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Oof. Admittedly I have not been posting brand new listings often for the last couple of months. My software is refreshing listings older than 90 days but I haven’t been making changes to stale listings. That no longer seems to be working. I’ve been running deeper sales and offers but I’m not really seeing the rotating bare minimum boost any longer. I have to conclude that Cassini is really hiding stale stuff since January. The rep who did my review did confirm that had that data. List it and forget it has to be dead or dying.
I feel like my lead photos and titles are pretty good. AI suggested changing the brightness a little bit, changing the prince slightly, etc. I’m going to focus on listing new items for a bit and then test that out.
I tried to look at my traffic report but it won’t let you go back more than 90 days. I’d be curious to see what it looked like compared to last year.
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Ebay has been pretty slow for me. Listing new stuff does seem to help, sending offers helps a little bit. ebay claims that non-Live sellers get a boost from buyers who come for the ebay Lives, but , while that might be true for some types of inventory—Pokemon, designed handbags, etc….the stuff ebay pushes with its Lives—I suspect ebay’s new emphasis on Lives is actually hurting some sellers rather than helping.
I am finding that being part of a community helps my morale—-just like back in the day here as trash elves—-there are no local ebay groups (now called “circles”) for me, but I am part of the RVA circle which is based around Richmond VA, but has members all over the country (and international, too, if I’m not mistaken. Most of their meetings are online, with one at the leader’s home that is for the locals, but is also streamed live, so anyone can attend even that one.
I recommend it….
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Ebay is unusually flat for me. If I was only selling on ebay right now I’d be very frustrated. Fortunately I started cross listing back in December.
Since the beginning of February I’m averaging 25 sales for $600 each week combined on Depop, Poshmark, and Mercari using Nifty… even though less than half my items are cross listed. That number is trending up the more I cross list. I do all my new listings and I try to do 100 old ebay items each week.
For the year I’m averaging 51 sales a week, which means ebay is only accounting for 50% of my sales and that percent is trending down. I currently have 4100 ebay listings and less than half of those listings are cross listed.
Another rough project I took on at the beginning of April was switching to business policies and flat rate shipping on ebay. The goal was to sell more items based on reasonable shipping costs. I modeled my rates based on Depop’s rates, so $5.99, $7.99, $9.99, and $12.99 for anything other than huge items.
I was hoping that business policies would get my shoe sales weekly average up, but it didn’t. I was still only selling about 12 pair a week. So 5 weeks ago I started a concentrated effort to cross list shoes – at least 20 pair a day. Over the last 4 weeks my shoe sales have doubled to an average of 24 pair a week.
So I say all this to say that ebay…is not good. I have fixed my shipping. I have refreshed my entire store so no stale listings. I am listing more than I ever have before in the first half of the year -averaging 51 new listings a week so far. Something has changed, something is wrong.
I do all that and I’m selling just as much stuff off ebay. Even worse, stuff that has sat for years on ebay sells like hot cakes on the other platforms.
My sales are trending up in alignment with my increased efforts everywhere else. Why is ebay flat?
Anyways, I’ve laid all the groundwork in the first half of this year to make a real run at $100k gross sales (sale price only – not including shipping) this year. Hopefully ebay starts to pick up as well so I can get there. My second half sales are always much stronger than the first half.
One last note, I shipped 66 items last week and I am on track to ship 70+ this week for the first time ever. That is ALOT of shipping and ALOT of work for a part time gig.
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Regarding traffic reports, you can go past 90 days if you use the desktop site and select “Custom” in the dropdown. I do wish it worked the same as the sales page where you could select what period it compared stats with (same time last year, quarterly, prior period, etc.)
I had back-to-back-to-back bad months (March/April/May) after a great start to the year sales-wise. I’ll accept some “blame” for needing to step back for a bit earlier this year to focus on something else, but a little time off can’t explain the kind of drop I saw. I’m not selling in categories that benefit from posting to other sites, unfortunately, so it was a matter of doubling down and continuing to “list through it.”
June feels better, but I’m in the same boat of still of it being sluggish and inconsistent. I don’t mind if a week is “bad” then gets saved by a sudden jump one day, but obviously would prefer it to be more spread out and reliable. Slower times of the year give me opportunities to look into ways of speeding up different parts of the sourcing/listing process, so I can’t complain too much about that.
Curiously, I jumped on eBay’s offsite promotions offer they were running to see if that aided sales. The rough numbers are 2:1, which is apparently the average ROAS for pay-by-click ads, LOL. Can I dump in $1k and make $2k? Hmm…
Also, the whole eBay Live thing is so crazy. Meanwhile, eBay’s other advertising efforts all seem to be focusing on finding “unique” items (the kind of stuff some of you are probably selling!) but if you load up the app you’d think it’s all Pokemon/Magic/etc. Maybe that’s just my algorithm but that’s a common thing I’ve seen across different sites where people talk about eBay.
I find economical factors affecting sales interesting. Largely I think it helps sales of my kind of inventory, but I do like to split the items I list between “wants” and “needs.” A buyer “wants” a DVD copy of their favorite movie for their collection, while another buyer “needs” a part for their vacuum, etc. That’s just my approach, though.
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Thank you. Ironically Ebay did pick up a bit this week after I posted this and started my weekly sale. I figured out what I was doing wrong on the custom view tab. I still can only look at 3 months at a time but I was able to go back if I cleared today’s date as the end date.
My impressions are WAY down in the last three months. Ebay is 63% of my sales for the year, and surprisingly that is the same percentage as for the last three months. So that would suggest that my lack of listing and other economic factors /pricing is perhaps lot of the issue. I have had to make much better discounts to get the sales I am making on Ebay, pulling all the strings. I’m TRS, have flat rate shipping under a pound, running my weekly permasale, making offers (sometimes 33% if an old listing). Looking back through my sales it does not seem as though the extra photos needed on my listing quality report are a dealbreaker. Overall, I am selling less stale inventory (even with a deep offer) on Ebay but some is selling off on Poshmark. Mercari is pretty dead overall.
I am definitely getting fewer promoted clicks since the attribution change in January but more promoted sales. If that’s true to most sellers who kept the same rate then I wonder if someone could successfully challenge the fee structure. It’s smart to not promote at first and then do it when you end and sell similar but I kind of just like keeping it simple. Should change this since it would be simple to add after the software refreshes.
I read that Ebay sales overall are doing better than a lot of small sellers like me are reporting. It’s focus categories so maybe the live sales are providing a boost? The notifications are annoying. I saw a commercial on HBO (10 seconds) and it was almost nonsensical.
@mycottage we don’t have a seller circle here either. I’ve been looking at Facebook groups, which is 90% of the people with soft sales and 10% of the people lashing them. Not many people looking at their traffic reports but some anecdotal evidence that Cassini likely changed in January along with the promoted fee change. -
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I’m thinking of quitting promoting. Sales on Ebay are tough. Some podcasters are only promoting after the item has been listed 30 days, but Ebay sends me messages bugging me to promote and there is no way to filter out listings by staleness that I am aware of. I don’t feel like I’m getting anything by promoting at 2%. My click through rate on promoted listings is .1%. So I feel like they must be showing it at the very bottom of impressions – a page never looked at. I can’t find the old traffic report I was using to see the % of promoted sales and promoted clicks. Can you even see what % you are paying a fee on now?
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@ChristineR I’ve been promoting pretty much everything as listed at 2.3%. But if I get an offer and take it or counter, or I send an offer, I first remove the listing from Promoted Listings. So, if the item does sell, there’s no PL fee. This has kept my PL fees pretty low , despite ebay’s “Attribution” rule. But I suspect it has also helped to keep my sales low, because 2.3% is not getting me a lot of visibility. I have a lot of older listings, and , like you, I think ebay really downgrades them.
I suspect there are multiple reasons for slow ebay sales, much of it tied to ebay’s refusal to recognize just how effective their competition has become, and much of it tied to ebay’s inability to focus on anything beyond ad revenue, ebay Lives and ebay sales centered on a relatively few categories (trading cards, designed handbags, etc).
I think the only way I’ll be able to keep this up is to go nulti platform and to push social media, Waiting for ebay to wise up is a losing proposition.
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There is a lot of chat among long time smaller sellers about sales being down. I just watched a video by someone saying they think it’s shipping costs combined with high volume sellers promoting at high general or priority because they can afford to do it. Ebay really needs to do something about shipping costs to attract more buyers.
The promoted fees don’t add up to a lot for me at this rate but I’m curious what will happen if I drop it. I stubbornly refuse to pay a higher percentage. I would if I had gotten most of my items very inexpensively but I also sell brand new items and sometimes pay up a bit for vintage.
Gemini says this:
1. The “2% Anchor” Camp (Estimated at over 60–70% of independent sellers) Following the 2026 “any-click” attribution rule change, massive cohorts of everyday sellers shifted their strategy. Because any random click can trigger an ad fee on an organic sale up to 30 days later, keeping ad rates high is a massive risk to margins.The Logic: Sellers use 2% as a “participation fee” to prevent the eBay search engine, Cassini, from burying their listings.
The Pushback: Platforms like EcommerceBytes note that eBay has been aggressively prompting sellers with notifications warning them that competitors are using “8% to 15%” ad rates. Despite this pressure, the community consensus on Reddit and eBay community boards remains clear: “Stick to 2% to survive the margin squeeze”
2.The “Dynamic & Priority” Camp (High-Volume Power Sellers)Large-scale retail sellers and liquidators frequently bypass the 2% strategy…
I guess I if most people are paying the participation fee then I’d better be careful not to drop it. I’ll be in no man’s land potentially.
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That’s why I use the PL at 2.3%….it might not give me a very big boost, but I figure it prevents me from vanishing altogether. And my tactic of removing from PL before accepting offers etc as certainly kept my PL fees low….but of course low PL fees aren’t much good if my low PL rate is preventing me from getting much higher sales velocity. I’m just not convinced that a higher PL —like 10% or whatever—would help me as much as ebay likes to claim, and of course, with the new attribution rule, there is no way to really know whether it is helping much or not.
One thin I’m thinking about is a variant I guess of the list without PL for 30 days tactic….I’m considering offering items directly on Instagram…payment through PayPal I guess…for the first ten days (or whatever number)…with a notice that the item will be going into my ebay store at the end of ten days (at a higher price). Even if I don’t sell very many items that way, it will hopefully increase the number of people clicking through to look at my ebay store to see what I already have listed.
I do think people are buying our kind of stuff, I just don’t think they are shopping on ebay as much as they used to. Add to that the fact that ebay clearly is pushing eBay Lives and certain favored categories, and I think it might be worth trying to push before my stuff goes up on ebay (or at least some of it…some things I’ll probably still put up on ebay first.)
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Multi platform is great. Sometimes I successfully sell stale items on either Poshmark or Mercari, which also gets them out of my Ebay store (maybe helping it if stale stuff does hurt?). I crab about promoted Ebay fees but Posh is 20%, which is no joke. Also about 90% of my Posh sales are based on offers. Buyers are more comfortable negotiating on there. I’ve taken a couple of hits on brand new items just to get a little cash flow. If I use Nifty AI to start a listing I have it set to charge more on Posh than Ebay and Mercari.
My issue with the Ebay promoted fee is that I’m not convinced that I’m really getting anything for it and I’m apparently getting less for more money, further liquidated by some sellers going all in on pay to play.
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I think what the PL fee gets me is some— limited— exposure on other seller’s listings. But I find many of my views are organic, which I attribute to people actively looking for the item and finding it in search results (where ebay is showing it organically because they are showing my competitors higher percentage fee listings as promoted). I think even with 2.3% ebay is not necessarily showing my items on other seller’s listing pages, not if there are similar items they can show with higher rates.
So, you are pretty happy with Nifty?
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Yes, very happy. I sometimes use their AI listing tool for new items. It saves all of my sold listings so I can relist an item if I find more or sell something very similar. Also good back up in case Ebay loses photos again or drops something. I will use it for COGS – I will need to move way from the Ebay spreadsheet because I sold more on Posh this year. Also I don’t particularly want Ebay seeing my COGS. If Nifty can’t auto delist an item that sold, they send an email to to alert me. I can run a check for duplicate listings. It does all of the dumb Posh sharing for me. It ends and relists all of my listings every 30-60 days on the platforms.
I did have one thing sell twice but I suspect that was user error. I also had something I couldn’t find and thought I might have sold but I think maybe I decided to throw it into the garage sale. On the whole it’s been very reliable and I wouldn’t be cross posting without software.
I feel like I’m getting a lot for the money. I wish there was a reliable way other than Terapeak to decide on prices. Then AI listing would be more valuable. I’m still doing sell similar mostly on Ebay.
BTW, I’m still posting on Pinterest, which is quick. I also kept using my under a pound flat rate which gets me Google hits. I get an average of about 9% of my clicks from outside Ebay.
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Nifty is awesome and I am sooooo glad I bit the bullet and started it last December. It was alot of work to get started. Cross listing manually with a 4k item store is….a slog. To date I still only have about 2500 items cross listed of my 4000 item ebay store. I also had the painful experience of switching to business policies on ebay.
But I did it and here I am and I’ll show some numbers as to why cross listing is essential now. List and forget is completely dead. Note that all numbers are sales price only, no shipping and before fees. It’s easier to compare apples to apples this way.
In 2025 from Jan 1 to 8/25 I had 939 sales for $44805 My store had 2989 items on 1/1/25 and 3641 on 8/25/25. My average store size was 3143. I averaged 46 new listings per week over this time.
I started cross listing slowly in late December and ramped up throughout Q1. I completed flat rate business policies switchover in March/April. Nifty also refreshes all my ebay listings with a 5% price reduction so my store is fresh – no stale listings.
My store had 4006 items on 1/1/26 and 4055 items on 8/25/26. My average store size was 4040 this year to date. I have averaged 63 new listings per week this year to date.
So almost 1000 more items on average, no stale listings, more new listings than ever before, and shipping was streamlined to a flat rate model of $5.99, $7.99, $9.99 and $12.99. You would think my ebay store would be experiencing amazing growth, right? Well…not really.
To date this year I’ve had 1157 sales for $41862 on ebay alone. That is some SCARY anemic growth compared to the work I’ve put in to grow. It’s not even growth as I’ve been selling off old stale inventory for cheap. I did all that major work just to maintain where I already was. It is terrifying to think how bad my sales would be if I had made none of these changes.
Now when it comes to cross listing I use Poshmark, Depop, and Mercari. This year to date I’ve sold 875 items for $21582. Items that have sat forever on ebay sell quickly on the other platforms. And a reminder – I only have about half my ebay items cross listed so the sales velocity is higher on these sites.
I’ve narrowed my focus going forward on clothes, shoes, and small misc items that are 1cuft or less in size, so everything I list will be cross listing compatible.
I averaged 34 sales a week last year through August and this year I’m up to 60 per week. I’m averaging 74 sales a week this summer. I’m a little scared of how many sales a week I’ll have in Q4 this year. I expect to break 100 several times. Shipping is SUPER annoying right now. I fully expect to cross $100k in sales this year (sale price only – before fees and shipping/tax not included.) That is only possible due to cross listing.
So what other benefits are there to nifty?
Store refresh automation: It’s automatic. Items on every platform get refreshed with no input from me.
Auto offers: I used to spend time every day sending offers. It’s all automated on all platforms according to the rules I have set up. There is alot of customization for this to work however you want it to work. You can even set up a delay for how long to wait until the offer is sent once a person looks at your item.
AI listing: Simply put, it is awesome once you are used to it. I now pay my two oldest kids to list for me. Currently I’m not really listing except for occasional items. My daughter lists clothes and misc items. My son lists shoes. When listing clothes she photos the items and has a dry erase template she writes down the measurements on and takes a photo of the template. I have every possible measurement on two templates.The AI tool integrates the measurements into the listing description and item specifics. It only incudes the measurements that have written entries. You can create custom rules for the lister to follow . You just add notes and prompts into a template and it follows the rules. Once the listing is generated the kids do their own proof read and then do a price search on ebay or terapeak. The recommended prices on nifty are a work in progress. I don’t recommend using them. They’re right only about 50% of the time. Once they are done they mark their drafts as ‘ready to list’ and then I do the final review and post them live. I pay them $2 a listing with a $5 bonus if they do 20 listings in a day. It takes them each about 1.5-2 hours to list 20 items so they are both making $20+ an hour. IMy daughter is saving up for college/car and my son is taking flying lessons and saving up to pay for his lessons (expensive!)
Side note, they’ve both scored high enough ACT scores to get a free ride to college. Higher scores than I had even. Nice!
Sorry for the side quest – back on task!
The listings that nifty generates are quite good quality. It hits so many excellent keywords, there are SEO optimized keyword sections in the item description, there are endless AI templates to help streamline shipping options. I’ve time trialed myself doing shoe listings with AI. I can do 15 pair in an hour start to finish, including basic cleaning. This is robust listings – far more detailed than the basic listings I used to do that didn’t even have a description other than “see pictures for details & condition”.
Bookkeeping: Nifty has some excellent tools to analyze your metrics. You can track your COGS (I’m not using this yet – another huge up front undertaking), your inventory SKU’s, and whatever else you want. I don’t know how anyone could use Poshmark or Depop to manage inventory. Depop doesn’t even have a SKU system and Poshmark is very rudimentary. I do all inventory tracking direct in Nifty, which then pushes that info out to the different platforms. So if ebay ever glitches with the SKU system, I am safe. I can just do a full refresh on nifty and it will completely fix all my ebay listings.
Ask Otto: Nifty has it’s own dedicated AI chatbot that is VERY useful. You get a certain amount of free credits to interact with OTTO each month, and after that it will start consuming your monthly credits. I’ve added some metrics to my weekly numbers this year to track clothes and shoes sales more accurately, as well as tracking cross listed vs ebay sales. I have been doing all this manually – so each week I would log each sale and mark it as ebay or cross listed, and then mark each sale as clothes & accessories, shoes, or other. This week I described to Otto what I have been doing and it generated the same report automatically. I double checked the classifications of my sales and the numbers and it was perfect. It got every sale properly classified. Now I have a report I can run each week I can trust that will generate my metrics without me having to spend 20-30 minutes logging data.
And the newest tool that Nifty just launched is AI bulk cross listing. Man I REALLY wish this was around when I started. Now if you have a bunch of ebay listings you can bulk cross list to all platforms. It does take 1 credit per item same as fully generating a listing, but I get 1000 credits a month on my pro plan. More than enough to do all my listing and do some bulk cross listing. I’ll make sure to use up my credits each month on bulk cross listing the rest of my items until I’m all caught up. Going forward all my new listings are already cross listed so there is no extra work to make more sales.
TLDR, I pay $90 a month to make an additional $600-800 a week this year without any extra work once it is all set up. That’s an impressive ROI. I can entrust my teens to do ALL my listing and their listings are very high quality. I just spend 20-30 minutes a day proofing up to 40 listings. The rest of my time is spent with shipping and inventory management.
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And since I’m here I do have one more update.
I totaled my Sienna minivan at the beginning of July. That sucked, but there is a silver lining. Since it is a toyota it holds it’s value. I paid $38,500 in 2021 right before the chip shortage. The dealer was desperate for a sale so it was an awesome deal on a new van. My total payout was $39500. Yes, I got MORE than I originally paid even after 5 years and almost 60k miles.
The crappy part is the short time frame to get something else. I’ve adapted to so much chaos and change this year that I was inspired for more change, so I heavily researched EV’s. At the very last minute before my rental ran out I found a Chevy Blazer EV that was a dealer demo at local dealer that only had 4k miles. It is warrantied as a new car and qualifies for new car loan terms. I paid $29500 and they gave me a free Chevy V2H capable Powershift Charger. I don’t really want that charger so I listed it on ebay. This is a $2k charger! Mind you this is a loaded $56k MSRP SUV. I had cash in hand but since I got new car financing so I financed $25k and put the rest of the payout in a high interest savings account at 4.2% APY. I’ll end up making money putting it in a high yield savings vs paying cash and I’ll keep that huge chunk of cash on hand in case we move or add on to our house.. I can easily pay the $540 car payment with ebay funds as I have with all my other vehicles.
I’m installing my home charger this week. I get a $300 credit towards the $500 price of the charger and I’ll get a 30% cheaper rate on power to that charger as long as I avoid 8am-8pm on weekdays. A full tank of power will cost under $7, or about 3.5 cents per mile. My Sienna Minivan was around 13 cents per mile. There is also a FREE public charger at the Library that is a 5 minute walk from my day job location. The maintenance manager just installed an outdoor port for me to use in emergencies and in the winter at work – also for free.
If you have not explored EV’s yet, I highly recommend it. I was in the dark and since I live in coal country, ignorant people like to demonize it and quote outdated info. These cars are the future and the future is here. The battery will outlast the car, and there is practically zero maintenance. The next gen battery technology will be even better. There are sodium Ion batteries on the horizon the does away with rare earth metals like lithium and cobalt.
I LOVE my Blazer EV. It is super roomy, super comfy, and has sports car AWD performance. All the bells and whistles that came with this one in particular were just icing on the cake. My commute is 50 miles round trip a day, which is perfect for an EV.
Prices are dropping quickly, especially on used cars. A couple days after I bought this one, the local KIA dealer called me and offered $33500 for a brand new EV6 Wind. They don’t sell well in WV, so that was a really great deal. That’s also an incredibly nice car I recommend you check out if in the market. I’m keeping an eye out for a cheap Chevy Bolt for my daughter. Nice ones with 60-80k miles can be had for sub 15k now, but I’m hunting for one significantly less than $10k. While I hate buying a 100k gas car, I’d happily buy a 100k mile EV. It’s likely good for another 100k with no maintenance other than tires and still have 80% or more of the original battery life.
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