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Listening to the podcast now. Yeah, my sales dropped 50% in December of 2008. THAT WAS A FUN HOLIDAY SEASON. 🙁 It took a few years to recover. At that point, I was primarily on Amazon, so I’m not sure how Ebay itself was doing during that time. I had my inventory duplicated on Half.com and some listings were up on Ebay due to Alibris. I did have a small, separate inventory on Ebay during that time, but that was just extra money and was not really a concern. Sales began to recover in 2010 for Amazon.
This past year into now is the closest it has felt to recession levels since the recession. November-December was lackluster. January was better, but not as good as it normally is. February and March have been meh. My Ebay sales are actually UP YOY, but so are my stock levels. You need more inventory to make the same or even less than in the past few years.
What I noticed during the last recession is that A LOT of resellers disappeared. However, new resellers took their place just as quickly. It evened out.
I also can’t believe the amount of resellers I’m seeing everywhere. More sellers with the same amount of customers = a lot of desperate resellers. I’m sure a lot of them will quit during the next recession, only to be replaced by a new set of resellers. The new set will go from a time of prosperity to googling “how can I make money at home?” and find all the youtube resellers bragging about their Goodwill Outlet haul videos: “How I spent $30 to make $1,000!” It’s going to get rougher out there, to an extent. Buyers will temporarily decrease. Some new buyers might also be drawn to Ebay that are used to paying full price for new items. Still, once it is really felt in the economy, a lot of people will pretty much stop buying anything or eating out or just plain having fun.
Congrats on hitting 10k feedback! I actually think that having a 10k+ feedback helps attract buyers. I noticed that once I hit that numbers, my sales went up (this was a few months ago). Anything helps!
Boredom is good. A lot of us quit our jobs to work on outside projects that aren’t easy to do while maintaining a 9-5. I think it’s more problematic when people allow themselves to be a “reseller” in both profession AND hobbies. Yikes.
Boredom is a good reminder that you didn’t quit your job so you could be a 24/7 reseller worker bee. You are not 100% defined as being a reseller. Burnout happens when you forget and put too much work into it, not leaving enough time for everything else (the everything else should come before the work, once you have been doing this long enough to mainly work on auto-pilot).
When I do bulk buys, I like to think of it as the equivalent of x normal sourcing days. “Oh, if I do this bulk buy for this amount of inventory, it’s the equivalent of 10 days of sourcing.” If you only source 1 or 2 days a week, in actuality that means 1+ month of sourcing.
From what it sounds like, you’d do better picking the cream rather than trying to buy the collection outright. If you already have too much inventory to list, it’s not worth adding an entire collection that might have a lot of junk in it you’ll never get around to dealing with.
03/19/2019 at 9:13 am in reply to: Promoted Listings Trending Rates – 16.4% for Collectibles!? #58928I still think PL is a cash grab that doesn’t significantly increase sales, no matter how much studies say otherwise. All that matters is having good stock with good prices, photos, descriptions, feedback and a fair return policy. I’m currently at 50+ orders per week on a store of 10k, and 5-10 orders per week on a store of 250 listings.
My local goodwills start their coats off at $39.99 + up, shirts at $8.99 + up, etc,. Still, I see long lines of people with overflowing carts. Resellers are still making bank if they’re stocking up at those prices. If there are still plenty of eager buyers at increased pricing levels, there’s no need for them to lower their prices.
03/18/2019 at 1:11 pm in reply to: Promoted Listings Trending Rates – 16.4% for Collectibles!? #58883This statistic is staggering. I can’t believe that many people are willing to throw away their hard-earned work that easily. Are there less f/t’ers overall doing this compared to even 10 years ago? No matter what, it is not a sound financial decision to throw that much money at questionable results with little data to back up that that sort of fee is doing anything to generate sales (less than a year’s worth of data at this point?).
Yikes.
I’ve heard “lovefool” by the Cardigans like 5 times over the past 2 weeks. That, plus a bunch of other late 90s songs in ubers. I also saw an article the other day that Bush are now considered “critically acclaimed artists'” which surprised the heck out of me.
03/14/2019 at 9:20 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 402: Can You Build An eBay Business On Repeat Buyers? #58620Wow! In all seriousness, that is one of my dream niches. I will sometimes stumble on snapshots from that time period with similar material, but never a huge cache of them that I can steadily list through. So cool.
This is what I would do, but a lot of storage space is needed:
If you’re going to the Goodwill Outlet, temporarily reduce your asp for items to $25 or even $20 from $30-40. If you’re already buying items at those price points, reduce your items from the goodwill outlet down to $15.
You should be able to increase your store numbers quickly, and temporarily have to spend more time listing/packing than you are now. This will also help you to reach your listing goals more easily of 1k per day – having a higher number of lower-pricer items to increase activity in your store. This should also temporarily get you above the $100 a day hump, and bring you up to $125-$150 a day relatively quickly.
Once you have established a more active storefront and have a healthier cashflow, at that point invest more money into the original idea of higher asp items.
I would make an offer of $14 and say that it’s the best you can do since it already includes free shipping. I find that when people ask for huge discounts, they are fishing for ANY discount since they want the item. Offering even a small discount will please the buyer and make them feel as if they have “won.”
03/05/2019 at 9:58 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 401: You Don’t Have To Quit Your Job To Sell On eBay #58146F/t is rooougggghhhh. I’ve been consistenly at 1.3-1.5k gross for the past 2 weeks for both ebay stores & etsy, but that has been due to my winter listing binge. Now that it’s almost spring, a lot of that time will be devoted to sourcing (I have been doing a lot of that as well this winter, but nowhere near the amount I will do over the next 9 months).
As a part-timer, you just list when you have time. As a full-timer, you are constantly changing your processes in order to wring out the most effective use of your time. I am seriosusly tired, and I will be spending all day today working on changing things up again today.
Sounds like you didn’t do the research, and are faulting the buyer for utilizing a feature of Ebay it is well within his reason to use. As a fellow postcard seller, I really hope you didn’t turn this guy off of buying postcards on Ebay!
OMG the title.
Just take the money and run. As a buyer, I would not bid on this auction after seeing this behavior happen twice.
If you’re buying clothes from the bins, definitely wash them. If they’re from your closet, they might not necessarily smell bad, but wrinkles do not make for good photos.
I’ve found that my sales have gone up since I went solely GTC on everything more than 6 months ago. The 30 day manual fall off/relist didn’t actually work that well for my business, in hindsight. While I still do believe that Ebay favors activity in your store, the 30 day cycle way of going about it is not necessarily it.
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