7-8 items a day in sales. What’s interesting is that the sales are very consistent. We do often get a bump on the weekends and when ebay as a whole is slow we sell less too, but it’s not uncommon for me to sell as many items on a Tuesday as on a Friday/Saturday. I can’t prove that listing every day automatically makes a lot more sales, there are other factors such as what I was listing and time of year that I can’t totally account for. But I can say listing every day sure makes the sales more consistent which I find helpful from a business perspective.
As for the Daily Refinement guy, I think he is focusing more on his “mentoring” business which is an aspect of him that I never was thrilled about. I think there is value in many of his methods and I can see why some people might be willing to pay for better access to his advice but it’s not for me.
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Listing in any form is always good. Glad you have a system down that works for you. As Retro said, each seller needs to find the listing routine/pace that works for them.
My only hesitation about these “systems” is when new sellers think it’s the only way, cant keep up, and then just not list.
I just like “always be listing”. No particular time of day or week. Just list when you can.
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I have found that my daily sales will grow to be, on average, just a little less than what I list daily. When I was doing 5 a day, we quickly grew to selling 4-5 items a day but not much more. Now that I’m doing 10 items a day, we tend to average around 7-8 items a day in sales. What’s interesting is that the sales are very consistent. We do often get a bump on the weekends and when ebay as a whole is slow we sell less too, but it’s not uncommon for me to sell as many items on a Tuesday as on a Friday/Saturday.
This tracks with my own experiences this year as well, interestingly regardless of store size. I’ve consolidated my inventory over the last few months from around 2500 listings to under 2000 listings and now under 1500 with little to no effect on my numbers as a whole. Have there been slower weeks? Sure. Those weeks often coincided with when I stopped listing new items consistently. Coincidence? You decide.
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This is always a great conversation topic, and with how dramatically new listings seems to affect the search algorithm, almost feels like one which should get discussed every single week. There is such a massive difference in my store’s performance when I list every day, or most days, versus sporadically. I might go as far as to say that while summer slowdown is very real, my own listing habits (or lack of) contributed to it. This year at least.
I was very good in the first half of this year in listing a few items every day. First it was three, then five. Sometimes more than that but always aiming for that minimum. It kept me motivated and focused for a good four or five month stretch. Like you, I focus on a specific niche (mine is trading cards) and one key for me was to build up a huge backlog of pictures (scanned front and back images) so that I can grab a handful of cards from a box and create those listings when I had the time. I sell similar from existing listings based on card type (graded, autograph, sport, etc) so getting my scanning process sorted out was the most important step to actually getting stuff listed. My scans are clearly labeled, so all I have to do when I want to make a few new listings (like I did this morning) is grab a few interesting cards from my semi-organized boxes of scanned but not listed items, sell similar from one of my existing listings and spend a few minutes fiddling with titles, descriptions, prices and item specifics.
It’s easy to get photos done for listings when it’s just five or ten items total, but much harder when it’s five or ten items every day. Doing the photo work in batches helped me build and maintain a backlog of photos, which made it easier to keep up with consistent listing even on days where I spend an hour or less on eBay, as I often did this spring and summer. Once the backlog of photos starts to trickle towards zero, I add to it. Doing multiple tasks to create a new listing in the same day, like taking the photos and creating the listing, has always been a trap for me to not list consistently. Once in a while, sure. But it’s too many things to do in the same day over and over again.
Of course, creating a good template for your items is important as well. I charge one flat rate for shipping and that’s it. Easy to do with the small trading cards but I also sell larger items like books and I just charge one flat rate for shipping which never changes. It’s one less thing to have to mess with when I create new listings. I also skip most item specifics besides the required ones. Every little step you can take to speed up the listing process will help you list more consistently.
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