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Yeah, I get it. I’ve thought about putting a travel trailer as well in the driveway for additional storage or air b&b, but then always had the fear that someone would drive off with it in the middle of the night, haha. Or build a tiny house in the backyard and turn it into an air b&b or additional storage (whichever could make the most additional money).
I’ve seen a lot of people here talk about focusing on small items when they don’t have a lot of space. Maybe try something like that?
I LOVE finding Kwajalein Atoll / Marshall Islands military books and ephemera. They will always sell quickly, and for good money. Surprised yours took a bit to sell – might have been too expensive off the bat for some people, but that booklet does look fairly scarce.
Haven’t they proven that it is effective over the long-term? They have had a store going for 10+ years. It’s still overall been buy low, sell high, sit on it until it a sale comes in.
If you have to pay $300 a month for a store that can hold 6,000 or 10,000 items, what is wrong with adding as much as possible to the store if the cost will be the same anyway?
I think what you also have to keep in mind is that their earlier years may have had items that were huge home-runs, but they have “flat lined” to maintaining the same type of sales levels with stock that isn’t as extraordinary. Or, maybe they were sourcing more in their earlier years and selling for less with more sales each week and a higher STR, but were miserable doing it because that is a sweatshop mentality as they describe. If that is the case, maybe they are doing better now with a much larger store but less focus and effort on it than when they were constantly worrying about numbers and what to add to their stores.
Selling less often for higher ASP with no need to go out sourcing all of the time = the key to staying in this business long-term without getting burnt out. No one can maintain an exuberance doing this for this long. You can’t source at thrift stores 2-5 days a week and still be greatly enjoying it 10 years later. You will either burn out or have to change in order to keep on doing this.
I thought you could only donate items for what you paid for them? This sounds sort of weird, otherwise.
When I do have errors in my listings, customers usually tell me. There seems to be a community of people on Ebay with nothing better to do than to correct you on certain aspects of your listings. If you have an item that is location based, someone will come in and tell you it’s not where it says it is – even if the the town name is printed on the item you are selling! It is weird. I actually haven’t had customers like this in a long time, but I used to use them as my eyes for listings that needed corrections. I guess my listings are perfect now. 😉
Otherwise, I absolutely do not have the time to edit or check for errors with my older listings. I just check over what I’ve just listed quickly after I list to make sure pictures match up and the info is right in the titles. I can either put my effort into listing items, or I can do something that is not online selling based with my time. If I am in for the day with the intention of working on my ebay store, I will just list new items.
I’ve just looked at my store, and 12 out of 23 items that have sold in my main store during the past week have been listed for 2 or 2+ years. A significant amount of my inventory sold has been listed for a long time. If my items are selling, there’s no need for me to constantly be surveying them to see if they will sell. They will.
I seriously just glossed over the formula portion of the opening paragraph because it is irrelevant to selling long-tail. Applying this or that to an item won’t generate a sale within a week or two for true long-tail.
One strategy I have for true 1 of a kind items is pricing them low, even considering for their rarity. I actually have a lot of scarce ephemera pieces priced at 10, 15, 20 apiece f/s in order to draw in younger customers or those that are prolific collectors that don’t have a TON of money. I don’t have everything of this sort priced high.
Having items at these price levels does not spur sales any faster. People will buy items like these when they will, and sometimes they buy in quantity when they do because the prices are lower. That’s about the only advantage in this case. Still, even priced that low, 3-5 years for a sale is not uncommon.
Sales don’t matter if the person who is looking to buy the item isn’t looking at your item when the sale is going on. I only run sales because it seems to jostle the Ebay search system in general – if I go a day without a sale or with very low sales, I run a sale and sales come back like normal. Long-tail items do not go along with the run a sale or run an auction mode of selling.
TBH, I never adjust my listings at all once the item is listed, unless I made an initial mistake in the listing. After that, it’s completely hands off. I think that’s more for people with very small inventories that don’t have a lot to list. The most I do is end and sell similar in bulk. I have never had the time to adjust active listings during my history of selling on Ebay. I honestly don’t think editing a listing helps at all. I sell extremely old items in my inventory all of the time, and I did not do a thing to sell them other than perhaps ending and selling similar.
For people that don’t actively seek or hold long-tail inventories, it is very hard to imagine the sort of people that seek out the items that are present in them. In a way, we are pretty much holding onto items for that 1 person 5 years in the future that will think, “hey, I would love to have that” as a whim one day and then yay, sold. Or, tv or movie productions that have yet to be made. Collectors that don’t realize they need a specific item for their collection until they need it right at that moment, 3 years later. There’s no way to speed any of that up.
Getting up to 10k listings is seriously my goal. It brings the cost of each listing down to $.03 a month.
I’ve had items listed that have taken 10 years to sell. It’s still within my 10k listing count, so it doesn’t matter that it has taken so long to sell.
That doesn’t mean that items have to be held onto forever. Some items get damaged in storage and need to be removed. Others are just duds that need to go.
However, if an item is really unique and you have a feeling someone will eventually want it, it is best to just wait for that person to buy it. What I am seeing is that long-tail selling requires a completely different frame of mind than that required for str, numbers, business plan sort of thinking. They are just different ways of looking at having a business.
Okay, let me do an experiment with this.
I have 2 ebay stores. 1 is my stuffed anchor niche store with over 9,000 items, super list it and forget it strategy. The second is a basic “general” anything & everything store that is usually hovering around 100-110 items.
Last month, I sold exactly 147 items on the niche store. With roughly 9,200 items currently available for sale on it, my STR is low.
My 2nd store sold 10 items on an active inventory that consists of 100-110 items at any given time (I have optimistic plans to expand it up to 125-150 this month). If my active inventory is 100, my STR would be 10%. I guess since it’s currently near 110, it’s slightly lower than 10% STR. Maybe 8.5-9%?
Under these business parameters, would my smaller, secondary store be considered the more successful store because the STR is higher? Or the larger store with long-tail, very low STR but overall greater number of sales?
It has been like that for at least a few years with isbn books. I’m not sure how long, but as far as I know at least 3 years. It actually looks like an improvement over the way it used to look on the listing page – they used to have books with catalog images show up right over the description field. With the way they have them now, most people will probably just ignore it.
What I find interesting about this is that my sales are consistantly at 150-200 items sold per month on ebay, no matter what. I would say 35% or greater of the items I sell are either genuinely scarce or have rarely been listed before on the internet, if ever. Why do I still see such consistency of items being sold at all price points?
I could see items that people want or need being sold at those rates, but a lot of items are just ??? because I’m the only person in the world apparently that finds the item interesting enough to be picked up and listed.
Based on the inability to 100% effectively price or gauge customer reception to what is being introduced to the marketplace, how am I stuck in the rut of similar number of items being sold? Shouldn’t there be a wild discrepancy each month based on what is listed if it has never been introduced online before? Either absolutely no interest, or an insane amount and I sell out right away and that overall boosts my numbers up? Is it overall that hot & cold, but it just ends up at the same numbers month after month anyway?
I am listing the same types of items from a broad perspective, but that shouldn’t really make any difference if the items themselves are completely different, especially when they are being sold to completely different people with different interests than the previous items that have sold month after month.
I did have a boost last year when I sold off a collection that created sales of 200-300 items sold per month. Since I have not had access to a collection like that since, my sales have adjusted downward to 150-200 items sold per month on a greater amount of listings than a year ago. Hence, not being able to purely compare overall sales year over year or fully project growth or plain steadiness other than just bloating my store up and hoping it catches more eyes. Finding amazing “home run” collections will really screw your overall sense of sales if you are basing them on past years.
I pretty much feel like the underwear gnomes from south park to compare the way I’m running my business vs. you guys with flow charts.
I find this whole running an ebay business with forecasts and data to be fascinating for smaller sellers who source using thrift stores, estate sales, etc,. I still don’t think that the majority of us can use the same tools to run our random, or general store businesses the same way that people at Old Navy or Walmart use to determine their businesses. We can’t even compare ourselves to Amazon, which would be the closest means to selling like ourselves.
Our stock is determined by what we find in the wild. Our sales come about by how much effort we put into listing it, and how long we are willing to hold.
I have always personally tried to run my Ebay store like a B&M bookstore. That means buying all the books I find interesting, and then dumping them in my store. If other people find them interesting, good, I have a good eye for what people are looking for. If people don’t like them at the moment, oh well, someone will come around in 5-10 years who will appreciate what I have picked out.
I just know that I cannot forecast what people will like in the future from my store. One type of item will sell really well for a few years, and then bam, silence for a few years before sales pick back up to normal. I can forecast what they like now, and have liked in the past, but other than that I cannot determine the specific item they will like at a specific time. All I can do is stock vintage used items for when they are interested again.
Wow, that is neat! I found a forum post from a year ago where a bunch of hosts were also asking for at home work opportunities. Someone responded they hired people from home, but didn’t go into details. Very cool.
$13.50 an hour, how generous! I can’t believe customer service pay hasn’t gone up at all after all of these years. $15-20 an hour is where starting pay should begin at.
Funnily enough, I was thinking earlier about these sort of jobs and long-term international travel. Does anyone know of an at-home customer support position that hires Americans that live abroad? Just curious…
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