Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
I am so sorry to hear about what you have been through. I’m glad you have gotten past the worst of it.
My advice for stale inventory: I LOVE having a huge inventory. The larger, the better. Sometimes, it just takes forever to find the right buyer. Items aren’t necessarily stale, they’re just long-tail. That being said – sometimes you do just need to get rid of stuff.
If your items are priced right, keep them listed. Maybe run a small sale to get some attention to the items.
If they’re not worth as much as you have them listed for, run a sale or an auction to bring the price down and clear them out. Or, delist them and donate them to a thrift store. They can always be replenished with new inventory from the bag sales.
I understand the reasoning behind doing that, but it sounds like such an exhausting process to sell things at for the price you originally wanted to sell them at. I understand it’s all based on customer psychology studies for business, but still, wow. I just give my customers occasional 5% or 10% off sales to clear out stock, and otherwise make them pay my requested full-price the majority of the time lol.
You did good splitting up the ephemera lot to sell individually. Unless they’re genealogy specific, you are not really going to get a lot for an unsorted mixture of unspecified town ephemera. Of course, other themes do well bundled up (Valentine’s, Christmas, Halloween, for example), but for town specific stuff, you are definitely better off selling item by item.
I built 2 new bookcases for my office this weekend to store unlisted books in and have found so many boxes of unlisted ephemera on the floor in my office. This is on top of the ephemera I already know I have to get listed that’s stored elsewhere. As much as I love dealing with it, you can really drown in the stuff if you don’t keep up with it. It’s just so easy to put it off to the side while you deal with larger items (books, in my case).
Worthpoint is really useful to extrapolate data from for items similar to the ones you are listing. You might not find exact matches, but you can determine the popularity of an item based on selling prices from yeard ago, even if a similar item is not currently available for sale.
For example, 2 weeks ago I was going to list an older, smaller book that was completely falling apart for $10 with free shipping. I looked up books similar to the subject and saw that when they were available, they went for a few hundred dollars. I priced my copy for $300 obo and received an offer the next day for $150. I took it, and have already received positive feedback from the buyer.
I love worthpoint!
05/02/2018 at 12:11 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 358: Knowing What You Know Right Now, Would You Start Your Business Today? #38918My comment disappeared again, reposting:
Just got a chance to listen to the podcast. I think the changes through the years with Ebay have been positive (I might be alone in thinking that!). I no longer fight for TRS status, so I don’t care what hoops have to be jumped through(sorry). Back in the day, we didn’t even have a TRS to get a discount on. I recall the savings Ebay passed back on back in the day to sellers was for merely being a powerseller?
In terms of being able to list items on Ebay, you had auction & fixed price that was charged at a similar rate to auctions. If you had a store, your store listings were actually HIDDEN from the front page of Ebay search. You had to be a savvy buyer and click on the bottom of a page to see the hidden store listings. A lot of listings got lost in the search due to this.
Now, you have to pay more to have a store, but your listings are actually VISIBLE from the start. I don’t know why Ebay didn’t do this the whole time, but at least it eventually happened. Yes, I wish that the stores were both cheaper and had more items included in the number of listings, but I’ll take what I can get. I also think the “free” shipping supplies are a big improvement. I have actually been receiving a lot of positive feedback for the protective way items have been shipped in Ebay’s air mailers. I think that was actually a good strategy on their part.
For early (early 2000s) Amazon sellers, do you remember zshops? For some reason, a lot of items listed to Amazon in the early 2000s were shuttled straight through to your zshop. I don’t remember Amazon’s catalog pages being the same as they are now. I don’t remember when the switch happened between zshop and marketplace. I do remember having to switch over inventory from zshop to marketplace and create pages in the new Amazon marketplace for those items.
Sites change and evolve over the years. Ebay has gotten better, Amazon has gotten really difficult to sell on (FBA really changed the game for 3rd party sales, and now they too are starting to have difficulties with higher fees).
Streamlining major policies for Ebay is not the worst thing in the world, especially for those that like to compete to be “the best of the best.” Hold up the impossibly high standards. Ship same day. Ship for free. Accept returns for free. Customers love that. If you don’t want to do that, don’t. You can still sell things online. Otherwise, having basic policies to shore up your business and make it appear outwardly to the world that it is a business is a good thing. It is good to have an outwardly professional appearance shown to your buyers, even if you’re only sitting inside your house listing in your pajamas.
relisting as “sell similar”
GTC in case I can’t keep up with the work of ending and relisting them. That’s why I wanted to know if there was any similar bump at the end of the 30 day cycle within GTC. Running them at 30 days apiece would be a nightmare with an inventory this large.
I usually only do 200-1000 listings per day. It takes anywhere from 5-15 minutes each morning, depending on how many are ending that morning. I use the bulk editor to do it while I’m making coffee. It’s nbd in terms of time.
I end the listings and use the “sell similar” feature in the pull-down menu for the bulk editor page in the Ebay seller hub.
2 items I’ve had listed for over a year now already have watchers within the first 5 hours of being “newly listed” today. I haven’t seen these items with watchers before. From items “newly listed” 3 days ago, another 2 that haven’t had watchers before have watchers now. It repeats like that for “newly listed” items nearly everyday with my inventory. Old listings gain new watchers. It makes no sense, but eh.
2 or 3 years ago, when I first had nearly 10,000 listings active(I’ve since changed pricing, reduced the store down to 4,000 listings, and brought them up again to over 9,000 listings), I came to a point where sales just…stopped. I had originally been doing the method of GTC without adjusting or ending listings. My stock was exactly the same as it had always been, but I was getting no sales.
I then experimented with ending listings that were at the end of their 30 day period within the GTC cycle. Sales started again, and they were really high when I first began doing it. Listings had somehow become lost within Ebay search (some had been listed for over 5+ years without ending or having adjustments made to them).
I now still end items everyday, if possible, and relist them. Surprisingly enough, I do have sales of items that have just been “newly” listed, sometimes within a day or 2. I also gain additional watchers on items that just newly appear. Some items end with no watchers. Within a few days of being listed, watchers appear on them. I don’t understand why it works, but it does.
would this also apply to ending and relisting items at the end of their 30 day cycles, but on gtc? or would the ebay system already have to know that an item is in and at the end of a 30 day cycle and this only works for an item that is listed for 30 day cycles?
i have most items on gtc, but i try to end them and relist them on their last days in order to do a method similar to yours. i only have them on gtc in case i get too busy and can’t end/relist each day, so to avoid them falling in an unlisted black hole if i can’t keep up with them.
every time i start to list stuff i no longer want, i look at the piles of unlisted stock i already have to list and go “ughhh…” now, i have bags of unwanted clothes and other random items mixed in with stock, and i just never get around to the clothes because it’s no fun for me. that’s after weeding out stuff that’s not good for online. if i have to list stuff that’s not enjoyable to list, it has to have a higher asp, at the very least.
i’ve created an instagram just for ebay related stuff. this mainly relates to my more “general store” model of selling (similar to what most people do on here) that i am just starting to focus on a bit more. this is for hard goods, records, art, clothes, etc,. also, ideas for building an ebay business, sharing items sold, items to list, hauls, etc,. thethriftingnerd is the name for this account.
the account i originally listed above is for items related to my niche, collections and cats. not really good for ebay tawk.
They should be paying us to go!
I use IrfanView to crop images and make other corrections when editing images for listing. It is free for Windows users. I have pretty much used it everyday for years, love it.
For items I have to photograph, I just use a cheap point & shoot camera and pop the sd card out. I bought a fast desktop computer to speed up everything and paid extra for an sd card reader in it. I then put the photos in a folder dated that day, and can quickly upload photos straight from the computer into the ebay listing page. I sometimes photograph 5 items at a time, sometimes 2-3. I can zip in and out with picture taking.
For business, I want to be quick and get it over with. I find photographing with a phone and uploading it to various apps to be too cumbersome for the quantity I want to list.
-
AuthorPosts