Home › Forums › Random Thoughts › 30 Day Listings Sales Boost
Tagged: 30 Day Listings, GTC
- This topic has 101 replies, 22 voices, and was last updated 3 years ago by
Steven S.
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04/26/2018 at 11:04 am #38385
Now that we have been on SixBit for quite a while and have lots of sales, I wanted to see if I can prove a sales spike on the first and last day of a listing. Since we are 99% 30-Day Listings, I would expect to see a spike of sales on Day 1 and on Day 30. Well, what do you know…
Not sure why the spike on day 8, but this definitely shows to me that you get a sales boost when using 30 day listings, as your listings are getting the “Newly Listed” and “Ending Soon” boosts in search.
If anyone else has similar data, or contradictory data, please let me know.
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04/26/2018 at 11:51 am #38394
Thanks for sharing! Is your other 1% GTC, or auction, or what?
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04/26/2018 at 12:20 pm #38396
Mostly auctions. We are only starting to use GTC for multiple quantity listings.
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04/26/2018 at 11:52 am #38395
Huh, so you had over 200 sales on Day 1 of that month?
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04/26/2018 at 12:31 pm #38397
This isn’t one month.
I took all sales since we went to SixBit (over 3,200 transactions) and I looked at how many days the item was listed before it sold.
So, for all our sales in the past 9 months, 206 took place on the first day, then 110 on Day 2, 118 on Day 3, etc. Then on Day 30 (last day), we have sold 147 items on that day.
I wanted to look at the distribution of sales by day for our 30 day listings (just about all of them). So the best three days for a sale are the day it listed, Day 8 (for some reason), and Day 30 (last day). It is also interesting that there is a slow degradation on the average from Day 2 to Day 29, then the Day 30 spike.
On any given day, there is a 3.33% chance of a sale (1/30). 7% of our sales are on Day 1, 5% of our sales are on Day 30. Interesting to see the spikes on those days…
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04/26/2018 at 12:35 pm #38398
That’s great info. Appreciate you sharing.
If you sell items mainly BIN, I’m surprised that sales would be up. As an eBay buyer, I never search “Newly Listed” or “Ending Soon”. I always search “Lowest Price” or “best match”. Because if its BIN, what would the benefit of seeing which BIN item ends soonest?
Obviously other buyers are sorting search results this way?
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04/26/2018 at 12:52 pm #38400
Not 100% sure, but I do know that buyers will search the “Newly Listed” and “Ending Soon” sometimes. It may be that there is a boost in Best Match for these items.
Or it may be the psychological effect on a buyer when they see Newly Listed (“I’m seeing it first”) or the Ending Soon (“Better buy it before it disappears!).
It does show me the spike that happens with 30 Day vs GTC, so we will continue to use it (except for multi-quantity listings, those I’m moving to GTC.)
Maybe like the Pareto Principle, I don’t have to understand WHY it works, just that it does and I should use it to my advantage…
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04/26/2018 at 5:34 pm #38419
I have a couple reasons for those spikes that you may conciser. The first day spike may be due to the new listing triggering buyer’s saved keywords. And the last day spike may have something to do with the message that eBay sends to watchers telling them that the listing is about to end. And the 8th day spike… lol I don’t know! But that’s some really interesting data! Thanks for sharing!
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04/26/2018 at 6:50 pm #38428
Do you have a similar graph from a subset of items that were listed the other way? I only ask because to attribute the sales bumps to that change you’d need a group that is listed GTC as a control, otherwise your dataset is incomplete and your assertion about the reason the numbers bump at 1 and 30 is just an assumption. Not saying you’re wrong, just curious.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
shayward23.
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04/26/2018 at 7:34 pm #38432
Shayward: I don’t have a graph for GTC because we don’t list via GTC. If someone that lists using GTC could provide some data, that would be great to compare.
I can say that my hypothesis that there is a sales boost when an item is ending seems to be supported by this graph. As to what creates it (EBay boosting exposure or psychological reasons), I can’t conclude.
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04/26/2018 at 9:31 pm #38437
Understand, I don’t use the program or I would gladly run a control test. I only wonder if it makes a difference because when I list something as GTC it still runs a 30 day timer on my active listings page, and just automatically starts that timer over when the 30 day runs out, so I would wonder if manually reslisting the item isn’t just doing the same thing but with extra work.
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04/26/2018 at 9:43 pm #38439
Shayward: Not really. A GTC listing keeps the same listing number and will go “stale” if it does not sell in 60 days. Jay and Ryanne (as well as others) have had to deal with stale listings in the past. They drop in search after 60 days.
30 Day listings will get a new number and new history every 30 days.
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04/26/2018 at 9:47 pm #38440
Interesting, that’s good to know…might have to make some slight changes.
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04/26/2018 at 10:00 pm #38441
Something to try. We manually resisted until we grew too much, then went to SixBit to auto relist. But once every 5-6 months, we turn it off to re-evaluate our listings.
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04/26/2018 at 10:06 pm #38443
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04/26/2018 at 10:10 pm #38446
Jay: I seem to remember your rep telling you that listings go “stale” after 60 days. This was when you guys did a big relist a while back.
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04/26/2018 at 10:44 pm #38448
You’re right. we were told this: https://www.scavengerlife.com/2016/07/scavenger-life-episode-266-maybe-ebay/
Its funny that we ignored this info and continue to list GTC. Your data interesting because it does seem to show a small spike in sales.
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04/26/2018 at 11:51 pm #38454
It may be more than small. If the degradation continues that you see from day 2 through day 29 until day 60, it would be interesting to see the “stale” listing drop off starting day 61.
At least with 30 day listings, this cycle only repeats, it doesn’t continue to degrade.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
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04/26/2018 at 8:39 pm #38433
When I started selling a few months ago I did 30 day listings. I stopped after a few months when I was more confident in the way I was listing and did not feel that I needed to coddle the listings anymore.
Now, newly, I am going to give 30 day listings a go with some of my most watched items that are not selling. As a side note, I think that people bookmark and forget about it and this gives the idea that there is a lot of interest but in reality no motion (sales). So I took the top 10 items that had the most watchers, ended them and changed them to 30 day listings and one of them I put on auction.
I will report back if that has made any difference.
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04/27/2018 at 9:07 am #38463
I honestly wish that they had a 60 Day listings option. If items go “stale” in 60 days, why not let us list that way?
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04/27/2018 at 11:00 am #38478
T-Satt,
60 days is too long.
1. 30 days keeps something new coming out every month which is good for the platform and good for business.
2. An upside for 30 day relist is that is will cause many to have to pay to relist some because it will probably bring them over their listing amount into being charged per listing. -
04/27/2018 at 11:11 am #38481
Unfortunately, my listings this month have dropped through the floor, when I was hoping to keep them stable for the period of a similar experiment I’ve been running. I’ve been moving all my listings from GTC to 30 days and, when I was listing regularly, I saw a significant spike in sales. Due to medical and non-eBay work, my listing numbers have tanked, which has slowed my sales, but I definitely noticed an improvement.
Even better, those annoying “improvement” emails have been going away! I still have some as my GTC is being converted to 30-day only as they “end”, but I don’t seem to have any improvement suggestions for items in the 30-day camp.
Despite the inconvenience of relisting constantly, I’m sold on the 30-day method and will probably stay here, except for items that are multiple quantity and seasonal.
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04/27/2018 at 11:33 am #38484
amatino: I get it, and that is similar to our experience. When we moved from 30 day to GTC, we saw our sales drop. When we went back to 30 Day, our STR returned to normal. This was back in 2015.
When we got to the 1300 listing level, the relisting process was too laborious. I tried doing batch relistings through the eBay site, and I saw a huge drop in views. It was like eBay knew that they were batch relists, and we would be lucky to get 3-4 views on those items during the 30 day period. So the only way to keep our views in a normal range was we had to relist the items one at a time. This took too much time.
That was what moved us to SixBit. It will automatically relist each item for you if you choose. Or, you can let your listings expire, then grab all the items that need to be relisted, mark them as “Send as New Listing” in SixBit, and then schedule them to relist over a specific timeframe. This is what I’m doing now, as I set all our items to expire, and then we have been making some changes to our process, and I relist the items and schedule them out. PS – I schedule our new listings too, so that we have 100% new items listing in our store every day.
Though I am starting to use GTC on multi-quantity listings. I have seen a sales boost on items when they sell, so if a listing is generating sales, I want that sales history to stay on the listing, so I am moving to GTC. I just set up a process monthly to review our multi-quantity listings and if they haven’t had sales for 60 days, I will end it, tweak it, and resend as new.
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04/27/2018 at 6:10 pm #38517
I think it also depends on what you are selling. J & R did this experiment and it didn’t make much of a difference for them. Maybe they didn’t do it long enough. I think that if you sell a lot of 1-of-a-kind type of items that a 30 day listing would not help that much.
However, T-Satt has shown hard data for his store. The 30 day listing does appear to help. Also, I remember a person who used to be on the blog, Byran, did this also and had some crazy great sales volume. The thing I see in common here is that both of them were focused mostly on clothes.
So, my theory is that yes, if you sell mostly clothes, then the 30 day relist method appears to help.
Sounds like a lot of work to me. If someone could explain how to do it in WonderLister I may try it.
Mark
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04/27/2018 at 6:16 pm #38518
I agree with you Mark. I think it will go deeper than just clothes. I think that for any item that has many similar listings (clothes, shoes, VCRs, iPhones, books, CDs, etc), then any boost in search is valuable.
This boost isn’t as valuable for items that few people are searching for, or for items that doesn’t have competition. Those items are waiting for just the right buyer. That buyer may be there tomorrow, or 2 years from now, so a boost in search doesn’t help. These types of items will be long tail no matter what, so a boost in search isn’t worthwhile.
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04/27/2018 at 6:23 pm #38519
T-Satt,
That is what I was trying to say, but you have said it much better!
Mark
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04/28/2018 at 2:08 pm #38592
Amatino, are you using Ebay for relisting? I’m not sure I could keep up with it but I do believe it might be helpful. I just ended some more items that were cheap and getting few views, plus lowered some prices. Despite better listing it’s pretty darn slow.
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04/28/2018 at 12:57 pm #38580
would this also apply to ending and relisting items at the end of their 30 day cycles, but on gtc? or would the ebay system already have to know that an item is in and at the end of a 30 day cycle and this only works for an item that is listed for 30 day cycles?
i have most items on gtc, but i try to end them and relist them on their last days in order to do a method similar to yours. i only have them on gtc in case i get too busy and can’t end/relist each day, so to avoid them falling in an unlisted black hole if i can’t keep up with them.
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04/28/2018 at 6:07 pm #38601
Almasty: I would think it stay the same, as in both cases they are “new” listings. But I don’t think GTC gets a boost at the end for “Ending Soon”. I have seen some other YouTube videos that show no boost in search for GTC on day 30.
Only way to know is to try and track the data.
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04/28/2018 at 6:28 pm #38604
I’m glad Tsatt is collecting data. My concern is that people start putting way too much importance into all the little tweaks to fool eBay into boosting their items. This sets up the unrealistic expectation that you can “create” sales out of thin air. This mindset also takes away from the basics of just finding good stuff and listing professionally.
We’ve proven that you can stop listing for weeks at a time, extend handling time, list GTC, and still have steady sales. I guess the counterargument is “well, what would have happened if you did do all the tweaks. You would have sold more!” That’s the rabbit hole.
All things being equal, the tweaks can’t hurt. It’s great that even if it givs you the releief of taking control. Maybe Tsatt’s data collection can show that the tweaks do boost sales, especially if you sell contemporary commodities with a deluge of competition.
But I would not build my business on tweaks. I’ll be interested to see Tsatt’s future data. I’d love to know if he can break it down between his contemporary clothing vs his wife’s vintage items.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
Jay.
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04/28/2018 at 10:53 pm #38619
Jay, I agree with part of what you are saying. The basis of our business, and yours, is that we purchase good items at a good price and resell them for profit. Plain and simple. If you don’t have that, you don’t have a business. That is 90% of all our businesses, and that is where 90% of the focus should lie.
Beyond that however, all of us have different business models. You guys have the 10x return model, with a 4% monthly Sell Through Rate (so you sell about 1% of your inventory per week), which requires a large inventory to provide you with the return you need on a weekly basis. With your property situation, you have the ability to do that with no warehousing cost (I would consider your warehouse you built as a property improvement, as you will recoup that cost at some point should you choose to sell your property).
For Veronica and I, we have the 5x return model, with a 15% Monthly Sell Through Rate, which requires less inventory as the Velocity of our sales is much higher. We don’t have the ability to have as high of an inventory, and we would rather have the higher sales rate, as it is easier to store cash than inventory.
Not saying that either is better, we just have different situations and run different businesses. So we don’t build our business on “tweaks”, we build our business on solid fundamentals, and use “tweaks” to improve our business. Does it take us any time to do this? Nope. We have learned how to do this without it taking any more time. But when we have data that works in our favor, we use that data to make us better. Like the 60 Day “stale” rule that eBay notified you about. We used that information to say “if we DO use GTC, after 60 days, it is “stale” based on eBay’s standards. If it is really unique, that probably doesn’t matter. But if it is something that has competition, then we need to relist.”
Because in my mind, if it is listed, but nobody is seeing it, is it really listed?
I had to do some Excel work, but I have the splits:
So in both cases, there is about a 40%+ sales spike from Day 29 to Day 30. Granted, Hard Goods also has some interesting spikes on Day 23 and Day 25, but still, for Hard Goods, the best sales days are Day 1 and Day 30.
So all I want to share with the community is that based on our data for our store, we can show that 30 Day listings have a benefit of the “Newly Listed” and “Ending Soon” boosts in search for all sales types. We will use that boost to our advantage. Others may find this interesting. Maybe they don’t. Maybe it will work for their stores. Maybe it won’t.
Is it the basis for our store? Nope. Will we use it to our advantage? All day long. It would be silly not too…
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04/29/2018 at 8:37 am #38624
Totally agree. Just wanted too add some perspective to this conversation. I see a lot of these discussions become “how to hack eBay and get rich”. You’re adding little boosts but you still need the fundamentals all day long.
So can you give some more info on these graphs?
–what time periods is this info pulled from?
–When you say 40% sales spike, how many actual items are being sold on a specific Day 1 of your listing cycle?
–Are you listing “sell similar” or just relist the same item on a 30-day cycle?-
This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
Jay.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
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04/29/2018 at 11:51 am #38651
2 or 3 years ago, when I first had nearly 10,000 listings active(I’ve since changed pricing, reduced the store down to 4,000 listings, and brought them up again to over 9,000 listings), I came to a point where sales just…stopped. I had originally been doing the method of GTC without adjusting or ending listings. My stock was exactly the same as it had always been, but I was getting no sales.
I then experimented with ending listings that were at the end of their 30 day period within the GTC cycle. Sales started again, and they were really high when I first began doing it. Listings had somehow become lost within Ebay search (some had been listed for over 5+ years without ending or having adjustments made to them).
I now still end items everyday, if possible, and relist them. Surprisingly enough, I do have sales of items that have just been “newly” listed, sometimes within a day or 2. I also gain additional watchers on items that just newly appear. Some items end with no watchers. Within a few days of being listed, watchers appear on them. I don’t understand why it works, but it does.
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04/29/2018 at 11:54 am #38652
So what’s your process?
–list 30 day
–let them end
–each day go into your “Unsold items”
–relist any 30 days items that ended and relist as 30 daysOr do you relist as “sell similar”? With 9000 items, how long does this take you each day?
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04/29/2018 at 11:59 am #38655
GTC in case I can’t keep up with the work of ending and relisting them. That’s why I wanted to know if there was any similar bump at the end of the 30 day cycle within GTC. Running them at 30 days apiece would be a nightmare with an inventory this large.
I usually only do 200-1000 listings per day. It takes anywhere from 5-15 minutes each morning, depending on how many are ending that morning. I use the bulk editor to do it while I’m making coffee. It’s nbd in terms of time.
I end the listings and use the “sell similar” feature in the pull-down menu for the bulk editor page in the Ebay seller hub.
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04/29/2018 at 1:17 pm #38680
almasty, when your sales just stopped, were you still listing regularly?
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04/29/2018 at 11:58 am #38654
2 items I’ve had listed for over a year now already have watchers within the first 5 hours of being “newly listed” today. I haven’t seen these items with watchers before. From items “newly listed” 3 days ago, another 2 that haven’t had watchers before have watchers now. It repeats like that for “newly listed” items nearly everyday with my inventory. Old listings gain new watchers. It makes no sense, but eh.
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04/29/2018 at 12:23 pm #38668
Are you relisting as “sell similar” or just re-upping the same 30-day listing?
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04/29/2018 at 1:02 pm #38677
relisting as “sell similar”
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04/29/2018 at 3:45 pm #38697
If you have 9000 items in your store, then we’re about similar sizes.
–When you list each day, how long does that take? I assume you use then bulk lister?
–Bulk lister only lets you change 200 at a time. Do you just go page by page to “sell similar”?
–Do you ever get items in “Unsold” that shouldnt actually be relisted? Maybe it was sold on Bonanza, etc. Our fear is getting phantom listings. -
04/29/2018 at 3:59 pm #38700
Sorry, I see you answered this above.
I do worry about accidentally re-listing items that are “unsold” because we sold them on other platforms or re-donated them. Has this ever happened to you?
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
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04/29/2018 at 9:00 am #38626
Time period is from July 7, 2017 through April 27, 2018. So, about 9+ months of sales, over 3000 sales transactions.
So, to break down the original chart of all sales, there were 3088 total sales transactions. Of all sales that took place, 206 of those sales took place on Day 1 (the first day it is listed). This always seems to be the biggest sales day, showing the boost that newly listed items have, either through search or through watches that people have for certain items.
Of all our sales, 77 took place on Day 29, and then 147 took place on Day 30. For Clothes & Shoes, 58 Sales were on Day 29, and 103 on Day 30. For Hard Goods, 19 sales took place on Day 29, and 43 on Day 30.
So we actually seem to sell almost twice as many items on the last day of the listing (Day 30) than we do on the Day 29. And when looking at the “normal” level of sales for each item (sales that took place from Day 2 through Day 29), there is a definite spike in sales on Day 30.
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04/29/2018 at 9:11 am #38628
So over a one month period, you’re averaging about 22 items sold on Day one of the 30 day cycle? Then 16 items sold on Day 30 of the cycle?
Just doing the math for specific expectations on each month according to the graph. Not sure if Im translating that correctly.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
Jay.
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04/29/2018 at 9:39 am #38632
Jay, re: running your business through “tweaks” — I had a fortune cookie yesterday that said “If you spend all of your time learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade.” Seems apropos to your position.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
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04/29/2018 at 9:37 am #38631
I think the translation is a little mixed here.
It is not that I can expect to sell 22 items on a given day, or 16 on another. It is more about the distribution of likelihood of sale given the lifespan of a listing.
For any 30 day listing, an even distribution would say that there is a 3.33% likelihood of sale on any given day (1/30). So this is similar to when rolling a dice, you have a 16.67% chance of rolling a 6 (1/6) on any given roll.
What I wanted to see is how our sales are actually distributed over the 30 Day lifespan.
With 206 sales on Day 1 out of 3088 total sales, 6.67% of all sales take place in the first day, over twice the expected rate of 3.33%. This is like expecting to roll a 6 twice as much normal…like a loaded dice.
After Day 1, the percentages float around the 3.3% mark, though they are in the mid 3% until Day 16, then they are in the 2% range after. This is the sales degradation you see in the chart. Of all sales, there are less and less sales that take place the longer the listing is out there…until Day 30.
There were 147 sales that took place on Day 30, the last day of the listing, for 4.76% of all sales. Again, a spike in sales both compared to the previous days trend and over the expected rate of sales of 3.33%.
So, it isn’t that you can expect sales to take place on a given day of the month, but you can expect more sales to take place on the first and last day that a 30 Day listing is active.
And again, all given that it is a GOOD listing to start. Meaning good title, good description, sharp photos, something people want, and at a good price. That is where the meat is and always will be.
But there is some sizzle in the fact that there is a higher likelihood of sale on Day 1 and Day 30 for 30-Day listings…in our store at least. Others results may vary.
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04/29/2018 at 9:57 am #38636
Got it. But I guess my brain doesnt work like that with the percentages.
For instance, over the last three months, what were the amount of items that you sold on Day 1? How many more is that than you usually sell on a day during the month?
For us, we sell about 7 items a day on average. 10 items in a day would be strong. 15 would be amazing.
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04/29/2018 at 10:07 am #38637
So, to translate it to your thinking…
Lets put the dataset of 3088 sales as a 10 month period. Then yes, we would expect 20 sales (206/10) to take place on the first day it is listed, 11 on the second day it is listed, etc, and 14 (147/10) on Day 30.
In total, 3088 sales for the 10 months is 308 sales per month (with 20 on Day 1, 11 on Day 2, etc.) That makes sense for our volume in that timeframe. Below are our actual sales by month:
Jul 2017 – 210
Aug 2017 – 296
Sep 2017 – 302
Oct 2017 – 311
Nov 2017 – 356
Dec 2017 – 349
Jan 2018 – 281
Feb 2018 – 243
Mar 2018 – 321-
04/29/2018 at 10:18 am #38638
Got it.
–So you guys are consistently seeing about 10 more sales on the first day of each month vs an averageday?
–If these are mostly clothes, I’m assuming you’re averaging $15 net profit on each item?
–So that’s $150 extra each month for that first day boost?Just trying to put the boost in actual dollars per month. A couple hundred extra dollars a month isn’t bad.
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04/29/2018 at 10:40 am #38639
Again, this isn’t a boost on the first day of the month. It is the first day that a listing is active. So every day of the month, a new listing is starting, so that boost is happening every day.
Listing #1 starts on April 1, so it has a 6.67% chance of selling on April 1.
Listing #2 starts on April 2, so it has a 6.67% chance of selling on April 2.
Listing #3 starts on April 3, so it has a 6.67% chance of selling on April 3.$15 is a good average to use for our store.
For us, when we tried GTC a few years back, that sales degradation that the chart showed just continued to slide. We kept listing and listing, and sales got slower and slower. I finally ended the listings and relisted as 30 Day listings, and our sales rate came back.
So to me it isn’t just a boost of 10 sales on Day 1, it is the combined boost of sales rates on Day 1 and Day 30 over the low sales rate an item would have if it continues to slide down the scale to the dreaded day 61, when it is now “stale” and not showing in search at all.
I would love to have the data on our store if we put things on GTC and let them ride, just to see what the sales rate would be. But I really don’t want to sacrifice sales to do that for a year. I really feel that you have to have several months worth of data to compare.
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04/29/2018 at 11:18 am #38642
Boy am I late to this discussion. didn’t see it or would have jumped in earlier. But you have outlined our thoughts almost to a “T” 🙂
With WonderLister, and of course you with SixBIt, we can set all of this to happen automatically. Jay’s reference to them trying it, was still the Manual process, even though using “bulk edit”. That still is not creating rules and code as we can in our WL & SB programs. Settings listings to end completely, come off line and then relist with a new, fresh Ebay ID number, get picked up as new, and be seen as new by Ebay is done automatically and behind the scenes within these listing programs. It is about as automated as it gets.
The interesting we also see in WL, is when items are being relisted, if WL picks up a signal from Ebay that a listing now has some type of issue due to Ebay changes, WL kicks it over into a “needs to be reviewed” folder and doesn’t relist it. we then can go to that folder, take a look and correct any type of issue that was reported by Ebay, then click bulk upload and send them on their merry way.We have not done the analysis like you have but have just run more on the gut feel that we are correct, but you have expressed in words what we were feeling all along.
The 60 day number is incorrect as jay says. it is 90 days. Here is where it came from, there is a link here on an Ebay seminar given by an engineer that is an Ebay employee [or was at the time, he has on an Ebay shirt with logo], that was part of the team that developed the Cassini search engine. as he gives his talk about how to maximize and enhance a sellers store and benfit from the at that time newer cassini, that at around the 90 day mark the code they wrote into Cassini begans to see listings as stale.
here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6znSUKtKH0
Listen to this YouTube video. it is eye opener. He explains just how Ebay is looking at listings. But listen carefully, I forgot exactly where he says it, but he tells you at what point that Ebay will just start to consider items going stale [or not as much interest to Ebay]. They also watch other criteria. but another interesting thing is this is a guy Todd Alexander, an Ebay emloyee is explaing how the Cassini Search engine is working. How much more evidence do I need. Not much, since he worked on writing the code for the algorhytm, I think I believe him. Not going to argue with a guy that is explaining to me how they make the dang thing work.
Now that may have changed now, but it is a very interesting explanation and he offers. he tells us that it is not about the lowest price, not at all, so what does cassini look for? well, he tells us. so I said listen closely, I even took notes when I first listened to this. I am streaming it now, and again, I am hearing what we need to do. He just asked how many people in the audience has a single item at a fixed price. he tells how to make it appeal to more people.
So go take another listen and see how it compares up to the charts and rules you are using to analyize your data. You may discover some new insights that may bring a different angle of attack on your data.
Just some more food for thought. especially the Q&A at the end.
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04/29/2018 at 11:24 am #38643
“he tells us that it is not about the lowest price, not at all, so what does cassini look for? well, he tells us. so I said listen closely, I even took notes when I first listened to this. I am streaming it now, and again, I am hearing what we need to do. He just asked how many people in the audience has a single item at a fixed price. he tells how to make it appeal to more people.”
Since you took notes, would yu be willing to share these exact pieces of advice of what Cassini is looking for?
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04/29/2018 at 11:41 am #38647
“So to me it isn’t just a boost of 10 sales on Day 1, it is the combined boost of sales rates on Day 1 and Day 30 over the low sales rate an item would have if it continues to slide down the scale to the dreaded day 61, when it is now “stale” and not showing in search at all.”
Yep, sounds like a good system. I will say that I dont think your last statement is true. After 60 days or even 300 days, items dont fall out of search (or else none of our items would sell). eBay seems to be giving your newly listed items a boost.
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04/29/2018 at 12:16 pm #38665
Agree Jay, the item isn’t not showing at all. It isn’t like it disappears. But it does fall in search, and it may fall so low that buyers aren’t really seeing it unless they look for exactly the item you listed. Again, for very unique items, this doesn’t matter. Only specific searches by buyers will have your item be returned in search to begin with. For items that have a lot of searches by buyers and a lot of sellers, then being on the high end of search results matters.
I think for me the key is that there is a pattern that I see from Day 2 through Day 29. The sales slow down as time progresses. If I project that slow down beyond day 29 (ignoring the Day 30 spike), our sales would slow down more and more. This correlates to what we saw when we went to GTC. But by using 30 Day listings and relisting, the Day 30 and Day 1 boost was in our favor, and sales returned.
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04/29/2018 at 12:22 pm #38667
So I almost have Ryanne convinced to try this experiment. But as she said “it’s a matter of brain space”.
Tsatt, you’re argument of 16% more likely to sell isn’t enough. Can you give me a back of the envelope dollar amount of how much more you think you make each month doing 30 days? From what you;re telling me, it looks like you make between $200-$300 extra a month. Is this correct?
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04/29/2018 at 12:51 pm #38673
If you ever come on board with something like WonderLister or Sixbit it would not take up any brain space at all. Once you set your rules and scheduling, all of your listings then would get taken over by the software and either WL or SB will handle everything for you. Then any templates you create you save with all of the item specifics and formats you want. Then get a new item, open a draft-template, click submit to Ebay when finished then from that day and hour going forward the software will handle the listing, ending and relisting automatically. WL & SB both have customers who have tens of thousands of listings and do this. In WL we can also create a small rule that will “append” either the title of the “description” and add a rev. [revision code] to the listing and then we can filter and look at how many times an item has been ended and then relisted each time.
There are other things that both of these programs will do to / with your listings at the time of re-listing but that gets into how to use these programs.
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04/29/2018 at 1:22 pm #38681
“If you ever come on board with something like WonderLister or Sixbit it would not take up any brain space at all. ”
True, but from what I understand, then there’s the brain space needed to install and manage these applications and their databases, correct? I would love to have some of the features that I see mentioned from time to time, but there is no way that I’m going to get into the business of installing, storing, and managing (including backups) a database. Is there any cloud solution that provides the same functionality?
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04/29/2018 at 1:47 pm #38685
SixBit will not work in the cloud. I already asked.
If you go down the SixBit road, I can help with questions. And their group is great with customer service.
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04/29/2018 at 2:05 pm #38688
T-Satt: I talked with JC at SB about a year ago when I was comparing the size of the WL and SB datbases and I brought this up and thought he told me SB could go on the cloud as a server but only in the Enterprise version and it was costing. thought he also told me they did some propriertory coding for a few private business users for the cloud, but I could be wrong. Sometimes i mix up the WL and SB teams and what they each can and can’t do and what they are working on. Like when WL got all of the Photos to get paced in the cloud [Google drive] in order to reduce the size of its database and SB had not done this.
I sent my database to both tech teams about a year ago and what took SB to load in over an hour went to WL in less than a minute. But think JC and Ryan [the senior tech supprt guy at SB] have overcome that issue now. But maybe SB won’t operate directly from the cloud.
But again as I was saying to Sonia, this is all behind the scenes stuff not part of a user having to maintain a database. The actual program can be loaded or reloaded from anywhere. it is to make sure your database is backed up in multiple locations and that is just smart computer user technique and procedure. I could loose my whole hard drive right now and by tomorrow have bought a new hard drive, formatted it and down loaded about 96,000 files [I think that is what I have backed up]. I also use carbonite as a paid back up source.
So on a side note, a suggestion, make sure all user make it a policy to back up your computer. as they say, it is not a matter of IF, it is a matter of WHEN is your hard drive going to crash. 🙁
mike at mdcg
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04/29/2018 at 5:08 pm #38710
Amen. I talked with Steve in the last month and he checked, no dice on the cloud solution. Probably at some point, but not now.
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04/29/2018 at 1:53 pm #38686
Hey Sonia: These apps are self installing. They maintain themselves and do their own back ups automatically. Updates is no harder than updating any other app. WL is set to back up daily automatically. It auto rotates between a back up on my hard drive and the next day onto our free google drive account. Same place we store our photos.
The use of either of these apps is the same as oening up Ebay and using it’s listing app only you open WL or SB and a blank listing form is right there.
A main difference is that you can customize a lot of what you want to see and how you want to see it. The other is the flexibility you have in what data you want to see and what is included in a report. It is no harder to list and view reports than it is in the Ebay Dashboard.
As far as maintenance goes, it maintains itself.
as far as the cloud, yep both have versions that can be loaded into and run from the cloud but the question is why? Well the advantage to having the main application in the cloud is that multiple people can access it remotely from various regions and locations throughout the world. If you hire and trust assitance from other countries or other states or local counties you can have any number of people working for you and on the application at the same time. Other than that we personally would not need an in the cloud solution and doing so is very expensive.
If you have a harddisk crash, the app can be redownloaded and self installs in minutes. where are your photos and the single database, it is already stored in 3 places, atleast for us. One copy is on our hard drive, but if it crashed, then that is gone, but the second place is on a small external hard drive we bought for $60 that sits on top of the computer and the third place is on the Free Google Drive.
Where are your phone contacts stored and how hard is it to have a copy of those being saved. WL & SB is no harder than that. Wonder how many people have 3 back up copies of thier phone photos, contacts, texts and emails?
If we had a crash, WL could be downloaded to a laptop in less than 2 minutes and then when you go to open a file, you would just go to Explorer, click on the Google drive icon and viola’ there is your recent database. And if by chance it was not current one clcik on the tab synch with Ebay and it will make you current right away. By the way our database synchs with Ebay every 10 minutes automaically. Anyone using SixBits will synch with Ebay and Etsy in about the same amount of time, and again automatically.
So all of 3rd party users spend way more time talking about the benefits here on SL than we ever spend maintaining the actual systems. Now someone like T-Satt, is doing nothing more than accessing the power and flexibilty that these programs offer. An example is MS Word. You can either use it to just type a one page letter or use it to create a web site or a full color, two sided, fold over brochure. But that ability comes from knowing how to really us all of the cow bells and whistles that come with and are available with the software.
But the caveat is that one does have to learn to use the program. Just like trying to show someone how to list using the Ebay app. At first it is the easy lister-editor. Later comes learning about bulk editing, later comes creating templates and going back to them.
Just an opinion completely but I would venture to say, using WL or SB is actually easier and quicker to use than using the Ebay app and certainly safer in some cases. Think I just read Ryanne and another member saying about a bunch of lost drafts after so many days. Never would have to worry about that within WL or SB. And the fact we can customize the whole screen layout of the listing form, that once that is done one time, then the felds you enter data in is lined up in the order you want to enter it in. try changing around and rearranging Ebays listing screen. don’t think it can be done, but not sure now.
but in any case, back to maintaing, just really doesn’t pose any problem no more than amintaing any other software. And by the way WL database size is very compact and is much smaller than that of SB. But SB was going to work on that and maybe has reduced it’s size by now, but that is a techie, engineering type of thing, not a worry the the actual user.
Now those that are more tech savy on WL & SB may have different thoughts, but just my opinion. I can hear Jay saying, “whatever you are comfortable with”. LOL 🙂
mike at MDC Galleries
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04/29/2018 at 2:05 pm #38687
Thanks Mike for explaining all of that to me. I’ll continue to think about it – I may be making a bigger deal out of it than it is. Let’s just say that I’m on the very extreme end of the “cloud vs locally-installed” spectrum of preference. I don’t have many (any?) applications installed on my computer besides MS Office and whatever comes standard with the OS. I don’t even want to install TurboTax – I have been using cloud-based TurboTax since 2005. 🙂
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04/29/2018 at 2:15 pm #38691
Completely understand. my daughter only uses her hpone for everythign even the cell phone version of Polaris [a MS Office] look alike. She pulls up spread sheets and her company’s database on her phone all the time.
Here is one for T-Satt. Could you see yourself doing all the work you do on spread sheets ona cell phone screen. I wear tri-focals and even enlarged it is hard to see on a phone, much less all the scrolling that needs to be done. Zowie, think about clicking on all of the precedents and dependents function in excel and finding all the related connections. Holy Crackers Batman LOL.. 🙂
I have two giant monitors connected to one of our rigs and in that it is hard to see some things that are connected with all those “blue lines”. 🙂
Anyway Sonia, perfectly understandable.. everything has it’s place and time. Some things are just better left to deal with at another time. No right or wrong.
Like the old saying .. When you are to your butt in alligators it is difficult to remember that your objective was to drain the swamp. 🙂
And all the changes at Ebay, they aren’t making it any easier. 🙂
mike
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04/29/2018 at 5:03 pm #38708
Mike: Nope! My templates in SixBit make the listing faster from the desktop.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy…
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04/29/2018 at 12:52 pm #38674
For our store, yes, that would be a reasonable assumption. If we use a $15/item profit per item, and use an extra 10 sales for Day 1 boost and 8-10 for Day 30 boost, then $200-$300 a month would seem reasonable.
Will that work for you? Maybe. But if I were to consult with you on this experiment, here would be my advice:
Look at your active listings that have more competition. Looking at your store, I would take clothing, shoes, kitchen items, games, purses, etc. Look for items that will have more competition from other sellers. From that list, look for listings that you have had out there for a long time, say more than 4 months. That would be the list of items that I would use for the experiment.
For those items, you would then put them on 30-Day Listings going forward. If you are going to manually relist these items through eBay (since you don’t have a WonderLister or SixBit to do this for you), I would suggest to relist them one at a time (not it batch, I had bad luck with that).
But that then becomes the rub. It starts taking time to do this manually one by one. And when you have a lot of listings, it takes too much time. And you have to do this on a regular basis to see the benefit. You can’t do this for a month or two and see the benefit immediately. And you especially can’t do this at this time of year (during the summer slowdown) to see if it is working or not.
This is what led us to SixBit. The program does it for us, saves us the time, and still gives us the benefit. No muss no fuss.
I would always give advice person by person. No blanket statement that one process works for all. For a seller with a smaller store (say less than 1000 items) that sells items with lots of competition (clothes, shoes, etc.), I would have them use 30 Day listings and manually relist. At some point, if they are serious, then I would recommend upgrading to a SixBit or WonderLister to handle that for them, as the benefit of more new listings (by saving time from manually relisting and using that time for new listings) will offset the cost of the program. This was us when we were at 1,500 listings last summer and couldn’t make up ground due to too much time on manually relisting.
For someone like you with a larger store, mostly made up of unique collectibles that may not have a lot of competition, the work may not be worth it (unless you only do the high turnover items). Or I would tell a large store to get SB or WL. Or they could list GTC, but have a process where once per month, they look a their oldest listings, end them and relist.
This entire process, and the data that I showed that started all of this, is what is working for us, why we do it, and why we list the way we do. Will it work for others? Maybe. Maybe not.
Again, other factors are in play, and this entire discussion is on the margins. 95% of the business is the fundamentals that we discussed earlier. Using this data to our advantage is only providing a small bottom line boost. But it is a boost that I can take, with little investment of time or money. Whether it will work, and is worth it, for others is something everyone will have to decide for themselves.
To paraphrase someone earlier: Don’t worry so much about the Silver Bullet that you forget to focus on your aim…
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04/29/2018 at 12:37 pm #38672
And to throw something in about the often used phrase rare, unique, hard to find item.
One of the things we seem to be finding, is that finding the rare and unqiue items are getting harder and harder to find.
What I mean by that is two fold. One that the actual procurement of items in fairly good shape that are really unique is more of a challenge these days because more people are getting into online selling of them and TV shows and recycle shows are pushing more people to become sellers so, there are more sellers buying everything up faster. But als in turn, then those items are shwoing up on Ebay faster and faster and where we used to list something and we were one of only 2 or maybe 3 like items, we find these days, we find a fairly unique item from the 1940’s, 1950’s, list it, and search it and there are 80 others just like it.
And then to make matters worse, which we mention the other day, a lot of newer sellers don’t resarch and price at the top of the highest sold but are happy with just doubling their money [buy for $2 and then sell for $4 to $5 dollars, when top dollar is $35. All the antique booth guys we talk too trying to go online seem to favor this. So when we now list what was a once harder to find item, now out of the 80 like items they are priced all over the place, from $10 up to $80. we see this everyday.
I know years back Jay said, don’t worry, when all the others sell yours then will be the only one out there and it will sell for our top dollar. well now that everybody under the sun is grabbing anything over 20 years old that is not nailed down and selling online is more mainstream and fairly easy to do, there seems to never be a situation whereby we are the only ones any longer.
This day and time taking good photos is fairly easy with built in phone camera s. steady cam features, gauze and blurr reducers built in, zoom built in, back ground removal. Then apps to show what items sold for in the past at the touch of your fingers, copy and paste both photos and text, not all as hard as it used to be. How many kids are even doing this now?
There is kid that comes with his parents to an auction house we go to sometimes and he sits there with his laptop and researches as items come up for bid in real time and all he bids on is Sterling Silver. he buys it all the time and then he flips it online. We talked with him and his parents one time and since he is not old enough for a craedit card and an Ebay account, they handle all of that for them, but he knows what to buy, the makers mand Hallmarks, silver content, age of the designs, he is very knowledgeable.
But point at hand, there are a ton of people buying everything that is not nailed down and in turn flipping it online and at very low margins. We thought we had a West Bend insulated metal ice bucket we could sell for about $50. well there are tons of them all from $10 up to $125. Where now is the rarer, harder to find fit in. It is maybe 60 years old. Well millions of people are now buying, as Jay says, tons of stuff out there and it is being found and listed by the millions. Just an interesting market now.
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04/29/2018 at 11:40 am #38645
Wouldn’t it just be easier for everybody to listen to the YouTube video. I am letting it run again right now and it is extremely interesting. The notes I took at the time was in ballpoint pen on a pad on my desk. Those sheets were sticky type and I had them stuck to the bottom of my monitor for a fairly long time. But I think I may have also transcribed them into a MSWord document. I will have to do a search and see if i saved it somewhere. If I find it I will post it. May also be good to start a new thread.. something like What is Cassini, or Prepare to Tackle Ebay Search Engine.
Back to listening to this video, I am hearing things right now, that means a whole lot more to me than it did several years ago, because I now know more about WonderLister, auto listing, categories and Item Specifics. As he is talking about Item Specifics and relevacy scores mean a whole lot more now that Ebay changed that topic and we have now reduced the copy in our description area and placed a whole lot more of emphasis on Item Specifics.
I think I am going to relisten to this video again and maybe take “new notes”, now that I am more experienced.
Got to do some “home handyman stuff with wife for a while now”.
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04/29/2018 at 11:44 am #38649
The Video by Todd Alexander just starting lsiting the top things you need to do to saty on top of Ebay search, and best match. Man, wish I had relistened to this a year ago. Going to redo some work in WonderLister based on what I am hearing. He also is talking about ending listings and relsiting or keeping listing live. Also now touching on the Ebay bulk lister but just discovered somethig about this video, it cuts short the Q&A at the end that I think used to be on the original upload of it. May be worth a look to see if I can find the original YouTube post. this may be a repost of it, unless I am not remembering correctly about the Q&A at the end.
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04/29/2018 at 11:54 am #38653
As you figure out specific points, I’d love to hear them.
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04/29/2018 at 12:02 pm #38659
While Cassini results are important, as sellers, we must still take into account the strong product based push ebay is doing. This increases competition becasue buyers are shown multiple other options for buying our item or an item similar to it. Even if one sells a unique item that can not be found exactly, something similar in nature may come up which can divert a buyer’s attention due to the product and/or the expenditure involved. While multiple options can be good for buyers, it is not always good for sellers.
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04/29/2018 at 12:12 pm #38663
Amen to that AE. It still grips me that every time I open my listings or do a search on my items I get a hoard of other sellers images thrown in my face.
One thing I used to do, but not any longer is when I created my description I would insert about 50 lines of carriage returns at the bottom of the listing. The results was when Ebay was showing other sellers items at the bottom, those carriage returns drove that Ebay bar down by a long way. so far I was thinking nobody was going to scroll down 5 and 6 swipes past all that white space just to get the bottom of the listing and only find more Ebay advertising. But after I rebuilt some templates in WL I just stopped doing that. Guess if I wanted though I could use WL and do that in one fell swoop. Just a thought I guess.
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04/29/2018 at 12:35 pm #38671
MDC and Jay, I am interested in this new topic and will listen to the linked files later, but on the original post, I have a question.
Tsatt, your data suggests that there is a boost in sales on Day 1, Day 8 and Day 30. Is it possible that you made a majority of listings on Sundays? Perhaps I am wrong, but Sundays seem busier than other days of the week. If you are uploading a lot of listings on Sundays, you might see Day 1 and Day 8 as an artifact of the weekly cycle of eBay traffic.
Alternatively, if your uploads have been randomly dispersed over the 7 days of the week, and if you agree with me that there is weekly variation in eBay traffic, wouldn’t it make sense to upload your listings such that the day 1 “New Listing” flag occurs on the busiest day of the week?
Thanks, Daniel.
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04/30/2018 at 4:38 pm #38810
Daniel: We spread our listings across the week. We do this primarily because we know that the eBay algorithm likes consistent new listings. I know that there is some controversy on this subject, but I have seen and heard too many people that state this fact. Again, it may be a small help, but a help nonetheless.
So mass listing on one day wouldn’t account for the spikes.
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04/29/2018 at 1:38 pm #38684
Thanks for sharing your experiment and explaining it thoroughly. I’m a sucker for hard data ha
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05/05/2018 at 4:57 pm #39107
T-Satt- Thank you for your analysis.
Since, I use sixbit this is easy for me to implement and I see no reason not to give it a try.
From now on all my nonauction listings will be 30 Day instead of GTC.For now, I will leave my old listings which are GTC alone.
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05/05/2018 at 7:06 pm #39116
Utahbill: We also let our auto-relisted items end about once every 3-4 months. Then we use SixBit to make any tweaks, then resubmit with the “Submit as New” button checked. I tell you, every time we do that, old stuff starts popping…
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05/05/2018 at 6:20 pm #39112
Just curious: how do you turn GTC listings into 30-day since GTC never ends? Just pick a day and do it?
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05/05/2018 at 7:04 pm #39115
Jay: Yep. Just end the listing, make your tweaks, and resend as a 30 Day Listing.
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05/05/2018 at 8:36 pm #39118
Jay.. There is the key. GTC “C” being “canceled”. As T-Satt says, you have to end / cancel the listing. Then go to bulk edit and bulk change all of the unsold-ended listings to the 30 days. Then resubmit. This way they get a brand new Ebay ID number. Ebay sees them as “new listings” and they get picked up and shown around by the Ebay search engine as something “new” in the chosen category.
Then from then on, without a third party “software” like WonderLister or SixBit you have to watch your ended listing and relist them manually and make any tweaks you want.
In WL and SB T-Satt and I use the built in auto end, then auto relist function. And a bonus is that we can schedule the relist to take place at intervals or time spreads of minutes or hours apart.
In any case we still have a lot of GTC listings and so I won’t have a whole bunch getting converted all within a day or so, I am taking each day this month and as items are coming up to end, about 2 days before I am running through the process of ending the GTC listings for that day and then doing the conversion. By the end of the month, I will have everything over to the 30 day setting, and then from their on out WonderLister will end and relist automatically. so in a sense, it is still working just like the GTC as far as we are concerned and internally, but what Ebay is seeing is all 950 items in our store getting ended. Then every hour on the hour Ebay is seeing a new item being listed. But, it just so happens it is the same listing we ended about 2 days earlier. So it is still working just like the GTC but Ebay just isn’t aware of it.
I don’t know if you can do this with the Ebay app or functions or not but we can with SB and WL.
I think I have all of this correct. T-Satt will confirm if SB is working this way for him.
It is called “creating rules” within WL. Create the rule, that tells WL to end a listing at the 30 day mark, AND Relist. Then that rule gets applied to the newly relisted and from that point on the “Rule Takes Precedent” and runs the show. And yes you can set a dwell time if I want to make some changes or tweaks.
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05/05/2018 at 8:41 pm #39119
Yep, SixBit is similar. After the item ends on eBay, if the item (database record) still has inventory, and the Allocation says “Relist”, then it will resend the listing to eBay in about 20 minutes. You can list all inventory, list just 1 item (with 3 still in inventory, and when it sells, it will list 1 more, or you can allocate the inventory across platforms (2 on eBay, 1 on Etsy).
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05/05/2018 at 8:48 pm #39120
In Sixbit, can you create listing profiles for helpers so they dont have access to your eBay account?
I know Mike has said that WL either doesnt have it, or its a feature that coming sometime later.
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05/05/2018 at 9:29 pm #39121
I think so. You might want to check on the SixBit site to verify, because right now I am the only one that uses SixBit. However, I know that I have set up my own username to use six bed. And I have administrator access.
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05/07/2018 at 11:14 am #39259
This is a very interesting discussion and is timely for us.
When we started we had every listing at 30 days, based on the idea that we’d want to check the titles, photos, etc while we were learning and improving our listing skills. Beginning the end of March, we starting switching them to GTC when relisting and creating new listings.
Nearly all of our sales are now GTC.
Our sales plummeted in April and are still in a tail-spin.
Not sure if this is an example of correlation doesn’t imply causation in our case, but I’m definitely switching back to 30 days and giving it a try.
Plan of action is to work through them over the next several days, starting with the oldest and most watched.
Will see…
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
karlacreekbank.
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05/07/2018 at 12:05 pm #39269
April started the slow season for us. This is usually how it is for many sellers as the holiday season ends and summer comes on.
To be clear, Tsatt said he thinks he makes $300-$400 extra each month because he relists every 30 day. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s certainly isnt the silver some folks advertise.
All you can do is try. If anything, selling 30-days at least can give you a feeling of doing something.
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05/07/2018 at 12:12 pm #39272
Well if you go by the theory of 30 days listings, your sales should have spiked or at least maintained since in April you used sell similar on your entire inventory.
With GTC, buyers still see the countdown to the ended listing clock. The clock just resets when it runs out.
I don’t worry about it. GTC for life for me.
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05/07/2018 at 1:13 pm #39280
karlacreekbank: This was what we saw when we went to GTC as well, and why we switched back. Jay has a point though, that depending on what you are selling, this could be a slowdown season and it could be a seasonality in your items, not that you went to GTC.
And as I said earlier, it really only matters on items that have many competing listings, like clothes, iphones, etc. Rare, unique, one of a kind items that have a smaller audience will probably not benefit from 30 days. Plus, if you want to use Pintrest or other social media to market your items, GTC is best. If you link to a 30 day listing, it expires. The GTC items will still be out there and the link will still work.
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05/07/2018 at 3:05 pm #39297
agree, T-Satt – we sell a variety: a lot of unique and vintage items, but also items like used iPhone and iPads (not current generation, but recent generations) – they were selling steady, yet none of our new listings we put up in April (all GTC) have sold, so that was the part that sounded alarms for me as I read through the discussion.
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05/07/2018 at 3:12 pm #39298
karlacreekbank: It may not have been long enough for those items to sell. I did a separate analysis about a year ago, and our items averaged 120 days being listed before they sold. So in those cases, it will have relisted 3 times before it sold.
You may need to get an idea of the average STR for your items before you worry.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
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05/07/2018 at 1:56 pm #39287
But T-Satt.. since you are using SixBit and guess you have automated the end at 30 days then automatically relist at 30 using SixbIt that to you it is the same as GTC. Auto. end and auto relist, over and over again for 60 months is the same as GTC only you get a new ID number every 30 days and Ebay thinks it is a new listing.
Unless I am missing the boat completely.
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05/07/2018 at 2:43 pm #39293
True, the auto relisting acts for us “like” a GTC. But what I wanted to see was the distribution of sales across our 30 day listings. In any given 30 days, an item would have the chance to sell on that day 3.33% of the time (1/30).
But our distribution doesn’t show that. Our distribution shows that items have a spike in sales on the last and on the first day listed. So we sell way more than the average on those days.
On a GTC listing, you only get Day 1 once. You “might” get a spike on day 30 (with ebay promoting Ending Soon), but I have seen some videos that dispute that.
What I would love is some data from a GTC seller with a sizeable volume (200+ sales per month) that shows the distribution of sales day by day. That might show some comparison.
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05/07/2018 at 2:06 pm #39290
Something maybe of interest.
I’ve noticed when I search eBay for an item for myself, find it, and then search completed listings for what price I should pay, I will sometimes see the same or a similar item unsold multiple times, since it was renewed every thirty days or less. This has turned me off in the past about making the purchase. Especially if I am searching for a ‘rare’ item to buy and then flip sell on another platform. However, when an item is listed as GTC, it just keeps rolling over, forever for sale, it does not leave a trail of unsolds, making it appear stagnant and unwanted. So I am more apt to buy this ‘rare’ item when I cannot find it unsold, but perhaps only sold, and then sold at a decent price. Certainly only a small percentage of buyers shop like this, yet I do, and I cannot be all alone. I believe I am correct in this observation, yet I have not really dug into it.
When I switched everything over to GTC, this idea was a small contributing factor in my doing so.
I’ve been experimenting with long listed items, ending them individually and relisting at 30 days duration, and with some changes to the titles. I change the titles a bit to not only tweak, but perhaps fool that computer brain we have all been discussing that the listing is truly indeed a ‘new’ listing.
I would rather be listing new items, have plenty, just in a situation right now where I can only coddle old listings until hopefully tomorrow. I am convinced I am not doing any harm by going 30 day, yet after a cycle or two, I will probably switch back to GTC. None of this is my idea, all from the forums, yet my initial observation is my little bitty brainchild, if at all relevant or even completely accurate. -
08/25/2018 at 5:14 am #47940
Has anyone besides T-Satt already tried this method and has some results ?
I already changed some of my listing ( ~ 200 listing) to the 30 day listing period and will report back on how it went for me.
- One suggestion for T-Satt
As aperture already mentioned in a different context:
Wouldn’t it be smart to list your items in such a way that the final date will always be on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday evening?It seems to be the best time for auctions if you want to recieve the maximum amount of money, mainly because on these days most of the buyers are online.
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08/25/2018 at 5:46 am #47941
Let us know how the change works for you. Even Tsatt’s results are minor, but every sale counts.
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08/25/2018 at 9:07 am #47945
Ostap: I don’t like to force everything to end on just those days, as I know that Cassini likes consistent new listings. It is something that I could test, but I like the consistent daily sales.
Jay, as I always say, lots of small gains are where it is at. The Unicorn is too elusive, but if I find some nice gains everywhere, it is worth it. We don’t get rich with a 2% cash back card…but we all use them, right?
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08/25/2018 at 3:36 pm #47951
Totally agreed. I love that you keep improving your business with little turns of the wrench.
But the “refresh every 30-days” is spoken as some kind of unicorn moneymaker in most other forums and Youtube. Same goes with the idea if you end items on Sunday night, you’re sales will also shoot up. Think of me as the “curb your enthusiasm” guy.
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08/27/2018 at 1:48 pm #48060
Agree Jay. Is there a boost and an advantage? Yes. Is it a Unicorn Catcher? No.
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08/25/2018 at 5:07 pm #47956
I don’t have scientific proof but I can say that I get new watchers on old items that have been relisted or sell similar more often than I did when I had GTC. I also have a promotion going on so I believe that helps too. And I also have over 1,000 listings now so maybe that helps. I can only say that based on those three factors (relisting, promotions, more items) that I have been getting consistent sales for the last couple of months.
And lest it not already be understood, I am very grateful to everyone here that has helped us along the way. I have been so busy lately, I barely have a chance to catch up on the forum. But I do check in so just in case you thought I went AWOL, I have not!
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08/27/2018 at 10:00 am #48037
Feedback on my move to List-and-Attend. I’ve been shifting all my listings to 30-day as they come up to their “ending today” date. It has taken several months, but I’ve been fully 30-day for few weeks now. It was not feasible for me to relist daily, so I got into the habit of relisting once a week. With only 500-odd items in my store, some weeks it worked out that half my store was ended, so I started doing my relisting on a Sunday. This is now my third Sunday doing this and I can report consistent sales on Sunday evening and Monday, sometimes even Tuesday. The phone ka-chings in the most satisfying way!
I should probably relist on Saturdays to get the weekend crowd, but I work a full day on Saturday in retail, and my feet are killing me and I’m just not in the mood to do anything but sit on the floor with my feet on the wall! 🙂
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08/27/2018 at 3:27 pm #48067
Can you be more specific with numbers?
–How many items do you re-list on a Sunday?
–How many sell that day?
–How many do you normally sell on any Sunday?
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08/27/2018 at 1:51 pm #48061
Amatino: Yeah, at that level, relisting isn’t a killer. Once you get to 1,000 items, it really became a time suck for us. Glad we relist with SixBit. We are wrapping up a relist session now (we turn off the auto relist every 3 months or so so that we can take a fresh look at listings), and at 60-80 items that end per day, it can still be a grind if there are a lot of tweaks we want to do with titles, pricing, etc.
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08/27/2018 at 7:11 pm #48075
I’ve actually spent the past month and a half moving my listings back to GTC from 30 day. As of a week ago, all 9k+ should be GTC.
I have to say, I’ve actually seen an increase in sales again to almost pre-July levels.
It could be sales just picking up in general. Items I’ve recently been listing might be more desirable. I don’t know. I’m selling items that have been listed for less than a week, to items that have been listed for 8 years. I have done no tweaks to the listings other than changing them back to GTC.
I might end and refresh several thousand listings in a few months it feels stale. If not, I will just leave them as they are. I am currently seeing no difference between GTC and 30 day for sales for a large quantity store.
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08/28/2018 at 2:03 pm #48104
Almasty: I love your last part, about just ending and relisting your items to give them a fresh start. I think that might boost your sales a bit just by showing these as fresh new listings. I would be interested in seeing if that helps when you do that after 4-6 months.
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08/28/2018 at 5:25 pm #48123
I just don’t think there is anyway to completely verify either way. I’ve never tried relisting every 30 days, always just GTC.
The ups and downs, seasonal differences and pure chance would skew any attempt at a comparison.
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