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One thing I’ve noticed recently that may be part of the reason for slow sales is Ebay is sometimes choosing which category to show your buyers. At least on mobile seating. Even if your item contains every keyword the buyer types in, it sometimes hides your item by only showing one category. It happened to me on a jersey. No matter what I did I couldn’t get my jersey to pull up. So I looked to see what category the results were listed in and realized mine was not in that category. A buyer can choose after to show all categories but most of the time they just look at what ebay shows them. I don’t know if this is a temporary problem or a new method they are trying out or what. But it’s not good because sometimes ebay picks the wrong category to show you. I moved my jersey into the other category and it showed up the next search.
Thank you for your responses so far! To answer Jay, I have applied for mostly customer service type positions (call centers, data entry, front desk). I’ve also applied for a few hybrid positions where it’s half warehouse half clerical. Prior to ebay I had warehouse, call center, customer service, retail, and food industry experience. Some of the employers don’t even ask me questions about my eCommerce job, they skip right to the job I had before that one. I don’t think they know how to proceed talking about ebay as a job. And i try to “sell” it but really it didn’t work out so great if I’m there to get a job anyway. It worked out great in the first year or two but for some reason my sales declined and my money dried up to put back into it. The thing is, I know I have a great mind to help someone else achieve their goals. It’s really their loss for not hiring me, but I can’t make them hire me. I have never had physical limitations before so not being able to apply for jobs that require more standing is hurting me. But I can’t do anything about that right now so I’m focusing on the jobs I can do. I almost think it’s a let down situation. On paper it looks like I have this great online business but then when they ask specifics and find out it’s just Ebay and Amazon they lose interest and right back to the two options of responses I get.
I wrote a long post about this but opted for the short version instead. I don’t like to ignore buyers. It sends the message that you are either too big of a seller to deal with customer service or that you simply don’t care about their buying experience. It’s very easy to just write back and at least apologize and remind them that they can return their item. Ignoring someone is just asking for a negative feedback. They are giving you the chance to be proactive and take care of the issue before it turns into a bigger issue and I’d rather have them do that than to leave me a surprise negative. But to each their own.
You can keep it super simple and just set up a tripod when you go to make a meal. Then just talk your way through it. I certainly don’t want you to have to add more work to your plate but if your already cooking anyway, might as well film it 🙂
Do you have any plans to do a cooking YouTube series? Seriously people would watch videos of you cooking with your instant pot. I suck at cooking but I’m thinking of buying one soon. I know there are already videos on YouTube but I don’t know those people and it might be interesting to see what you guys are cooking since you do it more frugally. Even just a few videos would be cool.
It could be a trivet kettle stand. Others are calling theirs that. They are not butterflies but similar concept.
I have a question for you guys. Your second store doesn’t bring in a lot of money compared to your other store, but you do have a decent amount of inventory. That seems to be the issue for a lot of sellers who can’t figure out how to make more money in general with their store. So, what would you do differently with your second store if you wanted it to match the income of your first store? That answer could help a lot of people. Why do you think it doesn’t make a lot and what would you add to to make it more profitable? Would you source differently for it?
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this but you may have sold your Alexandria paintings because of Walking Dead. Alexandria is an important location in the Walking Dead tv show so it could have went to a Walking Dead fan. Either way, great sale. If you happen to live close to Alexandria though, you could easily buy souvenirs with the town name on it and people would probably buy it for a Walking Dead souvenir.
Yeah I mentioned that in my comment. It’s definitely unfortunate. But they did just introduce long sleeve shirts and we’re hoping for other products. It’s a low profit margin but it has the ability to keep selling. It’s like your nail polish listing. You made 1 listing and now they just keep selling. I have friends who bring thousands doing it. You have to work your way up. But it’s free upfront to do which is the best part. And no inventory to deal with.
I also wanted to talk about Bingo. We used to play years ago and it was more like your newest bingo place. And the older women in there took it seriously. But it was back when you could smoke in restaurants and you would walk in and the smoke would be so thick it looked like fog. You’d come out of there reeking like cigg smoke. I always wondered what it was like now that they can’t smoke in there anymore but we haven’t been back. It is fun but can be very expensive. We also tried a sweepstakes gaming place recently just for fun. We went during the day when it was empty inside and played a fish game. You can use more skill to play that one. We came out with money but we were okay with losing it in the first place. We just spent 20. But players in there at night are usually desperate for money. They are trying to pay bills and its sad because their probably going to lose.
You’re completely wrong about Merch by Amazon. If you sell a shirt for 20 dollars you make 7 dollar profit not 2. But starting in January fees are going up by almost 2 dollars so a 20 dollar shirt will now only give you a 5 dollar profit. This is a total bummer as most of my shirts i sell at 18 and will now only make 3 dollars which isn’t worth it. And while you can edit your shirt and change the price, you risk buyers still not paying that much and your shirt that had sales goes thru the approval process all over again and if it doesn’t sell in 90 days, it gets unlisted. That’s if it got re-approved in the first place. It may think your shirt is the copy cat shirt of someone else’s and deny you for it.
The other horrible merch issue happening right now during the worst possible time is Amazon has announced they are going to throttle merch sellers in order to keep up with demand. It started with not letting new sellers in and limiting how many shirts you can upload per day depending on your tier status. I could upload 10, then 5, then 2, then 1, now none. No merch seller now matter how big they are can upload a single new shirt until further notice. Their supposed to give us an update on when this might change today sometime.
But the worst throttling is they have told us that they will make your shirt not visible to buyers at certain times or they will limit the sizes or colors available. I have watched my sales plummet when they started this. I would type in one of my most popular shirts and see nothing over large available or nothing available in mens or womens. Or worse, my most popular shirt won’t be on amazon at all. If your shirt isn’t visible, it can’t be bought. Q4 is the worst time for them to do this and i still can’t understand how a powerhouse like Amazon can’t keep up with demand.
I will still continue with Amazon as it is passive income after you put up the design which by the way i mostly just do simple text designs. I don’t advertise or promote my shirts so i rely solely on organic traffic. I still make a few hundred dollars a month at my current level. I have a few shirts that sell a few every single week. People who advertise or have their shirts go viral probably sell hundreds of their shirt design each week. I’m a small fish in the water but it’s okay with me.
You don’t have to be a designer though to make shirts. There are tons of free fonts and images you can use on your shirt and a lot of websites that you use to check competition, trademarks, and ideas. I usually don’t care about my competition at all. I only check to make sure someone else hasn’t used the image im using or design because amazon won’t let you upload yours if it’s a copy of someone else’s.
Okay, that’s enough rambling about merch. If you’re even slightly interested I would go ahead and apply to get in as some people wait for a long time to get approved. Months or even a year.
Recently I had a buyer ask me for tshirt dimensions which I never really understand. It’s an xl and usually if you’re bigger than that, you definitely know it and if you’re smaller than that it doesn’t matter as much. I usually ignore t-shirt dimension requests but then they sent me another message later on the same day asking again. Considering the shirt was sort of vintage I went ahead and got the dimensions for them. Then I get a message saying that they are a woman (had a man’s username) and asked me if I could try on the shirt and take a picture of myself so they could get a better reference of how it fits or if I could put it on a mannequin. I started to write back and just apologize and say no but instead I just declined and left it alone. It’s a t-shirt! Lol Oh yeah and they wanted to know if it’s unisex.
You can definitely change your active page back to the way it was. I know because I’ve done it. I still have my 1-500. I called ebay and it was something under my subscriptions. She told me one thing to do and that wasn’t it and she told me another thing to do and that worked. It’s something you need to subscribe or unsubscribe to. I’m sorry I can’t recall what it was called. Call ebay and tell them you want the look of your old ebay back. It may be the sales reports plus or the selling manager. I don’t recall.
I really thought I’d wake up this morning with a few answers to my question lol. Alas, I tried everything I can think of and nothing worked so I had to go a different route. For anyone else who might have this issue in the future, the only work around i found was to go to usps.com and use their click and ship feature. It doesn’t require the HS code there unless your a commercial business. It did ask a few more questions about the item but that’s it. It was a few bucks more but is worth it to end the hassle at this point and get this person their item.
