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Week of 1/20/25-1/26/25
Items in Store: 2956
Items Sold: 39
Total Sales: $1,604.00
COGS: $203.00
Total Profit: $1,401.00
Average profit: $35.92
Average sales price: $41.13
New Listings: 39
Items scavenged: 35
2025 weekly new listings Avg: 21
2025 avg gross weekly sales $1,769.25
2025 Avg weekly Items Sold 34
2025 ASP $52.81
2025 projected total sales $92,001.00I didn’t feel like waiting till Thursday so I figured I’d post numbers today.
This week I got alot of inventory management done. I really don’t like how inefficient my inventory management system is. The ebay app can’t really be used to efficiently edit the custom SKU, I’ve tried using an ipad and the keyboard always gets in the way. I don’t want to drag my laptop out to the inventory shed, plus I wouldn’t have text to speech or touch screen. Really the only way to do custom SKU entry is on my phone in the safari browser. I’d like to eliminate this step entirely as it seems like an unnecessary touch point and assign inventory location at the time of listing. My system (and ebay) isn’t set up for inventory assignment at the time I list though. For now it is a necessary evil to keep my inventory system full and space efficient.
So for clothes, I will look through my bins and find a bin that has enough room for at least 5 items. I’ll bring that up to the front of the shed and enter the sku one clothing item at a time until that bin is full. Then I’ll grab another bin with space.
Same system for shoes and small misc, but I typically just bring up an item on my phone then find a bin with space, starting with the closest bins.
Anyways…. doing all that freed up space in my garage to get my draft listings organized and space to move them once listed. I plan to buzz through my backlog of shoes and clothing drafts this week. With all this listing planned, I need more space. I tackled merging my two jacket/coat wardrobes this weekend as well. I’lll re-do wardrobe #1 to add 9-12 more bins for clothing & shoes. I’m really hoping I can fit 12 in there. We’ll see! Once I’m caught up on my draft backlog I will start listing 1 bin of clothes at a time to tackle the clothing deathpile. This will be much easier to manage inventory wise since I’ll just be doing a bin at a time and keeping them in my garage. They’ll get numbered sequentially and left in place in the garage. Hopefully I’ll sell enough out of them to just keep filling in spots in the garage.
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@retro-treasures-wv – No problem! I was thinking to start these earlier in the week anyway. First to get there can start it up!
I’m not listing anything right now because I’m trying to set up for a MaxSold auction. My family wants me to make room in the basement for a workout area. In addition, my career job is supposed to get busier in the future, so I’m looking to have a smaller inventory. I’ll need to be more selective about what I list.
Problem is … the same family that wants space in the basement also got me hooked on a TV show called Severance. We binged watched the first season last week, which meant that I didn’t have much time for creating auction lots in the evening. We finally caught up on Thursday and watched the last episode on Friday. BTW, it is a really excellent show, but you have to have Apple music/TV.
During the weekend, I was able to list, and I’m up to 30 so far. I’d like to have about 100 in the end, so I will probably be listing through the end of February and having the auction in March. I’m starting to pull some stuff from my inventory, so my eBay listings have started to decrease faster than what I sold for the week.
I had another slow week, but a better average price than the previous week.
Week of Jan 19 – 25
Total Items in Store: 1723 eBay, 43 Etsy
Items Sold: 8 eBay
Cost of Items Sold: $1 + $33 Commission
Total Sales: $161.22 eBay
Highest Price Sold: eBay $36 for Antique Book Pamphlet The Psalms in Yiddish Bergmanns Revision of 1912
Average price: $20.15
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0 -
Total Items in Store: 1150ish
Items Sold: 23
Cost of Items Sold: $208
Total Sales: $1028; Net $685
Highest Price Sold: eBay $112 (Art tile)
Average price: $45
Returns: 0Number of items listed this week: 31
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $300ish: pulling in some more new clearance – this is probably the tail end of it. Also went to the flea and spent $25ish, thrifted 2x probably $50, estate sale $60.
Sourced a bit much last week. Kid 2 is out of the house so I did go on a listing tear this weekend. I listed 6 days, the most days I have ever listed in a week. I tried to do at least three easy items every morning. I think my sales would have been worse had I not been keeping up listing more often. They usually are horrible between now and through February. I’m trying a new thing where I am adding a couple of custom item specifics to the end of some listings with decor styles, colors, etc. I hope it might get me more hits.
It is very cold here for us (low 40s at night) and we finally got some rain so I didn’t feel at all like organizing in the garage. The next few days will be in the low 60s then warmer. It would probably be good to focus on listing for now.
I hope you all have a good week. @RT I stuck with my system of like items. I have the new separated entirely from the old, the smalls are located in smaller boxes so they are easier to find. Then I have bankers boxes labeled with painters tape that I can easily tear off and reuse. One thing I like about it is being able to see what’s really moving. A couple of my boxes are pretty worn out. If I used a sku I would be afraid I would misplace something. I know some sellers like to do sku but also group like items. Anyway, I hope your sort goes well. @Sharyn good job with the 2024 death pile challenge and listing!
I got really distracted by the live selling but my health issue last Fall made me want to get my stuff together. I look forward to putting together a new routine and it will involve more regular listing and less thrifting, maybe shifting to garage sales or the bins even more often. All of my thrifts here seem to be trying out higher prices. I went to most of them Monday and the numbers just didn’t make sense on a lot of the items I picked up. I’m making myself look a lot of things up now.
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Christine, we had snow in the Philly area over the last few weeks for the first time in a few winters. It was wonderful the first and second times, but by the third time I was ready for spring. Too much ice and wind! I have lived in New Jersey my whole life, but it may be time for a warmer climate soon…
Nice job listing 6 days last week! I hope this means you will see really strong sales this week. Usually that is how it goes for me — I list a lot one week, and I see stronger sales than normal a week or two later.
If you keep up the listing momentum this week (or even if you don’t), on one of the days you don’t, give end/sell similar a try on some of your oldest listings. Mostly to make your store look really active for the algorithm. But also because you mentioned that your sales are usually horrible through February. Best way to fight that is use every tool in your seller’s toolbox.
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Oh and I keep forgetting to mention this: I’m phasing out promoted listings. When I end/sell similar my oldest items, I turn off promoted listings. I’m also no longer adding anything new to PL.
Eventually I will be PL free and it (so far) has had no ill effects on my sales. It will be a slow process, but sometime in the next year I will be PL free. That may be the key – weaning off nice and slow through attrition and new listings – to keep the algorithm from killing my sales.Currently only 2184 of my near 3k items are promoted. That is quite a drop since I was at near 100% a couple months ago.
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Retro, I think you have such a strong foundation for your store with so many systems in place to reprice and reorganize that it makes a lot of sense for you to phase out promoted listings. There are probably special cases where promoting will still make sense, but you have such a strong grasp of pricing your items to sell that I don’t know how much it matters. I agree that weaning off them slowly makes sense, and it’s not like you couldn’t quickly and easily turn promoted listings back on if your sales drop off or you have a specific target you like to hit.
I am not brave enough to go down that road! I am still sticking with your system of not promoting the item on the initial listing, then promoting it at 5% (sometimes I go 7.5%) when I do end and sell similar after 30/60/90 days. I do have some exceptions for bulky items since I don’t have a ton of space for my inventory and am fairly disorganized with the space I do have. I don’t know if this is the best way to use promoted listings in terms of maximizing my net profit, but it is the system that has worked best for me (by far) in terms of not thinking about this stuff too much and keeping me motivated and focused on the big picture stuff: listing, photographing, shipping.
The promoted listings conversation is always so interesting to me because I have only used promoted listings for a few years. When I first started using it, it was like turning on a faucet for sales. And I would definitely recommend that to any eBay seller who hasn’t had that experience! But slowly the numbers evened back out over time, and I think that’s the case for everyone unless you are just fanatical about listing, listing, listing good new items and pricing them well and keeping your inventory very organized. And those slower weeks where your net sales are <$1000 and you’re losing an extra 5% (or more) on many of your sales because they were promoted…it can be discouraging.
I do think that promoted listings remains a great option for listings that are 6 months or older, especially after doing an end/sell similar and making sure your price is not completely out of line with reality. Also for listings with a lot of competition. But for those unique one-off items, I don’t think promoted listings really makes sense.
Unless you’re like me and you sometimes deal with option paralysis about pricing, repricing, what to list, how to list it, etc. In which case — find a system that works for you and stick to that. And if you pay an extra 5% for promoting a listing sometimes, like I do? Hey, at least it’s a little extra money in your pocket. Use some of that profit to buy something else, and hopefully it’s a unique item or one with strong enough recent sales that you won’t even need to promote it to get it gone.
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Wow that’s brave. On the eBay for business podcast I heard the guy say to do st least 2%. But maybe since you know EBay tricks it won’t affect you. Let us know what you think later!
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2% is the minimum now. I figure at some point it’ll go up to 3%. The recommendations for promoted listings percentages are outrageous.
i’ve done plenty of tests with promoted listings over the years. I know that removing them all is disastrous, that raising the minimum number will give you a temporary boost but it levels out. now that I know if I remove a couple here and there that my sales will not be affected.That is as long as I keep listing desirable and higher priced items. No amount of promoted listings will sell a crappy item. I honestly think that a lot of my promoted listing items sell promoted just because the person clicks on that link by random coincidence. I see the same thing when I buy items on Amazon. I’ll see an item and then I’ll see the same item 2 spots below. The top link is sponsored the bottom one is not. Both listings show up at the same search but conveniently the sponsored one is just one or two steps higher. That Amazon experience is really what pushed me to start phasing PL out.
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So are you still doing 2? Sorry if I confused that. The seller guy on the podcast kind of seemed to indicate you would get buried if you didn’t at least do the 2.
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My testing showed 2% was pretty much worthless. I was at 3% across the board. 3% was also pretty much worthless when I compared it to 4% and 5%. I set up 3 campaigns at 3,4,5% and ran them a while. Then I swapped the 5% campaign to 3%, and the 3,4% campaigns to 5% then ran them a while. 5% was king when comparing the same campaign at different rates, so I switched all my items to 5%. I made a forum post discussing my results back in August.
So I’m at 5% on the items still promoted. 55 of 180 items sold in January were PL sales.
Sometime around October I just decided to start turning off promoted listings when I relisted items and I’ve never added anything new.
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Anyone else’s sales running hot and cold so far in 2025? I’ve had more days with 0 to 2 sales (and hardly any offers) than I would like, but also some days with huge numbers so that the numbers as a whole have basically come out to what I would expect or hope for.
I had a strong weekend of sales, so Sunday night I took an hour out of my evening and sent a good chunk of my eBay inventory (275 items) to auction at opening bids around half my original buy it now. It’s been a while since I did auctions. But I like to experiment and tweak this time of year. Auctions are super hit and miss, even in the collectibles niche where auctions remain pretty popular. Adding a best offer to your auctions (as opposed to a straight buy it now) is a pretty cool feature. Every time I run auctions, I always get a few sales I’m happy with from buyers sending an offer. I had one sale this week where the original listing was $20, I sent to auction with an opening bid of $9.99 and a buyer sent me an offer for…$20. If only they all went like that!
1/19/2024 to 1/25/2024
Total listings: 356
New listings this week: 12
Items sold: 27 — 10 via best offer, 10 via seller initiated offer, 16 via advertising
Gross sales: $1139.27 (down 18% from one year ago)
Net sales: $755.38 (down 18% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $42.20 (up 15% from one year ago)
High sale of the week: $81.59 net, about $50 after COGS Bruno Fernandes autographed jersey card /149 2021-22 Panini Obsidian
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