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After a very disappointing day in July where only 4 of my over 28,000 listings sold, I started to experiment with different methods to improve sales. I’ve added pictures of my Sales, Impressions and Page Views from my Traffic Report.
The first thing I did was “touch” my listings by raising each one of them by $1 using the bulk edit tool. This was supposedly going to change enough in the “listing code” (or some computer language BS) that the ebay algorithm would pick up the change and my listings would get new views. There were no significant changes to impressions, page views or sales.
The second thing I did was run a 5% promoted listings campaign on my existing listings. As you can see in the below charts my impressions and page views increased. Impressions showed a huge increase. Promoted sales also increased.
Also during this time I really started busting my butt adding new listings. I tried to do at least 100 new listings a day and some days I managed to get 300 done. I added almost 2,000 new listings during these 3 weeks. You can see the increase in “organic” sales, these are the new listings that were not in the 5% promoted campaign.
The last thing I did was end and then relist 28,425 listings. These listings had been on ebay for more than 30 days. I did not end/relist any new listings. It took me 4 hours to complete the end/relist. The last time I had done a mass end/relist was just under 4 months ago. You can see the substantial 2 day increase in impressions, page views and solds. Day 1 sales were $830, day 2 sales were $850 and the 3rd day of sales was $308. After I relisted, I sent 20% off offers to the “new” watchers.
I did not change anything in the listings. I just ended all 28,425 (200 at a time) and then “relisted as fixed price” (200 at a time).
These were my experiments. Your mileage may/will vary. But I have always been a firm believer in the end/relist (not sell similar) method to get a significant jolt in sales for old listings. I have been doing this 3-4 times a year for the past 5 or more years and I have always seen this 3-4 day spike in sales. (right click on image & open image in new tab to see blow up)
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Thank you for posting this! It’s very helpful.
Now, I know there’s a chance I will get shot down as “conspiracy theory” but I’ve seen a few people post about an increase in views when they logged promoted listings. eBay pushed it really hard in their videos in the open. Basically, we’re being charged by eBay to have our listings viewed and, if you don’t want to pay, you don’t get to play. I believe that we’re being hit for not promoting our listings. I would have loved to have seen what happened if you did the end/relist without the promoted listings!
But, holy smokes, Batman! Did the end/relist ever work for you! Nice one!
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The one thing you can see in the chart is when I did the end/relist, the 5% promoted listings campaign ended. When the listings were ended, the campaign on those listings was also ended because there are all “new” listings.
I had never done a huge promoted listings campaign like this before. They were usually only 500 to 1000 items, never 28,000 listings. But, I have always seen the end/relist sales spike.
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Back at the end of July I listed an 1870s book which was a transcript of a judge’s summing up in a famous trial of the time- the Tichborne case. It got 135 views in 4 hours before someone bought it (I priced it cheap at £9). The only reason I can think of for this rate of viewing is that people are searching for ‘Judge” and ‘Trial’- maybe the latter word.
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Here is my sales of the previous week and I did nothing. Looks like there may have been something else in play on August 24th. Did eBay send out another round of 5% eBay bucks coupons. Everyone post your metrics for last week. It would be interesting to see if we all of our sales track similarly.
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This is interesting. Glad to see such a huge sales boost?
Since this worked, are you going to end and re-list every week like others do? Wonder if there’s a point of saturation where eBay would stop seeing items as new.
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Jay, I’ve always seen this sales boost when I end/relist. It’ll last 3-4 days and then level out. I used to do it monthly when it would only take an hour or so. Now that I have almost 30,000 listings, and it takes over 4 hours to complete, I’ll do it about once a quarter. One thing I have to remember is that I also had a nice protracted sales increase by constantly listing (and using the promotion). Adding 100 +/- listings a day — everyday– definitely helped the bottom line too. Last weekend I bought about 60,000-70,000 postcards at an auction and processing them has taken up all of my time this past week, so I did the end/relist process to ensure I had a nice sales increase to pay for what I spent at the auction and also make up for not listing any new cards.
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Last weekend I bought about 60,000-70,000 postcards at an auction
!!!!!! You are seriously a master in this community with your process and storage, especially since you’re a one-man band.
How long does it take to process 60k postcards? 100 postcards a day is 600 days, but I assume there are duplicates and grouped lots?
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I’m still working on it. I’m 8 days into it, 10-12 hours a day. I still have about 15,000 cards left. I first “cherry pick” out the cards I’ll be listing within the next few months. That, so far, is about 6,000 cards. The rest go into shoebox sized totes and labeled with generally what kind of cards/places are in the box. Those non-cherry picked cards will eventually end up in my show $.25 boxes, in my antique booth boxes, or blown out in large lots, months, but most likely years from now.
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Its funny Jay that Popeye’s methods are so similar to my own processes and yet completely different at the same time. (Really, that is this community in a nutshell.) I rarely buy more than about 200 cards in a week, but most of them are individually purchased from eBay auctions and I get most for below market value for a variety of reasons, the two most common being seller is missing keywords from the title (so the “right buyer” couldn’t find the card) or auctions are just fickle. Plus the value of cards fluctuates from week to week and especially year to year, so sometimes the card I bought 6 months becomes “more valuable” if the player does well or goes to a new team with a different collector base.
@popeyespostcards I still go back to the episode from a few years back where you and Jay discussed your business, it was extremely helpful to me as I’ve scaled up my own (different) card based eBay store over the last few years. The nostalgia factor and knowing what different buyers are looking for and why is huge in the sports card world as well.
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I’d be very curious to see your numbers if you did an end/relist on your store.
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I used the “end listings” under the “actions” drop down on the listings page. Unfortunately, only 200 at a time, which is why it too so long. I didn’t end 200 at a time and then immediately relist those 200, I ended all of the 28,000 listings first and then relisted them.
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I didn’t end 200 at a time and then immediately relist those 200, I ended all of the 28,000 listings first and then relisted them.
You’re a listing monster. 200 at a time! That’s 140 groups you ended. Then another 140 groups to list.
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Love threads like this. Back in the days when we could do buy it now lengths of less than “good till cancelled,” I used to run all of my listings for thirty days and then end and relist or end and sell similar the day before all the items were about to end.
When I first started to end items monthly, it gave me quite a boost in sales the first and second time which was exciting. I’m going off memory since this was a few years ago, but at the time $1000 was a very good sales week for me and the first few times after ending and relisting all items, I hit $300 or $500 in sales in one day. I was more interested in tracking items sold and offers received then and I know I was hitting double digits (10+) in both categories when most days I would get 3 to 5 offers and 2 to 4 sales. So, no surprise I started ending and relisting every month like clockwork, even keeping up the practice after all listings went GTC.
I kept doing this end and relist process for something like a year total. I found that the boost wasn’t consistent from month to month. Some months were great, but some months I saw no boost at all. There is definitely a point of diminishing returns with ending and relisting, and I think once a month is too much. As I refined and tweaked my own processes, I found that I was spending too much time on things that weren’t shipping, taking photos or listing. So one of the things I cut back on were things like ending and relisting, and similar things like running weekly auctions (which are free for collectibles and trading cards).
I would still recommend that most sellers experiment with ending and relisting at least once or twice a year. Ideally, if you time it when eBay bucks come out or there is a big eBay bucks promo.
It won’t make you a million dollars or sell all your inventory, but it will be rewarding because sometimes an item that hasn’t sold and had no offers or watchers will sell within the first day you relist it anyway. Would that sale happen anyway? Who knows. But when I did this, sometimes in the process of ending and relisting, I would change up keywords in the item title, or change the price, and then the item would sell. So if ending and relisting gets you to do those things, definitely give it a try.
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how do you have listings that are over 30 days old? everything I have automatically relists at the end of 30days. Not sure if that is a box I checked somewhere?
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It’s been 2 weeks since I did the end & relist. I’m posting up to date pics of the impression, views, and solds charts.
I’m not smart enough to understand what any of this means, but my organic impressions are double what they were when I had everything under a 5% promoted listings campaign. I think I still have one item that is being promoted.
Page views (below image) are still much higher than when they were being promoted. It’s interesting that “external site views” are so much higher after the end/relist than during the promoted campaign. I thought having promoted listings was supposed to greatly increase external site views. Do they get “stale” too? Again, I’m not smart enough to understand the huge increase after the end and relist and not being promoted anymore.
Solds are still going strong, but I am seeing some slow days again.
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This is helpful. A real experiment!
So do you think you’ll end/relist every quarter? or every month?
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Jay, I’ll probably do another end/relist around black friday/beginning of December. In the mean time, I’ll be a listing fool too. Trying to add another 2-3,000 in the next 2 months. I’ll be over 30,000 by the end of today.
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I’ll be over 30,000 by the end of today.
!!!!!!
Are you seeing sales grow as you list more? Or just more consistency? Or more possibilities for “big sales days”?
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@popeyespostcards — do you employ any other methods besides end/relist to try and engage buyers?
The two that I use somewhat regularly are:
1. markdown manager — I run a 20 to 30 percent off sale on 500 items once or twice a month, which usually nets a few hundred dollars per sale
2. sending offers to buyers — I’ve got about a 1 in 10 success rate with sending an offer to a buyer leading to a sale (either they accept the offer, or send a reasonable counteroffer), and the offers I send are typically 10 to 20 percent off
I’m curious how these numbers compare to you, and others, and also if you or anyone else has used the coded coupon feature. I think all of these tools, if used properly, can help increase sales. Of course, as you mentioned, listing new items is far and away the #1 tool.
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I’m sending offers once or twice a day. 10% off offers on postcards that have been listed less than a month and 20-25% off older cards. I need to go through and add best offer to about 1/3 of my listings.
I very rarely use mark down manager.
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I like markdown manager for its simplicity – it’s very quick and easy (about 15 minutes) to create a sale of 500 items and let it run. Also, my experience has been that a markdown sale of 20 to 30 percent combined with sending an an additional 10 percent offer to buyer has a very high sell through rate. Maybe something like 1 in 3 or 1 in 4?
My current markdown sale ends on the 15th, so when I create my next one, I’ll crunch the numbers more closely and report back with my findings. I love threads like this. I think any seller who’s doing eBay full-time should play around with these different buyer engagement methods. What works best in one niche may not work as well in another niche. But it’s helpful to have all these options available to attract buyers.
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my experience has been that a markdown sale of 20 to 30 percent combined with sending an offer to the watcher of an additional 10 percent off has a very high sell through rate, anecdotally something like 1 in 3.
So you’re basically doing 40% off sales? Do you just raise the price high and then give a discount so its a normal price? Or are you actually selling 40% less than your competitors?
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So you’re basically doing 40% off sales? Do you just raise the price high and then give a discount so its a normal price? Or are you actually selling 40% less than your competitors?
I don’t raise the price before doing the markdown sale or sending offers to buyers. But I’m also careful about what I put on sale.
One of the biggest advantages of markdown manager is that you can quickly filter in so many ways – eBay category, store category, days on site, price, etc. So it’s really fast to find the items you are comfortable putting on sale, while leaving the rest of your inventory at its normal price.
The last year or so, as I’ve expanded my inventory, I’ve tried to focus on unique items (the cards, and even the books and other media leftover from my old niche) where there are zero, one or two similar listings on eBay at any given time. So with those, it’s all about waiting for the right buyer who’s willing to pay the price I want. I don’t typically put those items on sale at all, and if I send offers to buyers, maybe it’s 10% or 15% at most.
But on items older than a year, or items below $25, or items that I know aren’t as unique, I’ll happily go 25% or 30% on the markdown sale and then send an offer to buyer for another 10% off. I’d rather make the sale and clear the space than hold the item for months or even years waiting for $5 more.
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For those sending offers, you might want to look at this 50% off FVF fees promo from ebay (good through Oct 11th):
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I just read the terms more carefully and answered my own question: “Please note that the promotional credit will not be shown during the listing process, but will be processed and reflected in the Payments tab in Seller Hub or Payments in My eBay within 60 days of the completion of the Qualifying Transaction.”
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@craig-rex: This morning I got one of those eBay pop-ups announcing an eBay Bucks 5% sale. Seems like it is good thru 9/15/21.
@mycottage: Perhaps eBay has finally unlocked the “big secret” that eBay sellers are some of their best buyers too? -
@timo (and others who are interested in these types of experiments):
I did an end and relist coinciding with the eBay bucks promo and my results are posted in this thread.
The result is that I have more enthusiasm for end and relist now. It’s obviously not as important as consistently listing new items, pricing them well and titling your items well, but it is a strategy worth experimenting with every so often.
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@craig-rex: This morning I got an eBay pop-up announcing an eBay Bucks 5% sale. It’s good thru 10/14/21.
It came in on my ‘buying ID’. Perhaps these are getting more predictable? Since there was also one the middle of last month.
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Thanks so much for the heads up! I didn’t receive this eBay bucks offer on my buying or selling IDs, so I wouldn’t have known about the promo without your post. I’m going to try a new round of end and relist tomorrow afternoon (nice timing since I was planning on taking the night off) and I will report back my results over the weekend. I will be curious if this batch of end and relist leads to a boost in sales like it did for me last month. Maybe end and relist is most effective if it’s done once a quarter, or once a month, or maybe the sweet spot is somewhere in between. It will be interesting to see if we can accumulate enough data to develop a guess.
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I got a notification on my buying ID that there is a 5% Bucks promo running through 10/27. I figured I would let you know, and also, any excuse to bump this great thread for others to get inspired.
Maybe this is a sign that eBay will be pushing the bucks promos heavily during the holiday season. I miss the days of 10% Bucks like anyone else, but I’ll happily settle for 5% twice every month and hope they keep it up.
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