- This topic has 20 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 1 week, 3 days ago by
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Posts
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Revenue
Mercari
$50.20
Poshmark
$175.00
eBay
$1,024.85
Total $1,250.05
COGS (Orders) $0.00 (need to start inputting!)
Standard Fees (Orders) $187.54
Promoted Fees (Orders) $8.43Wow it felt so much slower than this, especially on ebay. I’m having days with no sales for sure on there. Mercari is really slow and they had 2 promos running last weekend. Poshmark has slowed for sure as well, with more lowballers and offer decliners.
So I’m looking at the traffic for the past 7 days and seeing a worsening trend of promoted vs organic clicks on my listings in the teens but sales at 100% promoted now on most days. Promoted impressions are still at 40-50%. So this seems to be saying that my cheapo promo rate is only getting me to a crazy low placement in search results that is not resulting in many clicks, while of course I’m paying for any non-buyer to click on my listing at any time. I would be inclined to stop promoting except for the fear that Ebay would punish me. I don’t really want to lose those 10-20% of “extra clicks”, or worse if Ebay has some sort of Cassini ding. At my store review I explained my approach to the employee and he said it was wise, in a way that made me think the ding might be a real thing. Any thoughts?
Meanwhile, I’ve been horrible about listing for several weeks due to outside stuff going on. I’m sure that is not helping matters. My store is down to about 700 + listings now. I also haven’t gotten back to my big garage sort for a while and I’m on call for jury duty. Need to work on my COGS for 2025. Much to do!
Hang in there to anyone with crazy weather!
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after much experimentation, I have also reached the same conclusion: ebay sales are only happening when you turn on dynamic promoted listings. i turned them off, sales die. i turn them to the lowest percentage, 2%, sales still dead. i turn on dyanmic with a 15% cap, sales start again. it’s a new ebay world, you just have to pay way more in fees to get sales.
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Strong disagree. I’m almost completely out of promoted listings – down to about 200 left in a 4000 item store. I am letting nifty remove them as part of the auto end/sell similar along with an auto price drop. I have it set to relist anything older than 180 days. FYI, if you didn’t know this the nifty auto end/relist will always remove your promoted listing. You have to add it back manually.
My slow process of ending promoted listings over the last year has resulted in zero drop in sales. I’m still growing year over year. I’m meeting my goal of 40 sales a week on ebay with the added benefit of an extra 15+ sales a week on depop/posh/mercari. I’ve broke my all time weekly record of sales twice this year already. I’m only up to about 1500 cross listed items as it is a manual process, but so far the sales I’m getting from cross listing are well beyond my expectations. I’m gunning for $100k in sales (sale price only – not including shipping) this year.
Listing quality items with good STR trumps promoted listings all day long. As I’ve been saying for a while now you have to phase them out slowly so ebay don’t crush your store. I did that experiment a few years ago and the sales ban hammer was REAL.
Nifty will slowly remove the PL for you and even apply a price reduction for you for your stale items. I recommend you give it a try. It’s worth it for that feature alone. If you just want ebay automation (auto end/sell similar, auto offers, price reductions, etc) that is only $22 a month.
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i think we’re comparing apples to oranges. my perspective started in 2008 and is well documented in this podcast, our saying was always “list it and forget it”. we sell niche, weird, longtail items. 10,000 of them in my store at the moment. the amount of “gardening” we have to do by relisting our store every 30 days and paying the maximum fee amounts to ebay to get anything to sell is not like it used to be. they are clearly pushing organic search down in favor of promoted and “fresh” listings. so you must be ever vigilant in rotating your store rather than selling the weird old item and listing the new constantly. the longtail, list it and forget model is not what ebay wants, though it’s what ebay was founded on, so not sure competing w Amazon is a great long term strategy for them. guess only time will tell.
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@retro that’s awesome. I could do this as well. I’ve set Nifty for relisting at 120 days. I’m not sure it catches it all? Mine are bunched up due to my past manual resets. I feel like running my weekly 4 day sale is a boost, and I’m making offers. So I can’t really afford to run pay per click as well, definitely not on my RA items. I’m also making lower offers on my old used items and dropped my Ebay offer floor. I tried a small pay per click experiment before when they gave a big credit and they chose the items and it was definitely not what I would have chosen. So for me the question is just whether or not to phase out my current % or try a higher rate on used items only.
I also kind of feel like we are in a transition period with a number of long time sellers reporting that sales are off. Ebay wouldn’t want to have lower sales overall so perhaps it’s just a ball pit and the ones willing to pay ball are going to get shown. Ebay wants to show investors revenue growth on our backs so they would be willing to play hardball with the objectors. Of course if you have amazing sell through items at competitive prices or make great discount offers, that would likely get you sold too. Personally, my items are a mix. I still have a lot of old piles I am working through and I’m down to one RA supplier but those items have good velocity.
@retro are you listing with Nifty AI yet?
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It’s a setting as to how many it will sell similar each day. I have mine set to max 100. So even after 2 months I still have listings from 2024. It will eventually get them all.
no I haven’t used the listing tool yet as I don’t have business policies. That is a requirement to use the AI tool. I’m at a point I could use them, but I don’t have the time to deal with that conversion headache at the moment.
I have used it to create some draft listings to sell some baseball bats. Worked great. I copied the titles and descriptions into eBay as drafts. Sold several of those bats already.
I do pay my oldest kid to list my clothing backlog and she does a good job. Kids her age HATE AI. She don’t want anything to do with it. She does occasionally use google to reverse image search at least.
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I definitely think they have upped the freshness factor tremendously since the podcast days. I asked the Cassini guy himself at Ebay Open if old listings dragged down your whole store and he couldn’t directly respond but did say he had two stores, one with some things over a year old that was slower. He also said “sales beget sales”. That phrase has stuck with me and I’ve moved away from the highest priced model and started taking lower offers and running a little bit of a deeper sale. Unfortunately that means I have less money to spend on advertising and I can’t afford to pass on my shipping discount to buyers. The ladies from corporate in the ladies room bluntly said re 90 day listings “you don’t want any of that”. It feels a bit like cheating having the software automatically do it.
I am a bit surprised that after the recent change in attribution rules, I’m getting less promoted clicks while promoting at the same rate. This is espeically true considering how many sellers said they quit promoting. It suggests they tweaked the algorithm. I can’t imagine that it’s because a good number of my competitors upped their rates after that policy change.
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I also don’t think blanket end/sell similar is good for your store, the same as blanket editing or ending promoted listings is not good.
eBay seems to prefer gentle pruning rather than plowing everything down.
I sell old stale items regularly after relisting. They do even better on posh and Depop. Mercari is doing better but it has been slow since they only allow 100 more listings for every sale I make. In 2 months I only have 6 sales on Mercari. I have to be selective as to what I cross post there for now. I’ve sold over 100 items between posh and Depop so far even though I’ve been slow to cross list.
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Thanks @retro
I’ve been impressed with Poshmark. The fee is hefty but I started crossposting by category in October and have sold 166 items on there so far. OLD things have sold, cross stitch kits, decor, kitchenware, all kinds of things. The shipping rate they have going at USPS for under 5 pounds is really great. I hope it lasts a while. My average sale price on Posh is lower than Ebay, as is the profit but I’m looking to move things, so that’s ok.
Regarding the dragging down of your store by old listings theory, it can only help your Ebay store to get rid of that old stuff on another platform. They do keep records of the original list date per Ebay staff.
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what are y’all using to crosspost to Poshmark etc? Nifty? are are there other tools you recommend. thanks!!
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@ryanne I use Nifty AI. I waited to find out which was the best cross posting software. I have spotty internet here so I went with Nifty AI, which I believe is only one of the two working from the cloud and not your computer. It’s been very reliable so far with delisting when something is sold. If they have a glitch with that they will email you to alert you. It’s not the cheapest but amazing software. I will use it to store my cost of goods starting with this year’s listings. It’s pretty liberating to get out from under Ebay’s algorithm and I think they tend to have younger buyers. However, Posh fees are higher and about 80% sells on offer. I have my offers automated. The Nifty AI listing tool is much better than Ebay’s but sometimes sell similar is faster still than using it for vintage or weird items. I’ve sold about $5000 on Posh already, more than enough to pay for the software. I wish I had done it sooner. It feels so great when something sells there that’s been listing on Ebay forever. Some of it I think has to do with their great shipping rate – $6.49 for up to 5 pounds! I think it’s only $10? (or $10 more) for up to 10 pounds (seller needs to upgrade the label).
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Nifty.
The automation only is $22 a month. That will auto relist your items and auto send offers. $22 is worth it to keep your 10k item store fresh. Implementing a price reduction when relisting is optional. I have implemented a 5% reduction and only end/sell similar after 180 days. Once my whole store is within 6 months I’ll reduce my end/sell similar daily cap from 100 to 50, just to spead everything out a bit more. I have no desire to relist every month, and with a 10k item store I think ebay would penalize you for that much turnover without sales. Having a fresh 6 month store is, in my opinion, the sweet spot. I was working to get to a 1 year rotation manually but it was alot of work.
Since I let Nifty take over I only have about 700 listings that are older than 6 months. All of those will filter into the relist cycle over the next 60 days.
There’s nothing wrong with having long tail items, but it is definitely a different era now. It will only get worse the more AI is integrated. List it and forget it is no more. You have to have some kind of refresh activity or you’ll be buried.
I would even recommend you run 10-20 old listings through an AI tool each week just to get some fresh keywords and refresh the title and item description and item specifics.
You can train ChatGPT and create a custom GPT where you can feed in a few listing URL’s each day and it will spit out revisions in whatever format you want that you can cut/paste into the listing. Refining the custom GPT to just spit out the actionable items and leave out the fluff is very helpful. I made a tool a while back to use when sourcing where I set all the paramters to the point I can upload a photo of an item while scavenging and the tool will just say “yes” or “No” if I should buy it. Then I say if I bought it or not. Then when I’m done shopping it will spit out a formatted file with all the listing info for the items I buy. It’s a great tool for shopping commodity stuff like clothing, shoes, toys, and games.
As a matter of fact, this listing refresher tool was a good idea so I started doing this for myself.
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@ryanne I just started nifty.ai’s 7-day trial. I’m most interested in listing/managing items on multiple sites, so I went with their $35.99/month “Crosslisting” plan to leverage my existing eBay listings:
They integrate with eBay, Poshmark, Mercari, Depop & Etsy. My store is mostly vintage tech & computing items, so I’m starting on Poshmark & Mercari and may get to Etsy eventually (but probably not Depop as they seem to really focus on clothes).
I’ve only just started with cross-listing (no sales, but I’ve moved less than 50 items so far). The cross-listing process is reasonably straightforward but definitely not ‘automatic’. From what I’ve seen so far, you need to click through each listing individually when pushing it to a new site, and mind/modify the shipping options in particular (for Poshmark/Mercari in my case) since they both have their own ideas & rules about shipping costs. From what I’ve seen, the shipping options that nifty exposes in their ‘copy listing to x site’ form are pretty limited (vs. eBay’s multitude of shipping options).
I’ve only just started & hope/expect there are things I will discover that could be set up (like shipping policies) in nifty’s configuration to help move through the cross-listing process quickly. I don’t mind suffering a bit through this process if it improves sales.
I’ll probably extend my ‘free week’s trial’ to a couple months, since I’d like to list at least 1,000 items on at least 2 additional sites and it’s going to take time to approve/move through the listings… and then time to wait & see if anything good happens!
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For Feb 16 to 22 I had a few sales and did a good number of listings. My wife was the winner again with 2 of the three items sold being things she found while we were at estate sales. And they were the highest priced as well!
My sales over all have been pretty good this past month but I do think that was due to find and listing some good stuff. During Feb so far I’ve had 13 sales. I’ve only had one item sell that had been listed longer than a year. two other items had been listed for almost a year and the rest were within 30days.
For promoted listings I’m now using 3.1 as my rate. Saw another reseller talk about it in a video and giving it a shot.
Total listings: 671
New listings this week: 12
Items sold: 3
Gross sales: $210.75
Cost of items: $12.00
Ebay fees: $40.23
Gross Profit: $158.52
Average sales price: $70.25My highest priced sale was this vintage college duffle bag. It reminds me of an old bowling bag. Seems the company that made it made them for numerous schools, assume it was not licensed.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/198071772594
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@jaepete that is a cool bag.
Sales are dreadful this week for me on all accounts. I haven’t been listing much but still.
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Hey Christine….do you have a referral code for Poshmark? I’m going to take a look at it and don’t want to create an account yet if there’s a way to help a fellow scavenger!
here’s my email jsmithbull@yahoo.com
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@jaepete thanks! I think I only get credit for a new account opening. The code is RETRO_DECOR
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@christiner ….Thanks! I haven’t done it yet, been busy with my regular job but soon
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