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A lot of it really depends on what I’m listing, who’s looking, the time of year. It’s pretty consistent year-round, overall, though. I normally see $600-1k+ per week, no matter how much work I put into it. The more work, the better quality the items, the higher the sales. Same for anything. The ebay store is only for collectible ephemera and books. Normal, popular books go up on Amazon. So, I am really working with material that people have no *need* for.
In order to get consistent sales, you unfortunately need a really, really large inventory for this category, unlike for an anything goes store. However, once an item is listed, it’s listed. Nothing to change.
It has been inching up over the years. About a year ago, I removed all items priced under a certain amount, and now only focus on higher-priced items. I expect the numbers to continue going up as I continue listing better items.
They’re mainly books and paper items in the niche store, so I’ve got them all boxed and shelved by type and size. I can fit 20-50 books per box, depending on how I tetris them in. For paper items, I can fit several hundred to a thousand in a bankers box, depending on how organized I’m feeling.
I list everything in a batch system. Photograph 10-50 like items at a time, assign them their own folder, list all at the same time using the same template. I just sit down and focus for short bursts of time, then move onto something else before it gets really boring.
It is really difficult to find storage space for the more general items. I list 10 toys/pieces of artwork/games combined and it takes up as much space as like 50 or more books. That’s why that store has less than a hundred items listed at the moment, it’s just too much space required.
I currently have 8,200 items in my ebay store and end and relist when I have the time, usually at least 4 or 5 days a week. I check the number of watchers on my items once or twice a day.
I’ve noticed that usually at least 1 item is rewatched that day. I end and relist anywhere from 100 to 1,000 items at a time. Sometimes, it takes 2 or 3 days for items with a lot of watchers to gain 1 or 2 watchers again. Eventually, they get back up to the 5-10+ watchers they originally had.
I don’t know which items sell based on being relisted. I do see “forgotten” items gain watchers upon relisting, but I don’t know if they also gain sales.
I did originally do list it and forget it for years, but I have changed it up over the past few years. I don’t know how ending and relisting correlates with sales, but I have had increased sales over the past year. This might also have to do with listing thousands of items consistently over the past year that are priced right and are desirable for collectors, less so for ending and relisting.
Pretty much all I know is that consistent listing of desirable items at good price points is what is key for having good ebay sales. The rest seems sort of unnecessary. Still, that won’t stop me from ending and relisting to get some perceived new views on items that I feel have been otherwise neglected, lost in the Ebay search. You never know.
Yeah, I wish the stats on how people looked within your store went that deep with what they provide you in the performance tab. I’ve just always looked Sales Reports Plus to try to get an idea of it.
In September of this year, 11.9% of my customers were repeat buyers. That gives me a pretty good indication that either buyers looked and purchased several items at the same time, or came back repeatedly throughout the month in order to buy. That would be fun to sit down and determine one day, but I don’t really have the time to look into that specific detail right now. Maybe when it’s too cold to go out during the winter?
Going back over the past year of repeat customers, the lowest percentage has been 5%, the highest 14.4%.
It’s possible that if I *did* split the niche store into 2 stores, that the same customers would find me over time at the other store as well, and purchase from both. I used to have a postcard store on delcampe, and one of my regular customers on Ebay at one point did go on a shopping spree on that store as well. However, both stores had over 5,000 items at the time, so quantity is definitely key.
The general store I’m filling up with electronics/vintage toys/artwork/records. It feels too all over the place to also be a second niche store? idk.
Just fun to think about this “out loud.”
I agree that dealing properly with chaos involves maturity. Chaos is inevitable in one’s life, especially if you’re a reseller or an artist. It’s how you deal with that chaos that is the key.
You can sit around and blame others for problems, or you can realize that problems will happen regardless of what you do. Sometimes, people just need to lay off being attached to the emotions that result from their problems. Especially if they’re small problems. Not everything is so bad.
For example, the link problem of this past week. I had 5,000 listings with links in them that needed to be removed. Instead of yelling and crying at my screen upon hearing the news, I thought rationally about what I could do. I had someone help me remove those links, and together we got it done in less than a week.
If I don’t sell enough items to my liking, I run a sale. I list more. I go out and buy more stock. I don’t blame anyone else for my lack of sales.
If a customer has a problem, I think of how I can help them in the least stressful way possible in order to resolve their problem. I try to make them feel as if they have had an overall positive experience, even if something went wrong.
There are a lot of people that are not cut out for reselling. They are the ones that find every step of the process to be an extremely trying orderal. It’s not. It’s fun.
Wikitravel is your friend for cheap eats around the world, or to find meals that are good for homesickness. I found that when I used to grocery shop when I traveled, that some prices for common items would be quite high and that I would be better off just eating at a cheap restaurant? I don’t drive, so I would also be shopping at places in the center of town/by wherever my hostel was. I guess it would have been easier with a car.
I’m surprised that museums in Europe don’t offer free hours/days, like they do around the US.
I’ve been sick for the past week, so I’ve done minimal scouting and listing. It has been a bit of a drag, as I am still selling a bit and am getting space opened up for q4. Oh, well.
“Terrace House” has been on my to watch list for a few months now. You can watch it on Hulu. I think it’s considered the “boring” reality show version of those long, slow shows on Netflix that show someone doing an activity for hours straight. I was really excited when they started bringing those shows to the US from Europe.
For Amazon prime members, there are quite a few add-on channels you can purchase for a few dollars a month in addition to your membership. Fandor and Britbox look promising.
Loved the day in a life video! All the attention to detail, from Ebay items to all the small things you need to think about for customers to feel comfortable and happy in an airbnb. You can tell how much you care for what you do, it’s not just for a paycheck.
Plus, y’all make rural living look nice! I’ve always lived in large cities, but to have a place like that farmhouse. Wow!
I’ve actually had a good week of sales on Ebay this past week. A few large multi-order sales (1 of 20 items!) and some nice sales of older stock. The store is now up to over 7500 items.
I’ve been getting a lot of stock in, but just haven’t had the time to list any of it. I did list 80 items last week, but it’s not enough to catch up with new stock being brought in, or to wittle down the boxes of unlisted stock I’m still going through.
If you like Wentworth, you can watch the show that inspired it on YouTube for free. “Prisoner Cell Block H.” All 692 episodes have been uploaded to YouTube.
The first season and first episode of season 2 of”House of Cards” are really good.
On Hulu, I would recommend “Fargo” and “Handmaid’s Tale”.
On Netflix, “Better Call Saul,” first season of “Bloodline” “Stranger Things.” There are a few decent Marvel shows on there, if you’re into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
I’ve also recently gotten the HBO add-on to Hulu and have been watching previous seasons of their shows on there.
I’ve been using an ION Omni Scan to take close-ups of slides with for listing on ebay, and then taking 1 or 2 separate shots of the slides as a whole for each listing. I almost think you’re better off taking photos for Ebay the way you are, because it makes it really difficult for someone that is just going after the image to just take it and not buy the slide. I’ve been thinking of photographing in a similar manner, or using one of those slide viewers that looks like a tv for extra kitsch value and to make it more difficult to just take the image.
I’m currently sitting on 2 bankers boxes of slides to photograph, meh. It’s fun, but it is a lot of work.
As a Millennial, I know that realistically I’ll never get to retire. I doubt all the money I’m putting into social security will be around by the time I am able to collect. I just hope there’s at least Medicaid left, but who knows with the way it’s currently going.
So, I have to think of life in terms of being semi-retired now. This is the only chance I’ve got. If you do anything creative, having a job on top of it is a no-go, unless it’s a completely meaningless, minimum wage job that expects very little of you. You’re just too drained at night to have anything left to put into anything that is not work. Since I run an Ebay business and do things outside of it, I have to act “retired” at night and have to force myself to not care about having a store.
As fun as running an Ebay business is, I just have to turn the computer off in the afternoon and work on other things. I cannot let the business side of my brain work all day. There’s too much to do! I do this to do those things, not to just run a store 24/7. It is easy to forget, sometimes, that this is not all there is to do (especially in the feedback loop of an Ebay blog/forum).
If you can get to the point of having various income streams running to lessen the burden of your daily attention, you are very lucky indeed! You just have to turn off the “go go go” part of your brain and take it easy at that point. Then, do other things that are not work related, if you want to.
I hope to eventually have a few more income streams (Air B&B, Etsy), but I’m not stressing it. Ebay is taking up too much of my time as it is. And everything else.
Haha, that reminds me of this time I went into a thrift store and found a set of scarce books that I had happened to find, price and list on Ebay only a few weeks before stumbling upon this second set in the thrift store. I was the only seller at the time to really have any of them listed online, either on Ebay or Amazon, so I priced them moderately high for what they were due to relative scarcity at the time.
So, as you can imagine, I was very excited to find dupes of the same set and sit on them until my originally listed ones sold. Only problem: they were priced at my listing prices on Ebay! They actually wrote on an index card above the whole stack: “as listed on Ebay, $25 per book, scarce!” It’s really weird to be defeated by your own pricing in the midst of the hunt.
With my niche vintage store, I will just sit on items forever. In a normal ship-out, I will pack things that sell fast as well as an item or 2 that has been listed for 2-7 years. Yay.
You never know when your customer will look for and buy your item. Sometimes, it is within a few hours. Other times, it takes a few or several years.
This morning, I packed 1 item that had been listed for a day, 1 that had been listed for a week, and 1 that had been listed for over 2 years. After packing, I got a bulk offer on 15 items to 1 collector. They had been listed for over a year. Yay. Money and space freed up for more stock.
That being said, I do sometimes toss stuff and reprice. Space isn’t infinite, unfortunately.
I used to do 30 days, but recently changed it back to gtc. I am too busy to constantly end and relist listings, even with the bulk edit option. I find that the bulk editor glitches a lot these days, so I try not to use it if I don’t have to. That being said, when I do have time, I end and sell similar items when they are within a day of their ending time.
Maybe 5% of my listings have BO. I have a niche store and know the price limits for most items overall that people are willing to spend, so I price initially based on research/past knowledge of sales and gut. The ones with BO are higher priced items that I would be happy to take less for because I’d rather have money than stock just sitting there.
Most of my items have “free shipping” built into the price, but I have started to add shipping to a few hundred new listings recently and not seen a decline in sales. It’s overall a wash, though. Shipping is built in no matter what.
7200 item anchor store.
