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Ebay sales have picked up a bit in October but 2026 sales are way down overall even making lower offers and running sales.
Vinted is a cool place to unload things. No issues for me so far on the selling end – knock wo0d. On the buying end some crap descriptions but I paid practically nothing for my two mistakes. They are hanging with .99-3.99 shipping for now. I plan to keep listing some unlisted inventory here. I probably should move low dollar Ebay here but not sure I will deal with that.
Mercari still slow but some sales now and then. I like this platform better than Vinted and Ebay. Their Fed Ex Smartpost rate is pretty good up to 5 pounds and they are holding the 10% fee.
Poshmark is now about 40% of my sales. Hope they hang on to the 6.49 shipping for a while longer.
I’m pretty much deciding going forward that at least 20% will go to the platform & shipping supplies and there is downward pressure on prices on every other front.
I’ve been working hard to get the hoard down but there is still more to go. I also find sourcing less rewarding. When I go thrifting there is hardly anything worth buying to flip. Since it has less appeal I am going to keep focusing on letting things go and listing. It is much much easier to resist buying. If I get rid of more things, I will focus on higher end only. I was surprised at my success selling clothing. It’s all in the right brand I suppose.
Pop up markets are pretty taxing physically and it’s only worthwhile to go to the ones with major foot traffic, which for me are out of town. I’m only keeping a couple of these next year.
Overall, reselling I think is getting much, much harder with lower margins. I feel urgency to get rid of things. Also, a lot of people are using AI, which is supposed to make listing better and faster. I find it is not that much faster except on Vinted. However, since Ebay is less of my sales now I plan to try starting listings in Nifty more often.
I hope everyone is having a good 4th quarter. Long live the trash elves!
PS. I’m listening to the Pure Hustle podcast and Selling on Ebay podcast. If you have any other good ones, please let me know.
PPS. I’m hearing good things about Facebook. LMK if you are selling there.
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PPPS. There is less and less I feel confident about flipping from favorite retailers’ clearance despite the economy. I guess their customers are on the right side of the K shaped economy. Everything is getting harder. There is plenty of stuff out there but with shipping costs up, more product listed, and economic pressures, it is harder to find things that make sense to flip.
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Hi Christine,
Thanks for the update. I check every once in awhile but it’s been a ghost town here. It’s a little crazy to me that people don’t take advantage of the forum, but I guess the podcast was really driving engagement here. Well, kudos to Jay and Ryanne for keeping the doors open – and to you for being the only regular poster left (at least that I’ve seen). I wish it could get a little more active but truthfully, I haven’t really had the time either. I was never a share-my-numbers guy, but people here always had an answer for me if I had a question and I tried to contribute when I could.
I wanted to get back into reselling a few months ago, but didn’t have the time. I think I’m closer to it now, but we’ll see. You’re painting a relatively dark picture, but that’s just reality these days. I was the only one talking about shipping prices becoming a problem back in the day, but it seems people are understanding it more now. I think local selling is a good idea, but, yeah, it’s a grind. I have to look into marketplace. Craigslist seems more than half dead these days.
I have checked out a few videos from Justin Resells. He seems about as serious as you can get for a PT seller, or even a FT seller, but I don’t have an opinion yet on how useful his videos are to a seasoned seller.
Well, I just wanted to write something to contribute and I guess to let you know at least one other person is reading what you’re writing. I lived in SB in the late 80’s BTW. I miss La Super-Rica ;). My last visit was like 2009. Time does fly…
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Justin Resells is great! Honestly I think most youtube resellers just watch his video and then base their commentary on all the work he already did.
His production value is also great now that he has a producer/editor.
It’s not all doom & gloom, though there is something off with ebay. I think all these other sites are taking away market share from them much more significantly this year. My Posh, depop, and Mercari scales are scaling rapidly, while my ebay sales are declining even though I’m listing more than ever. My pricing, shipping costs, and quality of items/listings is better than ever. I don’t do promoted listings at all as I have been phasing it out slowly for over a year. I pretty much haven’t had promoted listings since around April/May. I can’t tell you what it is, but something is significantly off with ebay since the beginning of September.
My first half of 2026 was going great on ebay. It was the best 1st half ever. August was trending similar to last year. I was looking forward to absolutely blowing everything I’ve ever done out of the water. Then once September hit the trend line completely did a 180 and October is even worse.
Overall I’m having a record year. I’ve still sold more items this year on ebay than last year, but I am on a downward trend there. I should be selling 100+ items a week right now but ebay is holding me back. It is frustrating!
Meanwhile my monthly sales on sites off ebay (posh, mercari, and depop) have been growing linearly all year at a rate of 13 sales per month and now making up around 60% of my total items sold per month.
TLDR; Get your eggs out of the single ebay basket and spread them around. You’ll end up with alot more eggs!
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Thanks for the reply. Glad it’s going so well for you. It does sound like ebay has been doing weird things for awhile. Of course, sellers usually complain about ebay, but they’ve never backed sellers the way they should have. There also seems to be a lot of corporate confusion mixed with “AI” stuff and trying to squeeze sellers with fees (I never did promoted listings). Looks like enshitification, but that’s the norm for big tech companies now. I’m glad other platforms are giving them a run for their money. Trying some of the newer platforms sounds like good advice. I’m glad you didn’t mention etsy, because a couple of years ago I bought a couple of things through them after years of never using the site. I had to return one of the two things I bought. A couple of weeks later, etsy cancelled my account. I’m assuming it was their algorithm. No way to contest it. It seems crazy to me, but that’s our brave new world. Anyway, thanks again for the reply.
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I did a deeper dive yesterday after posting here. I ended up restarting promoted listings capped at 8% dynamic and changed my nifty end/relist policy to 60 days from 180 with no price reduction. You can now do rule based promoted campaigns, with the biggest benefit being you can schedule a delay in when the promoted campaign takes effect. So all my new listings will not get the promoted flag until they have been on the site for 3 days. I considered doing 30, but I wanted to give this the best shot to be successful. At the end of 60 days when it is relisted there will again be a 3 day delay before the promoted listing takes effect.
It is what it is in regards to ebay at this point and I’ve done everything in my power to make the best of it. Listing desirable, quality items with reasonable shipping costs WAS good enough and now it’s not. Allegedly there is a quirk (I think ebay considers it more of a feature) in the search engine that hides unpromoted listings when buyers apply filters. Now that won’t be an issue.
If my impressions, click throughs, and sales rapidly rise then I’ll happily eat the extra fee. My margins can handle that. If not, then ebay is in far more trouble than anything I can influence.
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oops I lost a long post.
Some of my negativity comes from the fact that I am still digging out of the sourcing hole I created for myself. I got those things at a good price but still have things I wouldn’t buy any longer. I do still enjoy reselling. I’m very grateful I started cross posting with software. It’s frustrating on Ebay when you are top rated, are promoting each item, know how to pull the levers and drop prices but things still don’t sell well there. Poshmark is becoming more and more of my sales. I plant to tackle pulling off some old low dollar stuff in the new year.
Ebay has sent me a few suggested items to promote higher. I’m trying a few just to see what happens but they haven’t sold yet. I have enough margins on most of the used items.
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I hate when that happens. When I remember, I try to write in the notes app, so at least it saves automatically – but I don’t always remember…
Yes, I can relate. It sounds like I will probably have to diversify platforms. I’d like to sell more locally too. Right now, it’s not happening at all, but if it does, I’ll probably drop in to say hi. I still try to peruse new posts every once in awhile.
The thing I don’t like about promoted listings is that, in the final analysis, it’s hard to know if they actually work. Correlation is not causation, etc…And I don’t like that it can be another de facto ebay tax. I’ll just have to see if I can get sales the old fashioned way when I start up again. 😉
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I’m hoping to be able to push a lot harder over the next three months (I usually get pretty good sales in the weeks after Christmas). ebay has been pretty dead, but I just had three sales today so hoping that’s a sign that things are picking up. I’m planning on listing on depop (had one small sale there), ebay of course, and Instagram…and if things improve and my time allows, I might finally bite the bullet and start using nifty or another tool to cross post.
ebay reported Q3 results the other day and they had a strong quarter by the sound of it. …. but I think a lot depends on whether you are selling in ebay’s focus categories and/or are you using Lives, which they are heavily promoting. So, my guess is, some sellers had a great quarter, and many of us didn’t.
Hopefully, we will all have a great Q4!
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Value added resource does a good job. I read quickly through the earnings post. I think Ebay has found live buyers spend a lot more – which makes sense because it’s like community interaction appeal with fast selling and often bundle. Before I left the platforms on District I saw good sellers move through a heck of a lot of sales very quickly once they were known to have good inventory. Then people would congratulate the buyer on winning. It was rather fascinating. Sellers with good followings could price below market and make it up in volume.
I think Ebay is getting help from lives and past help from focus categories, though I heard trading cards are slowing. It’s tough because vintage home decor is not their priority and likely there is a fair amount of saturation going on so one would need to be promoting more maybe? I agree it’s a problem that you can’t tell if promotion is working or not. I’m doing my little experiment, but if it doesn’t even work on the items they suggest, I’ll just go back to the minimum after Christmas. I’m still burned that after January I could see my same percentage was getting me less promoted clicks. I thought some people would stop promoting in protest and it would get a little better.
During my last seller call, they suggested a clearance category. I made one, marked down items, tried running a 50% off sale. None of it worked. I recently marked down some more items and added them. It would be interesting to see what would happen if I marked them back up and promoted them high. I did not take time to revise the stale stuff. Some of it sold off on other marketplaces. I’m thinking of pulling down some things in January in case they are dragging down my store. Right now I’m going to focus on listing fresh inventory and putting some unlisted stuff on Vinted.
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That’s funny, Value added resource is such a generic name I had to check what it was.
Well, you’re constantly doing stuff, so that’s keeping it all going. Good luck with your death piles. Funny how Jay coined that back in the day and resellers just use that term now.
I’d like to spend as little energy as possible second guessing ebay. They just make it impossible. Which brings us back to ownership/management. It doesn’t look like they’re all on the same page, mainly because I don’t think the owners really know what they want. One thing seems clear, I don’t think it’s going to get any easier for us. Of course, this is all just me stating my relatively uninformed opinions 😉 That being said, barring one or two of the other platforms capturing massive market share, ebay is still the big boy on the block; so, at least for the time being, we’ll probably have to keep selling there.
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@Dylan I do use Promoted Listings General, usually at 2.3% (I might increase that now that we’re in Q4)….I use it for most, but not everything. And if I receive a buyer offer or send an offer, I always remove the item from the Promoted Listing campaign first. Very easy to do, and by doing this, any sale made in response to the offer will NOT be saddled with a PL fee.
As to the “return on ad spend” (ROAS) , it has always been difficult to know how accurate that is, but it is now completely impossible, because under the attribution rule that went into effect in January, ebay made a complete disconnect between advertising and sales….there does not need to be ANY connection between the buyer and an actual ad.
As to Instagram, I’ll be learning as I go…..it might not work, but if it works, I’ll be happy to get a bunch of sales with no ebay fees. I will try to post about my IG experiment as I get time….
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@ChristineR As for markdowns, I will run some sales/coupons for the Holidays, but I’m probably not going to push discounts that hard…let the major retailers do that. My view is, I sell stuff the major retailers don’t have, and if a buyer really wants it, let them buy it. Price IS important, but for my stuff, I think getting my items in front of the right buyers is more important. That’s one reason I’ll also be using IG to push some of my ebay items, and maybe also Pinterest. Within the next week or so, I might end and relist a bunch of stuff, some at lower prices, some maybe higher, but once I do that, I’m hoping to avoid a lot of discounting.
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Sounds like a plan. Hope it all goes well. Because of the “K-shaped” economy (I prefer to call it class war), sometimes pricing stuff high works, because that top Montecito percent thinks the most expensive is the best. Kind of relatedly, I’ve heard (from Justin resells) a lot of people don’t even read listing details anymore. Crazy.
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