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Seconding the lot suggestion. Some lots can actually do pretty well, with the right keywords.
The way I see these returns is just streamlining what should be good business practices. If you don’t want to accept returns at all (which is still accepting returns if it’s NAD), you can do that. If you want to accept returns, accept them for 30 days. If you have a 30 day return policy, have it fit in a certain framework of returns; don’t just have each seller creating their own return policy that doesn’t fit in with everyone else’s. It’s less confusing for the buyer, and the buyer is all that really matters in the case. A buyer should not have to read through a list of 50 rules to buy an item (which I have seen sellers do over the years, and it looks like you’re entering a formal marriage contract with the seller when you’re just trying to buy an item).
That’s interesting that Ebay tried that. I think it’s pretty evident from the number of storage units in this country that most people err to the side of keep rather than return, even with 90 day return policies.
Perhaps a way to engage Ebay on this issue is to bring up the additional burden on shipping/return costs this would place on sellers and ask for a deeper discount provided by Ebay specifically for “buyer’s remorse” returns of larger items. Since this is Ebay’s policy, maybe they could throw in 50% of the return costs, or figure out some way they could compensate sellers for dealing with these returns on larger items?
I don’t like that buyers can say they like or want an item and get a return on it, but at this point in history I believe that it is just a cost of doing business. A lot of buyers expect both of their shipping costs to be refunded, as well as the item cost for items that have absolutely nothing wrong with them. In some cases, it could be a customer fishing for an outright refund if the iten is cheap and it will cost more to refund all 3 aspects of what they are buying.
It is painful, but there is really nothing you can do about it with current expectations put in customers heads.
Most sellers should have money set aside in the event that someone will pull such a stunt. That’s about all you can do.
Amazon at least doesn’t force you to take back textbooks at the end of the semester, thank god. Every semester I have a few students trying to return books they bought 4 or 5 months previously with the excuse “no longer wanted.” Nope!
This seems like the first update in a long time that’s nbd. Simplified returns just seems to be catching up with Amazon’s return system. You ask to return something, Ebay will just send them a label. Before that on Ebay, you had to create a return label in your shipping program and email it to them. Agh.
30 day returns should not cause a flood of returns. I bet most people assumed that there were already 30 day returns for most items on Ebay. 14 day returns was too short of a return period.
During Christmas, Amazon requires up close to 90 day returns for items ordered:
Items shipped by Amazon.com between November 1 and December 31 of this year, may be returned until January 31 of the following year for a full refund, subject to our other return guidelines listed below.
Ebay is nothing compared to that, ha.
05/23/2018 at 7:12 am in reply to: ebay User Agreement update has been released – Listing Visibility #40777I barely even read Ebay’s “important” messages, let alone their actual user agreement. I figure it’s all fairly boilerplate in order to protect their butts in case they get sued for some minor (legal, according to their legalese) infraction by crazed sellers or buyers?
Even if there was something ghastly in the language of it, oh well? Just keep your head down and list, nothing you can really do to change whatever they say in their standard documentation.
I know you guys have a lot of slow-moving, long-tail antiquarian books. You might find they sell as well on Amazon MF as they do on Ebay, with less initial work in prep to list them. Since you have the storage space, all you will have to do is ship them after listing them, just the same as you would if they sold on Ebay.
I don’t sell brand new items on there because they ask for invoices to even list “brand new.” Items that are sealed go up on Ebay as brand new or on Amazon as “like new.” If the items are not sealed, they are mainly listed as G or VG.
I never got into selling on Amazon the way you guys did with large RA items, sinks and sort of items. I don’t know what the difference would be with MF for those sort of items.
The advice you were given is both correct and wrong. You can do it, but it is a lot of work to keep up on repricing, culling, buying new items. Plus, you fulfill everything yourself, so you have to have time set aside everyday to ship in order to meet up with your shipping metrics.
Yeah, my items are definitely at a disadvantage being on MF. You are not only competing with FBA on items, you are also competing directly against Amazon themselves. It is really hard.
Combination of retail arbitrage, estate sales, thrift stores, just like for Ebay.
I find duplicates of items all of the time while I’m out sourcing, but I have been doing this for so long that I know what will sell when, so I grab it even if it doesn’t “look good” when you look at it with a scanner. I don’t intentionally go out looking for 1000x of an item, like the Walmart sort of RA.You won’t hear many people talk about making a p/t or f/t income on Amazon because most of those people tend to stick either to Reddit, Instagram or Amazon Seller Forums. They are for the most part FBA sellers, and they are not really interested in selling on Ebay, unless it is for clothes or shoes.
I’ve noticed a lot of people that used to say it was “so easy to make money selling on Amazon” have pretty much become completely quiet over the past year. Thank god. With all the new fee increases for FBA sellers that have been put in place or are coming up in the next few months, it is going to be nearly impossible to sell on Amazon unless you like micromanaging your inventory and creating flow charts for the length of sales for items based on ranks, sales history, etc,. At that point, it is not really selling. You will basically have to be your own personal statistician for every single item you have listed starting in September for FBA.
That is pretty much the result of “it’s so easy to sell on Amazon!” Everyone just filled the warehouses with junk because their phones told them to, not because they had any real knowledge of what they were doing.
When I went f/t selling online, I was 100% Amazon MF. The bulk of my inventory is still on Amazon MF, but I have slowly spent more time and effort working on Ebay. Now, my sales are 30% Ebay/70% Amazon, or 50% Ebay/50% Amazon, depending on the week and time of year. I maintain 2 separate inventories, and work more on Amazon than on Ebay, even though my efforts are finally starting to show on Ebay with those 50% weeks sometimes. I COULD focus all of my efforts on Amazon and do fine and make a living that way by just working on it more, but I prefer to have items spread out over different venues just in case. I also intend on working on Etsy, whenever I have the time.
If I could have stayed 100% Amazon, that would have been fine. I have plenty to do outside of selling online. But, the combination of the introduction of FBA and the competition of sellers out there in the wild for Amazon have really just make me shake my head and go “nope” at just 100% Amazon. You have to be a certain sort of robot to maintain just Amazon and be fine with that, and I am not.
Amazon requires luck & perseverance, while Ebay requires luck & knowledge.
LOVE scan sheets. I couldn’t imagine running a business without them. I use Endicia, and it includes the scan sheet functionality. I bring a large amount of mail to the post office each day (10-50+ packages per day), and I would feel so bad if the postal employees had to scan each item individually to get the tracking in.
I used to just leave the packages on the counter at the post office, and it would sometimes take days for them to get into the system (if ever). At least with scan sheets, your item is in the system and it is harder for customers to say “the item never shipped” or some such excuse, when you clearly have and they have received it.
Elisabeth Moss was also in a movie last year called “Mad To Be Normal,” loosely based on the work of R.D. Laing. He was in the anti-psychiatry movement at the same time as Scientologists were during the 1960s.
What I find more odd about Elisabeth Moss is that she was married to Fred Armisen. He’s pretty questionable, from what I have read…
But Armisen’s most recent ex-wife, Mad Men actress Elisabeth Moss, has been quite public about her ex-husband’s failings. She described her one-year marriage to Armisen in a New York cover story from last March:
“Looking back, I feel like I was really young, and at the time I didn’t think that I was that young,” Moss says. “It was extremely traumatic and awful and horrible.”
A year earlier, she said that Armisen has to pretend to be a “normal person”:
“One of the greatest things I heard someone say about him is, ‘He’s so great at doing impersonations. But the greatest impersonation he does is that of a normal person.’ To me that sums it up.
To keep this “off-topic,” the episode that aired last night was rough!
I feel that during the course of the first years of establishing a business like this, your main focus really has to be on the business (50-60+ hours a week), and you can’t really let your thoughts drift to other ventures. Then, you just reach a point in which you feel you can take it easier and get back to what’s really important in life, and why you left your job in the first place, or make it more difficult on yourself and pile on more work elsewhere.
It is maybe during this transitional time between f/t work and taking it easy that most people go astray. They feel that once they leave their f/t jobs, that life should be easier. They should go immediately from their f/t work to coasting by. In reality, it is not like that.
It is more difficult to work for yourself than for an employer. You have to keep sustained focus and effort on what you are doing with no one breathing down your neck other than yourself. You are only accountable to yourself. Sometimes, it takes more than a year or two to feel settled, if ever.
Hence, why people like Jay & Ryanne will sometimes have a podcast in which they sound panicky because sales were unexpectedly slower that week. Just when you think everything is fine, sometimes it’s momentarily not. That’s when you have to deal with how you deal with your emotions over what is just a normal business blip. When you have been doing this forever, you will still find stuff that will surprise you. Sales, sourcing, customers, you name it. It never gets dull, nor do your reactions to all of it!
The show has run out of book and is somehow more depressing than ever! I like how they show what the Colonies would look like.
It is seriously the bleakest show I can think of that’s airing right now. I don’t know if it would be right to say I “enjoy” watching it, but I watch it because it has many valid underlying messages to it.
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