The Numbers: Week October 15-21, 2023

[Jay]

We spent last week in NYC for a mini-vacation. It’s really a city where we feel so at home and love to wander. Ryanne and I met in Manhattan when we l
[See the full post at: The Numbers: Week October 15-21, 2023]

[Jay]

(I might have accidentally delted the weekly thread Craig started this week. We’re looking for it!)

[Jay]

craig rex wrote:

Jay mentioned in another post that he and Ryanne are traveling this week, so I figured lets get a numbers thread up while they are enjoying some time together and, no doubt, planning their next project. Halloween coming up…hope everyone’s been having a spooky week of sales!

In last week’s post Jay mentioned a return because of a “renter” and I thought it might be interesting discussion to think about the opposite of that. Anyone have any customer stories where it looked like things would go sideways but they didn’t — and maybe you even ended up with a big sale or repeat customer?

10/1/2023 to 10/7/2023

Items sold: 26 (5 via auction, 15 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 16 via promoted listings)

Gross sales: $816.83 (down 41% from one year ago)

Net sales: $519.73 (down 43% from one year ago)

Average sales price: $40.84 (down 14% from one year ago)

Highest price sold (net): $126.03 — Glenn Gould Complete Columbia Album USB stick

Check out this week’s Sale of the week thread for the story behind this way and other tales from @retro-treasures-wv and @ChristineR among others.

Lowest price sold (net): -$12.39 — Jauan Jennings Panini Contenders wild card autograph rookie card

My main niche is trading cards and sports cards, and a lot of people’s gut reaction to that is “scammers” “returns” “picky buyers” etc. So you see a return like this and think…wow he must deal with this a lot.

But it’s very rare. This is my first return in months, and it wasn’t about condition or a scam or anything else — the buyer’s reason was found better price. I received the return yesterday and the card was perfect…the buyer even sent back the little extra (a $0.50 card of the same player) as well. So I will relist and sell it to someone else. It’s annoying, I guess, but if this is the worst thing that happens all week, it’s been a good week.

[Jay]

Craig, totally agree that returns are what they are. Over the decade + of selling online, I don’t think we ever ever had a scammer. But we do get returns that seem petty or from people who shouldn’t have purchased n the first lace.

Glad to see the trading card world is so low return!

[Sharyn]

That’s hilarious! Well, I happened to have that window open, and I can recover most of the posts. Here is mine:

Last week was just OK, but I haven’t sold anything since Oct 21. That is very strange.

My highest sale last week is already a return. Interestingly, she selected INAD and said that she immediately broke out in hives from the fur coat (but in addition it didn’t fit). Not sure why someone who is so allergic to fur would buy a fur coat  . I’m thinking the fit problem was a bit more of an issue. She hasn’t shipped it yet, but my buyers always ship back returns.

I’ve also got to stop scavenging until I list (and sell) some death piles.

Week of Oct 15 – 21
Total Items in Store: 1736 eBay, 37 Etsy
Items Sold: 10 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $7 + $43 Commission
Total Sales: $205.59 eBay, $0 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $55 for Vintage Womens Fur Jacket
Average price: $20.56
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $65
Number of items listed this week: 8

[Sharyn]

Hum, my happy face emoji got exploded. I could fix that. Or, maybe just leave as is 🙂

[Jay]

Yikes. We’ve had those weeks of low sales and more returns than we like. They often seem to happen at the same time, or we’re just more sensitive to them.

Thanks for filling on the posts I deleted!

[Sharyn]

Here is Retro:

Items in Store: 2786
Items Sold: 44
Total Sales: $3,655.00
COGS: $340.00
Total Profit: $3,315.00
Average profit: $75.34
Average sales price: $83.07
New Listings: 40
Items scavenged: 40
2023 weekly new listings Avg: 45

The local goodwill had great shoes on Saturday and I bought 24 pair – filled an entire cart. It’s been a while since I’ve done that at goodwill. I’m on track to beat 2020 in total sales. I don’t know how long I can keep this $3k+ week thing going but I’m enjoying the ride while it is happening.

 

Last week I “ended and sell similar” a bunch of hard goods. This did result in some sales once I adjusted the pricing to the going sold values. I’m going to do the rest this week and then start on stale clothing/shoes listings. Also when clearing up space in inventory I found 3 LARGE hard goods that were no longer listed. When I come across these I always check my emails to see if it was because of a failed relist after a canceled sale or non-payment. Nothing on all 3. They just weren’t listed anymore. So frustrating!!!

I didn’t do any new listings this weekend as October is LOADED with family events. We love to do all the events this month while the weather is decent. By the time the month is over our kids will be sick & tired of trick or treating – sometimes literally sick from too much candy. When I was a kid there was just the usual neighborhood trick or treat. Now there are umpteen million trunk or treats, location based trick or treat events, etc. We’re also making a haunted house this year in our front yard. Needless to say this week will likely be light as well on the listing front. Fortunately it will be high dollar items I’m listing.

Premium collection update:

Another SOLID week where consistently listing the shoes has paid off. I sold 15 items for $2688. 9 of the items were shoes for $2305. I listed the last pair of Gucci Horsebit Croc loafers and the same guy bought them that has bought all the rest – 4 pair in different colors. My IDEAL customer – I wish he would buy all of the shoes! I had to do more organizing and efficientizing in my inventory storage to make room for more listed shoes. I cleared an entire shelf and already filled it. Now I have to do another one! The selling of the stale hard goods has already cleared enough space for another shoe shelf…that will also be immediately filled.

Premium cumulative numbers

Total COGS: $12441

Total Sales (minus fees): $14410.04

Items Sold: 154

ASP: $107.86

PROFIT!: $1969.04

[Jay]

That must feel god to already be in the black after a big purchase.

[Sharyn]

Lucas:

Thanks, Craig! This was a rare week that I had my numbers done early in the week.

Week Ending 10/21/23
Gross Sales(w/o shipping $ tax): $2,028.48  (eBay $359 / Etsy $1670)
Net Sales: $1,811.55  (eBay $283 / Etsy $1528)
Total Items Sold: 15  (eBay 12 / Etsy 3)
Total Items in eBay Store: 1210 / Etsy: 529
Cost of Items Sold: $567.83
Highest Price Sold: $1,600.00 (Antique bronze bust of a baby)
Average Price Sold: $135.23
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $778.71
Sold via promoted listings: 9

Average Days Listed: 306
Longest Listed: 2283
New items listed: 12
New Listings Value $649.40

This was my best week of sales since Christmas season of 2020 and best week of sales ever for Etsy.  When the sale is a big dollar item, I really appreciate Etsy’s lower commission cost.  My total cost was only 8.5% on Etsy, whereas eBay charged 21%.

I hit two online auctions and an estate sale during the week and racked up almost $800.  Some more books, pre-war trains, a lot of collectibles for the U.S.S. Constellation, some CDs, a lot of vintage playing cards, an art deco lamp, and some vintage pocket knives.  This is what keeps the “job” interesting for me.  Having such a variety of items to research keeps me from getting bored with this gig.  I’m having to exercise some restraint to keep from digging into the batches, though, as I’m trying to focus on listing xmas ornaments in the lead up to the holidays.

I have a rare for me return coming back this week on an item I sold for $12.95 with free shipping.  Buyer sent a long note of apology because he didn’t measure correctly.

[Jay]

Lucas, we’re on the same page as far as selling all kinds of different items. Keeps it interesting. Always learning new things. Congrats on that sale!

[Sharyn]

ChristineR: (And I think that is it)

Total Items in Store: 1082
Items Sold: 16
Gross Sales: $634.87 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $358.63 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $65 + one item ours
Highest Price Sold: $111.65 (One Midcentury art tile, paid $1.99)
Average Price Sold: $39.68
Returns: 1 ($109 ouch)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $11 rummage sale + $20ish flea market
Number of items listed this week: 44

Looks like last week was actually ok for me, a little disappointing for this time of year.  This week is horrible for sales and I haven’t been listing either.  Some life chaos going on.  Hopefully next week will be better on Ebay and off.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Ebay business this week and watched a few videos.  Sourcing is not a problem.  Listing is generally ok.  The Auction Professor had a suggestion to limit research time by seeing the range for a certain subtype of item, and charging I think the average price or lower and letting a couple that would have gone for higher go for the sake of saving listing time.  I sell many one off items so I’m not sure that would really work well for me.  Besides that new point, I think my listing is pretty efficient.  I was thinking maybe I could start filling out fewer item specifics.  I had heard it helped you in search to fill out more of the recommended, but I’m not so sure it’s worth the extra time. It also makes for a mess of info the buyer sees, rather than just the important details.  I get a lot of measurement questions from people on mobile who don’t see or open the specifics.  I notice other sellers skipping a lot of them.  I could also maybe try listing on my phone without the desktop for more items but I use Terapeak to price, so that isn’t really too appealing an option.

So I think room for improvement is in the pricing and really the sell through rate.  My sell through rate is not great.  My current strategy is to price at the highest 2 year sold and then take offers and aggressively make offers on everything I can at about 15-20% off.   I take a cursory look at the actives and their prices, but a video I watched by Justin Resells made me think perhaps I should be looking harder at how slowly particular things sell and the number of items available vs solds.  Maybe my auto decline and my prices should be adjusted for that if it’s not a totally rare or desirable item.  If I had a better sell through rate I could move more of my garage inventory out and still keep sourcing a bit each week, which is fun.

Running sales doesn’t really seem to be going great lately.  I also tried raising my promotion rate to the suggested capped at 9% on my 20 clothing items last week. Sold none of that.

My final thought was I’m getting sort of out of the mood of picking larger hard to pack items.  I passed on a couple of French pottery with lids just because I’m losing my appetite for packing that kind of stuff as my store gets bigger.  I also bought and sold a pair of sneakers for $80 profit, they sold quickly and were easy to clean and ship.  I thought I don’t really want to get into clothes and shoes but I was grateful for that nice sale last week.

Long post.  I have some reorganzing to do and need to do a box assessment.  Pretty much no buyers are picking priority shipping these days and I think I can turn in some of those boxes to the Post Office to be used by someone else.  Perhaps this is because I’m coastal.

Glad to see others are having good sales!  Happy Halloween to those who enjoy it. Hope you are having fun R&J.

[Jay]

Sometimes slow weeks are just slow weeks. But I also think it’s always good to think about the relationship to our store and the process we have running it. We definitely change and updates things as we go.

[ebaymom]

Hi and welcome back from NYC… Glad to hear you had a fun trip! Thanks for telling us about your “sell similar” experience. From everything I have researched about it online, if you do no other tweaks or changes and simply end and sell similar, it will provide a temporary (24-48 hour) boost to the algorithm and then the items will fall back to their original placement in search after that time…. but with as many items as you guys have listed, that “boost” is going to have some kind of noticeable impact, even if it is just for a day or two. I guess the numbers will speak for themselves! As Craig mentioned in another discussion, there is a point of diminishing returns on sell similar… so I think it is interesting to find out what is the “right amount” of time to wait between doing it.  I wonder, does anyone else check their “Quality Listing Report” under the traffic performance tab?  I like to see how I rank on eBay in my top 10 listed categories and this report shows you that information. For being an extremely small seller I was surprised to see how high I rank in certain clothing categories. (For example, in a few categories I am in the 200’s… out of 100,000’s of sellers.) I did notice after ending a listing for a nwt hat (that had many watchers, but I think I priced it way too low, so just ended it because I couldn’t modify due to sending out an offer) that I fell from something like 500 in rank all the way to 1100 in new hats… I do not have many New Hats listed. I have no idea what this means as far as future sales… however, I just wanted to share this because it made me think that ending listings that are actually “good performing listings” could even have a negative impact on your overall ranking and maybe search placement, even if you get the one-two day “boost”. So going further, I will always be only ending the old listings that are getting no views so I don’t fall further down in ranking. Of course if something has been sitting around for a few years without selling, than it’s not performing “good” though, right?

Anyway, my post was also deleted but Sharyn gave me the idea to check my tabs and I had the old post still open so here it is below:

Stopping in to post my numbers for last week… I enjoyed seeing all of your numbers. Congrats to everyone who had the “big” sales… that is exciting. For me, it felt like a very tough week, and I had to pull out all stops to keep the momentum… including coupons, sales and promoted listings… oh and lots of very very low dollar offers this week… I can sense the buyer expectations for clothing at least is changing and buyers are wanting rock bottom pricing on the everyday stuff. I think buyers are watching and just waiting for sellers to send offers now (and not just 5% off.. but at least 20% off). I am getting many many watches and very little “offers” compared to even a year ago and I even got a serious $1 offer on a beautiful Nike sweatshirt, sorry, but no thanks! On a good note, this is my third week of consistently meeting my minimum daily listing goal of 5 per day. Hopefully I can keep it up… one more to go for today at 3:17 am, but taking a breather to post the numbers and then back to bed for me…

My Store Week October 15-21, 2023

Total Items in Store: 835
Items Sold: 20
Gross Sales: $451.91 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $223.16 (minus eBay fees, shipping, taxes, returns)
Cost of Items Sold: $30.50
Highest Price Sold: $25.60 (NWT Plus Size Chaps Floral Blouse from the bins)
Average Price Sold: $22.60 (inc. shipping)
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $64.45
Number of items listed this week: 35

$ Amount Listed this week: $796.30

[Jay]

Yeah, I think we now put about 5% hope that “relisting as new” is effective. Definitely wouldn’t make it our sole strategy.

Selling clothes is a tough competition these days. So many huge clothing sellers, plus clothing brands are really pumping out the fashion these days.

[debitendcredits]

@jay I have never given much merit to “the end and relist theory”.  But Jay I know you are a data driven fellow.  Can you tell me did you have more sales overall, or did old things that are now “new” get sell?  More importantly was there a higher percentage of older inventory sold this week than in previous weeks?

 

 

[Jay]

Well, since we trust Craig’s opinion, he really laid out his rational and unhyped take on the subject. Since we’ve had a handful of slower than normal weeks, why not try it?

We “ended and relisted” about 1000 on morning. It sucked because we had a lot of listing that required updated info so we there was a lot of data entry. I guess that’s one reason to relist items because eBay is always requiring new info. We then kept updating our store that week.

We sold about five items that afternoon. All were definitely old items that we had relisted. It was real. After having a couple days selling only one item, it was a nice boost.

But is it more psychological than practical? Sure. I think it’s just one tool in the tool box to manage a store, especially during slower times.

 

[debitendcredits]

Interesting, I had not thought about being forced to update item specifics, ill that really does have an impact.  I have decided to end and resist my old stuff in 30 day chunks.  Yesterday, I ended and relished everything from April-2019.  I also changed everything in that lot to calculated shipping, with best offer.  So let’s see what happens.

Can you post a link to Craigs explanation of what he thinks is happening?

[Jay]

I think this was the post that finally made us try it: https://www.scavengerlife.com/forums/topic/the-numbers-week-of-october-1-7-2023/#post-101356

[ChristineR]

Are you guys thinking you need to fill out most of the recommended item specifics to get better visibility?  I guess it’s a black box but would like to hear your thoughts.

[Sharyn]

I’m going to guess that eBay added required specifics after Jay & Ryanne had listed many of their items. While eBay allowed the listings to stay on the site as-is; however, once they became new listings, the required specifics had to be completed.

At least, that’s what I figured from reading Jay’s post.

[Jay]

This is the correct answer. Our items had been up for so long that eBay had added required specifics when we relisted them. Maybe eBay has a filter for items that arent up their current standards.

[Sharyn]

When I had listings that needed updates, they were listed under “Quick Filters” in Seller Hub. I don’t remember what the filter was called, but something on the lines of “Listings requiring update”. When I just looked at Seller Hub to see what the filter area was called, I noticed that the area is hide-able. If you’ve been  hiding them all this time, you wouldn’t see the issue.

[ChristineR]

Right. I was just wondering not about required but recommended.  Are people taking the time to fill all that out routinely?

[Jay]

I guess anytime a seller relists an item, then eBay makes you add more info if required.

[Sharyn]

I don’t fill out all the recommended specifics, but I will fill out as much as I can if I can do it quickly. I figure it provides additional search words especially if it is something where the title can’t fit everything.

[ebaymom]

For item specifics, I do fill out most of the recommended… you can even add some extra keywords… you could add “Christmas” for instance, under Theme… then your item may show up in someone’s search if looking for presents… If the item specific doesn’t apply (like “compression”) I just leave it blank.

[ChristineR]

Thanks.  That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing.  I was thinking if saving time by skipping more of them in the categories where the list is super long.

I did see some kind of banner recently where EBay said they are going to reduce the number of item specifics at the request of sellers.  They are working on it but we’ll see how long that takes…

[Retro Treasures WV]

I don’t trust “recommended item specifics” from any program that automatically assigns “Boots” or “Blue” as a character item specific on a ton of my items. Yesterday I listed a pair of shoes with pebbled leather and the algorithm nailed it by assigning pebbles as the character theme.

 

I fill out the ones that make logical sense of something a person would actually filter on.

[Sharyn]

I  agree. The automatic filling in of the required specifics used to be much better. What is an update worth if it makes the process worse?

[ebaymom]

@retro-treasures-wv in an ebay facebook group that I am in someone was just complaining about their “missing listings” tonight (same boat as you, above) … and it turns out that eBay is ALLOWED to remove stale listings… ones without a sale in over a year (it was an announcement from 2 years ago.) News to me… but here is the link (see last bullet). That could have been what happened to you. Also, this is just another reason to consider “sell similar” at least once a year, so your listings will not potentially be removed without notice! I really wonder if I don’t have any missing as well… I plan to do a re-inventory sometimes next year and I will check.

Removed or hidden listings | eBay

[Jay]

I wonder if they are just delisted and put into your “unsold” category? Or are the photos and listing completely deleted?

[Author]

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