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Tough week on eBay for us. Fewer sales and fewer high dollar sales. Just a week when no one wanted what we had to sell. We did want to dedicate this w
[See the full post at: The Numbers: June 12-18, 2022] -
It’s still coming and I bet it is coming soon. On the mobile app they’ve made alot of changes to the offer screen. It is now VERY busy and wordy! Specifically it details how payment will be received and when I can expect it. All the offers so far with this new screen have detailed that I will get paid within 4 days. I’m so excited to finally see an offer where it says I’ll get paid immediately.
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I hope so. We lost out on over $100 this week because buyers didn’t have to pay immediately. eBay loses out on their cut too.
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I hope so. We lost out on over $100 this week because buyers didn’t have to pay immediately. eBay loses out on their cut too.
I have a feeling these types of buyers simply won’t make offers going forward. Will this mean less offers submitted overall? Maybe, but I think overall it’s a step in the right direction to require payment after submitting offers, as long as it remains optional for sellers like GSP.
If eBay ever required immediate payment on auction items, this would be a full-on disaster in the trading cards niche which functions heavily around large sellers who list thousands of auctions every week. Clever buyers save a lot of money off the “hammer price” with a combined shipping rate on 10 or 20 or 40 auction wins over the span of a few days up to a week. I doubt this would ever happen under the current team running eBay, since most of their new features and innovations have seemed to be reasonable and fairly common sense improvements. But who knows what the future could hold.
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I think there is a segment of buyers who “cluster bomb” people several sellers with offers, and then think they can pick and choose after the fact. I am all for this new system, but wonder what unintended consequences it will bring.
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Items in Store 1941
Items Sold 20
Total Sales $579.00
COGS $51.00
Total Profit $528.00
Average profit $26.40
Average sales price $28.95
New Listings 63
Items scavenged 104
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 48I don’t know why I’ve never really noticed the summer slowdown before, but it is really jumping out at me this year. Maybe it’s because I’m listing so much more this year? I built up this flawed belief that I would have $1k+ weeks every week of the year. WRONG!
Still, looking at the past months data I’m up 40% year over year on items sold and total sales.
This week I stumbled on a rare find – GOOD records at a goodwill! I ended up with 65 records. I didn’t bother researching anything at the store because they were just $1 each (I paid 85 cents because I used a frequent shopper card for 15% off). At that price it is easier to just get em all then research/price/list at the same time. Sure some will just sell for $3, but if I have to put some effort into finding out which are worth money I might as well get paid that $3 each time I look one up. I got all the 70’s & 80’s rock albums. I put them to the front of the listing line and listed them all this week. The total list price was $980. Yesterday I sold 3 of the records for $79 so I’m already into the profit with a ton more to sell.
The main reason I didn’t really research at the store is because unless you REALLY know your stuff, it can be hard to tell what is valuable when it comes to media. Take this album for instance:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265743364464
I’ve never heard of them. This could have easily been an undesirable $4 record – I had no clue. It sold within hours for $40.
Now on the flip side:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265743936679
Whoah, classic Billy Joel vinyl! Must be some big money there! Nope. I lotted them up to encourage them to sell faster.
I don’t know why, but I’ve really become interested in scavenging media lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve come across some nice scores, or maybe it’s because clothing/shoe/toy/electronics scavenging has died down for me due to rising costs and lower quality stock at thrifts. I’m super into sealed new stuff, even if it is pretty much worthless….for now. It seems like grading media is the next wave of collecting idiocy and hopefully I can make some money. Still waiting for this one to sell:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265493082815
I missed the high price wave from August/sept 21 since I was in the hospital. Here’s to hoping the price wave comes again – I’ll be ready!
I also picked up something on my scavenger “Not really a grail but I want to find one” list – a betamax player. Unfortunately I sold my only Betamax tape a while back (a good thing at that price!):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265493055410
So now I need a betamax tape to test it out. Anyone have a dirt cheap betamax tape listed that I can buy?
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I don’t know why I’ve never really noticed the summer slowdown before, but it is really jumping out at me this year. Maybe it’s because I’m listing so much more this year? I built up this flawed belief that I would have $1k+ weeks every week of the year. WRONG!
J&R talked often about how there’s a point you want to hit with your store so it becomes more than just an occasional thing where you’re selling the odd good find from where you source, or the stuff in your closet, and you can keep the pipeline of sales flowing — just get to 500 items, or 1000. That’s a big milestone for a lot of eBay sellers and it’s really hard to figure out what to buy, where to buy it and how to sell it in a way that keeps sales steady.
I think at the point where you and I are at, around 2000 items, the patterns from week to week and month to month become a little more predictable and you can experiment more freely in different categories like you’re doing. There is probably another point, maybe at around 3500 items, where you really need an employee and some good storage to keep things humming along.
The last two years have also been unusual from the standpoint of public health and human behavior, so it makes sense that people’s attention is on going out to places and not necessarily buying things on eBay. But if this slowdown is comparable to pre-COVID slowdowns, which I think it is, then the holiday season should lead to a nice boost in sales across the board. And all your hard work listing will pay off then!
Love your new focus on media items, a lot of those LPs are a nice score even in used condition since they’re just the right type of item for someone to casually drop $10 to $30 on because they need it right now and there aren’t a million other copies available. Probably half of my trading card sales are that sort of item.
How carefully are you going over condition of each LP, or do you just give each a quick play test, one or two songs, and that’s that?
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The last time I did a big lot of records I played every single record that I listed. This time I only had to play a couple, and then the ones that were in more questionable condition or had a flaw I would play those sections.
Once you’ve seen enough of these records from the same person that are all in pretty much the same very good to excellent condition, you know what they’re gonna sound like.
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And regarding Godaddy bookkeeping, I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do. I have no clue why ebay didn’t swoop in and buy the service. It was a no-brainer! Instant $10-15 per month fee for sellers they could collect. With the new laws tightening down on tax evasion, ebay should ABSOLUTELY have a fully integrated book keeping service.
I signed up for Waze, but it kinda sucks. None of the other softwares really fit what I want. My amex card did have an app called Amex business, but they removed that product/service. Lame! in 2020 and a large part of 2021 I used that app to store my receipts and now all that is gone!
I’m thinking I’ll just use ebay’s reporting for all my sales and fees. Then I’ll just manually fill out a spreadsheet from my credit card transaction history. The only pain is developing the discipline to do my book keeping either weekly or monthly to keep things straight. I really should just go ahead and do it weekly. The other thing I’m going to have to do is stop using my business card for non-business purposes. I really like getting all the hotel points, but I’m gonna have to settle for getting amazon points on my non-business card.
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I have no clue why ebay didn’t swoop in and buy the service. It was a no-brainer! Instant $10-15 per month fee for sellers they could collect. With the new laws tightening down on tax evasion, ebay should ABSOLUTELY have a fully integrated book keeping service.
This is really one of those ideas that are so brilliant that I hope the eBay elves are out there reading this forum. Like you said, a true no-brainer. I would happily shell out $10 or $20 a month to type one COGS number into a form and have it spit out my true net profit.
I’m thinking I’ll just use ebay’s reporting for all my sales and fees. Then I’ll just manually fill out a spreadsheet from my credit card transaction history. The only pain is developing the discipline to do my book keeping either weekly or monthly to keep things straight. I really should just go ahead and do it weekly.
I also lack this discipline if it makes you feel any better. But I do basically what you do as far as using eBay’s reports for fees and sales. They’re basically perfect for tax purposes now that they run from the beginning of the month to the end. Last year, the “monthly” fees would start on the 15th and end on the 14th. I also buy almost all my inventory online and I pay through Paypal which provides a nice, tidy form every year with all my transactions. So that simplifies the end of year bookkeeping process quite a bit as well.
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Total Items in Store:
Items Sold: 4
Gross Sales: $59.83 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $39.84 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $12
Highest Price Sold: $36 (Three new Williams Sonoma 4th of July kitchen towels (paid $12))
Average Price Sold: $13
Returns: 0Unpaid items: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $30
Number of items listed this week: 22Terrible week for sales on Ebay. I was happy to get some stuff listed and I have more items cleaned and drafts done, so just need photos. This week will be tough to make time for listing with my daughter home and some other appointments and chaos.
Attended the college clean out sale and got a huge bag of clean bubble wrap and a handful of saleable items, a year’s worth of tin foil for us, and lots of other random practical goodies for $40. Super fun every year and I love to look for the overlooked value. I was looking for perfume and new in package bedding but could not find that. It definitely smelled of volunteers being able to pre-shop, but nevertheless, totally fun.
I don’t have immediate payment on because in all of my listings I ask buyers to look at my store and load up their cart for combined shipping. Since most of them rarely do purchase multiple items, I think I might change this moving forward. On a podcast I heard someone else say playing devil’s advocate that Ebay might want to encourage buyers to make offers to multiple sellers, since they have to wait potentially 24 hours for an answer or counter.
Have a great week everyone.
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This past weekend was a microcosm of how slow things are right now. I sold one $20 item on Friday, the upside being I had listed it just a few days before that and my COGS was $0. Then on Saturday, all morning and afternoon into the evening…no sales, no offers, not even a message with an “offer” that’s 1/10th of my BIN price!
I try and treat Saturdays like a true day off and if I spend any time on eBay at all, it’s maybe an hour doing something that I really wanted to get done that week but didn’t have the time for. But the silence rattled me a little bit, so I spent a few extra hours working on Saturday night. I added a few more new listings than I usually do and sent about 75 offers to watchers. Within an hour of doing all that, I received a $30 offer on a $40 item which I accepted, a watcher accepted my 15% offer on an $80 listing and then I received a $100 offer on a $150 item which I couldn’t click accept on fast enough. This all probably would have happened without putting in that extra time, but I’m glad for the sales. Yesterday (Sunday) was similar in terms of activity.
eBay always makes more sense when you look at the bigger picture. It won’t remain this slow forever. In the meantime, I have plenty more low COGS items to get photographed and listed. Nothing glamorous, but this is the work that will pay off six months or a year down the line. I wish you all good luck this week with whatever tasks you’ve been putting off recently. May we all find the motivation in these times of slow sales!
6/12/2022 – 6/18/2022
Total items in store: 2123 (down from 2128 last week)
Items sold: 38 (26 via best offer, 6 via seller initiated offer, 17 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2107.40 (down 33% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1502.99 (down 32% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $55.46 (up 35% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 14 hours (up from 13 hours last week) — because it’s so slow, I plan to cut down on this time this week. let’s see if I actually stick to that!
Highest price sold (net): $211.37 — Saquon Barkley gold prizm RC /10
This was my second experience sending an item to eBay’s new trading card authentication program. If you’re not familiar, a few months ago eBay required that sales of certain individual sports cards (not graded, over $250) are sent to a third party authenticator (a large grading company) to confirm their condition before going to the buyer. I know this program is used in other categories as well. Seems kind of unnecessary to me considering eBay’s Money Back Guarantee, but maybe this will help some buyers with deep pockets and little knowledge of expensive cards. The card was sent to an address in Florida and a few days later, it will get reshipped to the buyer at no additional cost to either buyer or seller.
Lowest price sold (net): $10.46 — Jordan Poyer autograph rookie /225
This buyer sent me a message about how happy they were that I accepted their offer, since their son was going to a sports camp hosted by this player, so I sent them a few cards of players from their favorite team. They also said “their friend” was interested in another card in my store, if only I could cut the price in half and give them 1000 details about the card’s condition, which is the point when I stopped responding. Nothing personal, buyer’s friend.
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I am now in the prepay for your offers group. The only thing I don’t like about that is that I can’t use eBay gift cards to pay for my order, I have to use a credit card. I buy eBay gift cards at my local grocery store for fuel points. Between Amazon and eBay gift card buying I’m able to have enough points to get $1.00 off per gallon of gas. It really makes a difference these days.
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I think things are different now and it helps to end listings and “sell similar”
Especially for the types of items that need eyes on them to sell. Like a unique fabric or a unique drawer pull or unique decorator item.
I think it would be smart for your store to end 10 or 20 listings of this type per day and sell similar.
I notice better views and more sales on the items I do this with.
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I think it would be smart for your store to end 10 or 20 listings of this type per day and sell similar.
I notice better views and more sales on the items I do this with.
This is a great point and so important to remember this time of year when things are so slow. I made a few threads last year to document my results with end and sell similar, where I experimented with ending listings that were months old and had no watchers. After I ended those and relisted them using sell similar, I typically saw a small boost in sales over the next few days and weeks. It was also a quick process even in large batches thanks to the bulk editor.
I haven’t tried end and sell similar recently, but this week I did send out coupons to buyer groups and saw three sales from it. We have so many options now to engage with interested buyers. It’s a different world from list it and forget it, but it’s also very rewarding to click a few buttons to send buyers a discount and actually get some sales from it. I wouldn’t spend hours a week sending offers to watchers, creating markdown sales or ending and relisting. But spend a few hours experimenting with these things in July, and you’ll likely see some positive results.
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Week of Jun 12 – 18
Total Items in Store: 1605 eBay, 33 Etsy
Items Sold: 8 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $6 + $30 Commission
Total Sales: $196.65 eBay, $0 Etsy; “item sales” from eBay performance tab
Highest Price Sold: eBay $65 oil painting from 1960
Average price: $24.58
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0Having just switched from GoDaddy to Wave, I’m now getting my “total sales” number from the eBay performance tab. I selected the “item sales” number. What does that mean, exactly? I know that the “total sales” number includes shipping, taxes, and fees, and the net sales is number after all the fees are taken out. What should I be including here? I thought that the “item sales” would just include the price of the item, but would include eBay fees but not taxes and shipping?
Anyway, I had visitors all week, so I’ve just been shipping and not worrying about the summer slowdown. I used Time Away for the weekend since we were fully occupied, and I didn’t want to have to worry about anything but having a good time.
I haven’t seen anything with requiring buyers to pay upfront yet.
Totally random: I was in a meeting for my part time job. I asked about whether the air conditioning unit where I sit was going to get fixed any time soon. It failed in the fall, but no one has been able to find the correct part. The president of the company asked whether anyone had checked eBay. 😎 (But, no, it isn’t available).
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FYI, I had two offers today that showed on the offer that the buyer had already selected a payment method and would automatically be paid if accepted.
I accepted both offers and they showed up as paid about 5 minutes later.
NICE!!!!
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Did the offer actually say somewhere that the buyer had already entered payment info? Where/how was this shown to you?
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It basically had a note like this:
“buyer has already selected a payment method and payment will automatically be made if accepted. “
I don’t remember the exact verbiage and didn’t think to take a screen shot.
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I wonder how eBay will handle combined shipping on offers with immediate payment. What if a buyer wants to buy 2+ items from you? Do they have to pay shipping each time and then you refund them?
I would love to see eBay move towards a more streamlined offer system where a buyer can send one offer for multiple items and that is what the seller responds to instead of the current system of individual offers for individual items.
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