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Working in a web form is pretty bad, although I’m sure some people are capable of making it work. I was having a lot of problem’s with ebay’s listing form, having to re-enter data when it didn’t register, slow connectivity, occasional crashes. Far better to work in a program where all the data is entered and stored on my PC.
And I was having to re-enter the same data time and time again, due to limitations in the template system.
And, I found it slow to create listings one at a time, then upload them and check them over, then go back to creating another. Far better to create many at once, upload them all when I’m done, then look them over all at once.
With Sixbit, I have templates for commonplace items that I list often, much information already filled in, in theory all I need to do is put in the title, photos, price and measurement if applicable.
But when I’m working on an elaborate listing for a rare book it’s also great to be able to do that work in something more stable and with a better interface than ebay’s web app.
Finally, I can look back through all my sales history and see what I sold that item for the last few times.
I’m probably only using a small portion of the potential of this program. For me, it’s mostly about creating templates to limit data entry and about not having to deal with the limitations of using a web form for data entry.
In theory free shipping should help sales and visibility by a small percent.
Well, in our line of work it’s probably impossible to tell, since each item is different and sales can’t be expected to stay the same over time. Would you really notice a 5% increase in traffic? I wouldn’t because my items might just be 5% better or worse during that time period… or buyers might be 5% less interested. But maybe it’s true, since they keep repeating it.
On the other hand, if you have rare items, your listing is better than everyone else’s, or you’re willing to wait, you can charge a premium for shipping and your item will sell anyway. Some buyers are willing to pay more, and some buyers don’t pay as much attention to the shipping cost as they do to the price. Sometimes the higher price “looks right”, but you can ship cheaper.
How many buyers passed the item over due to expensive shipping? We’ll never know.
I do free shipping on some small light commodity items, where the market is highly competitive, at cost shipping for moderately desirable items where I have a slight edge due to better pictures and I make money on shipping for some desirable items that are less price sensitive.
Maybe I’m wasting my time and brain power micromanaging this stuff, but it only takes a few seconds as I have pre-set settings in my listing software. I do think that one of a kind items do better with a little taken off the price and added to the shipping, as long as it still looks reasonable.
Unemployment numbers don’t reflect the record high rates of people “out of the labor force”… including significant numbers of “discouraged workers” who actually would like to be working.
It’s hardly controversial to suggest that the recovery from 2008 has been uneven and that significant portions of the country did not experience much of a recovery.
In 2015 Bernie Sanders said:
“while employment figures, have improved, “the ‘real’ unemployment rate—which includes those working part time who want full-time work, and those who have stopped searching but if offered a job would take it—remains in excess of 10 percent.”“Moreover,” says the report, “most workers have failed to see improvements in their paychecks … In fact, taking into account cost-of-living increases since the recession officially ended in 2009, wages have actually declined for most U.S. workers.”
Low-income workers have been hit the hardest. The data brief concludes that “on average, the lowest-paying jobs have experienced disproportionately greater wage declines.”
(actual numbers may have changed since piece was written)Numbers may have changed somewhat, but the point remains valid.
Telling people that everything is fine and they’re just imagining a slow economy was not an effective strategy.
Well, since we’re going there, I’ll keep it brief.
Politics aside, this has the potential to be good for our businesses. You said yourself that the Scavenger lifestyle is only possible in the United States, where there is so much excess stuff. But if that pie is not getting any bigger and the entire world is coming in for a piece, we’ll become a normal country where there isn’t enough excess stuff to make a decent living as a scavenger.
And make no mistake, the economy in some regions is bad enough that Scavenger is one of the better jobs available. More and more people are getting into flipping as an alternative to Walmart / Starbucks jobs, technology is making it easier and the our job is getting harder. In the last three years alone I’ve seen the amount of free money to be had from flipping dramatically decrease, luckily I’ve managed to get into some obscure items that aren’t heavily picked yet.. but they will be eventually.
We need people in the non-coastal regions of the U.S. to actually have good paying jobs so they can afford to buy our stuff. Will the new guy accomplish that? Nobody knows. But under the old system, the middle of the country was increasingly hollowed out economically, meaning they can’t afford to pay $50 for an old rusty drill for their woodworking hobby.
Finally, out of the two people available, this guy was the anti-war candidate, which was a major basis for much of his early support.
Blame the DNC for sabotaging the guy who wanted to address the above issues from a progressive point of view, leaving the country with no real choice.
