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For those with slow sales, I recommend looking at the Sourcing Guidance section of the Seller Hub. This can be found under the Growth tab.
After having a great March, my sales have been trending downward over the past few weeks. I looked at the main categories I have items listed in using sourcing guidance, and realized that similar sellers are also experiencing a sharp reduction in sales. For my main categories, this will likely go on through July.
I haven’t listed anything in my generalist store in a month. This is a good time to be listing non-niche items!
In a reply to myself, the things you miss out on when you stick to only sourcing online:
I was just in a thrift store that had a robbery. As soon as I entered the store, a guy ran out the door behind me with what looked like a small set of swiss army rolling luggage. He popped out of the store so fast that the one poor employee working there had no hope of catching up with him. The thief was so hyped up that he ran into traffic with his luggage and somehow didn’t get hit. It was pretty impressive, we were all just watching him weaving through traffic with this luggage set.
Supposedly another customer had alerted the lone employee to the shadiness of the guy prior to me getting in there, but there was nothing the employee could do since he hadn’t yet stolen anything.
Yeah, ebay is fine to supplement outside sourcing. It is good to do when you are feeling lazy and don’t want to leave the house for a bit. For the most part, you’ll pretty much consistently find better stuff outside of ebay.
I’ve tried to make the ebay sourcing work on its own, but it just can’t compare to leaving the house.
04/17/2019 at 1:21 pm in reply to: My ebay Income is about 50% less YOY from 2018 than expected #60407We’re probably in a recession now, or about to be in one.
My numbers for this year are down overall compared to last year. However, I am sourcing 50-75% less than I was to last year, or the year before. If I sourced more, would I sell more? Is my long-tail stale? What I am sourcing, does it compare in quality to what I got last year, or the year before?
How much can I blame myself vs. blaming the economy? Or the sites themselves? Maybe what I am listing is not wanted or needed by anyone. I could just be listing a lot of unneeded “junk.” Other people could be having the best sales of their lives because they have customers that want their items.
There are more resellers out there than ever. Maybe they have better, more interesting versions of what I have. They could have better prices. We are fighting for the same customers.
On and on.
04/17/2019 at 1:08 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 406: Disposable Income, WTF is that? #60402I’ve started a 2nd eBay store that is a generalist, non-niche store. The majority of items in it are from thrift stores. I devote very little time to sourcing or listing in it, and have actually built up a pretty decent side income off of it considering. It is a basic store with 240 items. I also have a back stock of around 5 boxes for it that I haven’t gotten to yet.
If I worked it like I do my normal business, I’m sure I could actually do pretty decently with it. I just don’t have the time or care enough to.
If you work this like a f/t job and it is your only source of income, you can make it work with thrift stores alone. You just have to be dedicated to constantly being out there and learning new fields. It just takes hard work.
I list seasonal items year-round. If I don’t get to it when I have a chance to list it, I might not have another opportunity for a long time, thus bypassing the holiday entirely. If it’s already listed, buyers have the chance to buy it when they decide to search for it.
I’ve been ignoring the “you have watchers in your cart” emails, but I gave a few offers through one the other day and actually got a sale through it! I’m actually surprised. I’ll try it again and see if it results in more salea.
There might be something to this. I sold 20 items yesterday after having a pretty slow week. I don’t think any of the items sold were from offers I sent, but something was jostled. I’ll take what I can get!
Yeah, but the newest update for the mobile app is also for the “send offers to buyers” when you receive a question, in addition to the new way of sending offers to ? buyers. I’ve had the first option via desktop and mobile forever already. I have, however, never gotten the “offer to ? buyers” to appear on either my desktop or mobile.
Version history 5.30.0
2 weeks ago
“Lots of updates for sellers this time, including being able to send offers to anyone who asks a question or is watching their listing.”I’ve checked, and that’s the current mobile version of eBay that I’m running. I have the first part of that, just not the second part. It is odd that their own update doesn’t even work for everyone.
I’ve only been able to get “offers to buyers” to work twice through that link. There’s no option on my desktop or mobile eBay for it otherwise.
I have no idea if the offers I sent even resulted in sales.
I’ve had the option to send “offers to buyers” when they ask a question for a very long time now, so I guess I’m in eBay bizzaro world.
Since I only get a sale on Etsy once a week like once or twice a month, I don’t notice when the direct deposit transfers happen. Sometimes it seems within 12 hours of a sale, other times a few days later. Do they only issue 1 direct deposit a week?
I like being able to instantly spend or transfer money out of Paypal after a sale. Having to wait a week for a direct deposit would be really annoying!
Wow! I can imagine this is going to be more painful for clothing sellers, as well those in the free returns program. This might cause a lot of people to give up on that experiment!
This just sounds more like noticing coincidences, rather than the sale of 1 item directly leads to selling additional like items.
If you have a large number of the same type of item in your store, you will be more likely to sell a greater number of that item compared to items you have a lesser number of. I don’t believe selling 1 specific item on EBay will necessarily lead to additional sales of that same type of item, unless you have a repeat customer specifically coming back to buy a similar item to what they originally purchased.
I agree with this. It’s really easy to fall into a malaise when it comes to certain aspects of this business.
After being too busy to source much over the past few weeks and not maintaining a steady sourcing pattern at all this year, I thought today would be the perfect time to get back to a feeling of normalcy. Of course, as soon as this morning came around, I made up every excuse in the book to maybe put it off for another day or two. I eventually got out of the house, but still. It’s not easy sometimes!
Thrifting has gotten big among younger kids; a number of them might be digging through thrift stores for this sort of material, not physically buying media online.
Record shops are still popular, and more are opening up all the time. While there might not be tower records and an overall proliferation of megastore size shops devoted to music anymore, those that want physical media are still obtaining it.
What is difficult about obtaining new physical music media these days is that a lot of places aren’t stocking it in the numbers they were during the 1990s. It might be impossible to find a new cd from a top billboard artist in your town. This is pushing people to buying these items online, whether by physical or digital media.
That being said, if I had access to youtube or spotify when I was a teenager, I would’ve been all over it! As it was, we had to share mp3 and wav files via very slow dial-up connections. When napster came about, it was amazing!
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