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I was inspired by @lukastreasuretrove post to think about some of the big and small process changes I’ve made to my store recently, and figured that would make for a good discussion. Because we can change the way we do anything and everything from buying to listing to shipping, sometimes to huge benefit. Remember the days before Jay and Ryanne had an employee for their eBay store? Those were simpler times…but I bet they would never go back to the before times!
The three biggest process changes I had in the past year were diversifying to a second selling platform, using promoted listings, and using the sell similar trick on old listings. If you sell on eBay, I definitely recommend the last two regardless of what you sell or the size of your store.
The other constant process change to think about, for anyone selling on eBay really, is to create at least a few new listings every day. This is really the biggest key to selling on eBay in 2023, in my opinion.
I find myself at an interesting crossroads right now as I am moving away from one niche (listing and selling as many individual trading cards as I can) to become more selective about which individual cards I list and diversifying my eBay store a lot more. This will include creating more curated trading card listings (like 10 card lots of players from the same team) as well as expanding into some new categories. I know books and movies already and I’ve been educating myself about other types of collectibles and memorabilia when the opportunity’s come up. I’m sure life will throw some other exciting stuff in my path at various points, and I will either choose to buy, learn and maybe profit or pass it up and stay in my comfort zone.
Some mini process changes. Nothing huge but maybe new to you.
1. Listing. List 3 or 4 items minimum every day. I slacked on this too much in 2022 even knowing how important it is to consistent sales. So far, so good for the first five days of this year. Good templates go a long way with this.
2. Coupons and sending offers to buyers. I’ve decided to stop fiddling around with both of these and just send a flat 25% coupon whether I’m sending a coupon to a repeat buyer or an interested watcher. In the past I’d sometimes do 15% or 20%, maybe 25 once in a while, but I realized that was a lot of time spent thinking and hedging and debating when the whole point is to sell. 25% off is the discount level that gets me to click on a promotional email instead of leaving it unread, and I had two quick sales out of 40 offers sent the other night if that does anything for you.
3. Auctions. I’m going to run 500 collectibles auctions the last week of every month in 2023. I’ve done this each of the last few months and infrequently before that. But I have enough inventory and a solid enough process that there’s no reason not to do auctions every month. The bulk editor is so much faster than it was a year ago, and a batch of 500 auctions is a pretty low effort way for me to make an extra $1000 or so. I am very careful about setting the opening bids at the absolute lowest price I’m willing to sell for, which leads to about 10% of auctions selling and another 10% receiving watchers but no bids. A few of those unsold will sell when I relist as BIN/best offer and a few more might sell if I relist them at auction the next month. Getting into a cycle with these auctions every month makes it easier to keep the whole process going. Shipping is a pain for a day or two after the auctions end, but I can live with that if it’s only once or twice a month.
4. Messages. I’ve been responding to buyers more frequently over the last month. The ones who say “best price” or “lowest price” are almost always a waste of time. But you know who’s not? The buyers who want to get a package deal on 3 or 4 listings, or the ones who have a fairly specific angle for why they’re buying, like if they’re a collector. A lot of times they just want to talk. I’ve learned about (and received pictures) of collections in the past month than I had in probably the whole year before that. But a few of those buyers become repeat customers, and they (almost) always leave really nice, positive feedback, which is still one of the “old eBay” things that gives me warm fuzzies.
5. Lagniappes. If you look at my feedback you will see one or two messages on every page which mention bonuses. This is pretty easy to do with sports cards in particular — if a buyer is located in Minnesota and buys a listing of a Minnesota Vikings player, it’s simple for me to guess that the buyer is a Vikings fan, find a few low value Vikings cards in my meticulously organized inventory and add them into the little plastic bag which secures the card in its sleeve. This might be a little more challenging with other types of items and I’d love to hear what others do if they ever add a little bonus to their packages. Bookmarks? Seems kind of lame. The way we buy online has become so automated and sterile that I think this is one way as eBay sellers that we can really emphasize that we are a small business run by a real, actual person.
6. Old stuff and stuff not worth listing. Gonna purge and donate and lot up low value stuff and get it listed instead of letting it accumulate. I mean it this year, really I do, no I’m not kidding.
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I have made a tiny little change over the last few days related to my buying process which is so small that you all might laugh. As many of you know, I scroll through thousands of auction listings to find the vast majority of my inventory. This means opening a lot of tabs, a lot of clicking and dragging and scrolling and copying/pasting item numbers into Gixen, the bid sniper program I use. It can be tedious and there are days where it really feels like work. But in terms of profit per hour, I’ve yet to find a more lucrative way of scavenging.
I’ve revamped this process a lot over the last month. My most recent change has been to use the home, end, and page up/down keys instead of all that clicking and dragging and scrolling. This has made for a more pleasant experience for my hands and wrists and it’s also saved me some time. I think because there’s less opportunity to accidentally misclick or (more likely) allow myself to drag the cursor into another tab which leads me to distraction. Distraction makes everything take so much longer!
Amazing what a big difference the little things can make.
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Are you aware of the Gixen chrome extension?
I am. The way that I do my bidding and buying is by looking through basically all the auctions that specific sellers have, and for the biggest sellers this is typically thousands of auction listings in one night. Then I copy/paste item numbers of the stuff that is undervalued into Gixen. I usually have a few hundred items in bid sniper at any given time, but I rarely win more than 10% of the items I bid on, and often those items are less than $5 each. But buying 20 or 30 from the same seller over the course of a week is how I build my inventory.
Unfortunately the Gixen extension requires me to click into each item which is even more time-consuming than the way I do it now. Maybe they will change that someday, I don’t know. But Gixen as a whole is such a wonderful program, I’d be fine if it stayed the way it is too.
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I use an iMac with an old Logitech mouse and a Cherry keyboard. The keyboard doesn’t completely map onto the iMac’s character set, so I have the Keyboard Viewer open. Even with that kludge I prefer the feel of the Cherry. The Apple mice give me incipient Repetitive Strain Injury. The Logitech has a wheel instead of a small ball.
I used a Rollerball on an Atari once, for about 30 seconds before the sharp shooting pains began.
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I used a Rollerball on an Atari once, for about 30 seconds before the sharp shooting pains began.
We live near a vintage arcade (the 1980s era cabinet style arcade games) and just last week I had a “good” time with the game Missile Command. The trackball was not my friend and my missile aim needed some serious work!
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As far as I remember, here in Britain the arcade games cost a fifty-pence coin. The size of the coin was reduced in 1997, so anyone setting up an arcade would either have to modify the machines or keep a stock of old coins. I suppose they could be set up to use contactless debit cards.
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I used to repair, restore, and collect arcade games/pinballs.
Coin mechs are one of the most fascinating aspects for me.
Inside the coin door there are slots for “coin mech cartridges”. you to put in whatever size coin mech you want.there is one brand of coin mech made by Imonex that is fully adjustable to match whatever coin you want.
one of my earliest eBay money-making rackets was to buy big lots of coin mechs, test them, and sell them.
I’d also sell modified mechs that would take multiple coins for home use.
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At the end of the year, while visiting family near Pittsburgh, we went to Pinball PA. All of the machines are in free play mode, so you just pay to get in the door. Some machines are retrofitted with a credit button that you need to press first.
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There used to be a crazy amazing pinball place near there that was called PAPA. It was only open a few times a year (due to stupid antiquated local laws) but they had pretty much every pinball made and all in immaculate condition.
They shuttered so I bet alot of the machines at this new place came from there.
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