Home › Forums › Buying and Selling › Selling on eBay › Using Auctions for Clothes.. Thoughts?
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sonia.
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05/15/2018 at 9:30 am #39953
I have 1300 items in my store and try to list 50 a week. I usually sell 20-30 so the growth is slow but there. I am not ready to do an anchor store yet so I am trying to maximize my free listings. Last month I realized ( I can be slow) that I should be using my auctions since I have 500 free. So at the end of the month I changed all my clothing items that needed to be re-listed to auctions. Putsy I know but I wanted to see if it would work. Also I listed all my in season clothes at auction. I didn’t put any buy it nows on them so it was free. So far I had one old item get a bid.. And then they didn’t pay. π But I have sold four in season items. I started the bid where I wanted and let it go some went higher.. So I am going to try this for awhile. Would they have sold on fixed price? Probably but I am hoping to save my fixed price for long tail items. Also I am changing my kids clothes to auction and free shipping. I see people selling their kids clothes for ridiculous prices and it just wasn’t working for me. I changed them to auctions and in the last month have started selling more kids clothes. So.. who knows. But fun to experiment and thought I would share. Ultimately I would love to adopt Jay and Ryannes list it and forget it approach but I think I need to get a couple thousand more things in my store first. π
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05/15/2018 at 10:11 am #39960
I too listed cloths at auction with a starting price that I would have put for the buy it now. And I too did it because I have the 500 free actions. (Just remember that it is 500 auctions, not 500 items. Every re-listing is a new auction so in reality it is about 150 items a month if my math is correct.)
So far sold two items in auction and one is being bid on so price has gone up. The other one has 4 people watching and a day or say left on auction.
I also do this with my magazines and so far sold several bundles at my starting bid which would have been my buy it now price.
And it might just be psychological but it feels like there is more action in my store when I do it that way.
Would love to know how it works out for you.
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05/15/2018 at 10:51 am #39973
It is a shame that eBay doesn’t have a subscription level between Premiere (1000 items) and Anchor (10,000 items). It’s smart to use the free auctions you get month, but it doesn’t seem very sustainable. Plus, there’s always the danger listings get lost between auctions ending and then figuring out your next move.
As you guys know, I dont think auctions have any special power. Obviously selling one item out of 500 isn’t going to make you rich!
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05/15/2018 at 11:51 am #39978
Oh no Jay I know I won’t get rich. π I’m just trying to use my free listings efficiently and keep my store fees as low as possible.
I wish they had a level in between as well. I would definitely subscribe to it!
Sigilini: I was watching that too. I wasn’t sure how many to list so I didn’t run out of free auction listings. I will keep listing regardless if I use them all up but I hope to save a bit in the meantime. I am glad they are working for you. I know there’s no magic bullet but seeing things go out the door makes me feel like I’m doing something half way right…. -
05/15/2018 at 12:39 pm #39985
Very true. If the auctions are free, do experiments to see what works.
On another note, we learned a long time ago that selling baby/kids clothes is not profitable. Too many moms dumping their used clothes on the market so prices are low low low.
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05/15/2018 at 12:41 pm #39986
Yep I’m one of those moms. π
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05/15/2018 at 12:45 pm #39988
If we had kids, it seems possible to just buy new clothes every week at the thrift store. You can buy bags and bags of awesome kids clothes for pennies.
So why even wash your kids clothes? Let them get dirty and just compost the clothes!
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05/15/2018 at 12:49 pm #39990
Jay! That’s a great idea. π
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05/15/2018 at 1:16 pm #39993
I keep close watch on my auction listings and bulk relist as auctions expire. They all collect in the ended items so I don’t have to hunt them down. So far so good. I have not lost listings as far as I can tell and have sold items regularly on auction at my “buy it now price” that I wanted.
Last week sold about 200.00 in mags (5 listings all to the same fellow), today sold two blouses at $99.00 and at 75.00 (free shipping) on auction to two different people. The mags went for more than I expected (sold at opening bid). I half thought that I would have to lower the price and in the end it worked out well. And I got the mags for free. Plus I have more of them listed. I have sold other mags that way and made good money on them (15.95 each and I think I sold about 10 that way).
Someone on the forum said once that auctions give people a sense of urgency. I can see how it might do that. Ebay will send a reminder when auctions are about to end, I believe, so you get free promotion.
But as I said above, they are free to list and I have almost 1000 items so I am saving those for my long tail items, which I do list and forget about. And I price my auctions at my buy it now price.
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05/15/2018 at 1:27 pm #39995
Sounds like you’ve really figured out how to use auctions well. Great money for free magazines.
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05/16/2018 at 9:44 pm #40134
I once had a great result selling a St. John item on auction but for the most part I think auctions for clothing sell at or near the starting price.
I’m getting ready to do an experiment with selling clothing lots and I’m going to do some of them as auctions. I’ll report back on this after a couple weeks.
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05/16/2018 at 9:46 pm #40135
P.S. Jay said “It is a shame that eBay doesnβt have a subscription level between Premiere (1000 items) and Anchor (10,000 items).” — Yes, yes, yes, I totally agree. I can’t believe they put in the other 2 new levels and didn’t do one for like 3000 or 5000 items. So weird.
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05/16/2018 at 11:50 pm #40146
I don’t understand the big need for a new store level between premium and anchor.
With Premium, if you have 1000 listings, it’s 6 cents per listing per month. If you have 5000 items, its an average 9.2 cents per listing per month (about $1/year). That is still pretty darn cheap, especially when compared with final value fees. If I thought it would achieve anything, I would spend my energy on asking for a break on final value fees. But that’s just me.
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05/17/2018 at 2:17 pm #40194
Listing fees are a fixed cost regardless of sales… At least with final value fees, you’ve sold something and have money (profit) as a result.
In your example, you state that 5000 items cost about $1 per year which comes to $5000 in listing fees alone.
If the average listing fee were down around 6 cents a month, then doing the math equates to 72 cents a year or $3600 for 5000 listings.
Also, reduced fees with a mid level store, may encourage people to list more and not look elsewhere to sell.
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05/17/2018 at 2:26 pm #40195
eBay should have a middle subscription level, but I also think many new-ish sellers have “listing fee anxiety”. Its amazing to see the twists and knots they get themselves into to save a little money on fees. But when you get them to do the numbers, listing fees are just the cost of doing business if they want to make money.
If items aren’t listed, they wont sell. We would never wait til list new items…because we’re waiting for old items to sell…because we dont want to go over our “free listings” quota.
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05/17/2018 at 3:53 pm #40214
OK, so let’s also have a 500 or 600 item store subscription between basic and premium – that’s what would help me the most, and the savings would be meaningful to me. But really, at some point, it really just doesn’t matter all that much. $5000 in listing fees would be a lot for me (small store), but if you have 5000 items in your store, then $5000 per year should be a drop in the bucket. And, as sigilini pointed out, my example doesn’t make sense because the break-even point is at 3400 items, which means it’s only $3600 per year for 5000 items.
Anyway, it’s just different choices of what problems/challenges/costs to prioritize focusing on. Different strokes.
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05/17/2018 at 7:32 am #40156
I think the make break point for a premium store is about 3400 items (1000 free + 2400 at 10 cents a listing), which would cost the same as anchor store ($300.00). At 3400 items it would make sense to upgrade because you also get 150.00 in free shipping supplies and 25.00 promotion fee coupon.
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05/17/2018 at 12:25 pm #40182
Sigilini thank you for doing the math for me guess I have a ways to go before upgrading. π
Katie: I agree with you on them selling at or near starting price. That’s why I start it at what I want to get for it. I guess what I was trying to say was I am running an auction on something that will sell quick anyways, using a free auction and saving my fixed price listings for long tail items. -
05/17/2018 at 7:22 pm #40238
You are welcome Elle. And I am with you. I sold 6 items this week on auction all for about the starting bid and all for what I would have listed them in Buy It Now. Good solid prices. Just maximizing on the available free listings as much as possible. I have about 200 to go to get to 1000 buy it now listings and currently I have 100+ in auction (which are over and above the 1000, as already stated).
And I might just do the switch earlier at 3000 items rather than 3400 because I would love to have the Anchor support and 600.00 a year in free shipping supplies, and 100.00 a year in promotional rebates/coupons. But that is way in the future…
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This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by
Sigilini.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by
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05/17/2018 at 7:27 pm #40239
I think the real issue is that Ebay charges 10 cents a listing for every listing past 1000. You would think, the more you list, the cheaper the listings would be.
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05/17/2018 at 11:41 pm #40255
So Cal Joe,
Yes, I was surprised the first time I realized this. I guess that’s their way of trying extra hard to get you to commit to a higher level store before you actually need it. Bandwidth sold by Internet service providers is the same way. If you go over your allowance, your per-Mbps price is a LOT higher than it is when you stay within your allowance. They would prefer if you bought a higher level subscription and used less of it. Of course, there’s more sense for bandwidth providers to do this, b/c they need to know how much capacity to build out and need to incentivize customers to not just flood the network all of a sudden. Although ebay needs to know how much capacity to build out as well, their higher listing fee when you go over your allowance is, while annoying, not high enough to be much of a deterrent to listing more. And I doubt that they’re worried that someone is going to come in and just flood their system with a billion new listings overnight.
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