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Annalisa: They tried that experiment. It didn’t yield any increase in sales. Also, Griff on Ebay Radio has stated that eBay’s algorithm isn’t fooled by this tactic. You are better off just creating new listings.
Jay, Ryanne: Maybe for the next podcast you could (with the help of sellers outside the U.S.) provide some insights into how sales taxes are handled in other countries. As we’ve been discussing the Supreme Court ruled recently that states can now have more say over collecting online sales taxes. I would like to know how sellers in other countries handle this issue. Thanks.
Hello all: We had heavy rain for 3 straight days about 2 weeks ago. For the first time in 22 years of living in our house we had water in our basement. The short story is I am a part-time eBay seller and had quite a bit of my listed and unlisted inventory in the basement. The majority of the floor was carpeted so I had a big clean up job.
The reason I am mentioning this is to ask each of you to take a minute to think about how your inventory is stored. I didn’t lose too much in the way of inventory, but it easily could have been a lot worse. I did have to recycle a bunch of empty boxes, which wasn’t so bad, but the whole experience has made me think about what I will do differently going forward.
My pain can easily be your gain. Happy 4th of July.
Ryanne: In one of your podcasts you were upset that Walmart only sold small containers of baking soda. I see they now sell a 12 lb bag of baking soda.
Amazon is cracking down on abusive returns. eBay seems to be headed in the other direction. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-bans-people-too-many-returns-2018-5
Hello all: I called eBay about my Seller Hub not properly displaying the “Date Paid” information. The help desk person took a screen grab to pass along to the development team. I currently have 2 sold items with this behavior. They are supposed to look into it.
Hello all: Is anyone else experiencing this behavior? Recently, when I sell an item on eBay and the buyer pays for the item the payment shows up in Pay Pal, but not on eBay. Here is a screen grab of an example. https://s3.amazonaws.com/mypublicbucketbb/Gear360.jpg
I received payment for this item, but the “Date Paid” doesn’t have a date, just a dash. It is a pain to have to check Pay Pal and I am concerned that eBay will ding me if I ship late because their interface isn’t updating properly.
Interestingly, last night I was deleting some listings that haven’t sold (due to upcoming $0.25/item/month fees in spring update over the basic store allotment). I also consolidated some listing to reduce my item count. This morning when I checked eBay I had received a message from eBay with a list of my items. It stated, “Lower the price by 5% on these items in shoppers’ carts, and we’ll email them to say their deal got better.”. I had never seen this message before. I have to wonder whether I triggered some action at eBay because I deleted several listings. I didn’t know that eBay would message buyers to inform them that I had dropped the price on certain items. I am wondering whether this is a tactic by eBay to have me drop prices instead of deleting listings.
I have no proof of course. It could very well be a coincidence.
Jay is always saying it is so cheap to list stuff on eBay, but after the spring seller’s update goes into effect for sellers with a Basic store listings in excess of the 250 free listings each month will cost $0.25/each. The Anchor stores are $0.05/each so this is a huge difference. I realize the Anchor store owners pay considerably more for the store fee, but this is a huge difference. Previously, it was $0.20/listing over the 250 listings and I thought that was high.
I am reviewing my store and cleaning out or combining some of my listings that aren’t worth the $0.25/month fee. Thus is sad. :(
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to pick through people’s stuff. A couple years ago a guy I knew died. He wasn’t a close friend, but I knew him. He wasn’t married, but his girlfriend had died a year or so earlier. Anyway, I later learned that his relatives cleaned out his house and hauled everything to the dump. I have to believe this guy had some stuff worthy of being resold on eBay. I wish I would have known that they were going to do that because I could have taken some stuff and if nothing else (from their perspective) I could have lightened their load. There was probably metal that could have been recycled too. Oh well.
Jay and Ryanne are always saying to, “Do your numbers”. It got me to thinking. I recently sold a pair of boots for $35. I mistakenly listed them as a size 8 US, when in fact they were a size 9 US. The buyer returned them, I paid the return shipping and I sold them a second time for the same price.
I wondered what the final profit or loss was on these boots so I did a spreadsheet on all of the data points. I have the spreadsheet available on the URL shown below. If you don’t have Excel you can see the same data at the second URL as an image file. If you don’t care to view the details the short story is I ended up making a profit of $1.31 on these 2 transactions. It is definitely worth selling them the 2nd time, otherwise it would have been a ($27.50) loss.
http://www.brianboberg.com/VariousTransactionExamples.xlsx
http://www.brianboberg.com/ebayfeeanalysis/DOcMartenBootReturnAnalysis.jpgHello all: I noticed today that Pay Pal provides a service called, “Return Shipping on Us”. I am not sure whether this is a new service or something that has been around for a while and I am just now finding out about it. Regardless, this is a service FOR BUYERS, NOT SELLERS. In the spirit of scavenging I assumed the readers of this blog might find this useful as most of us probably buy stuff using Pay Pal in addition to selling stuff.
There are some restrictions, but they appear to be reasonable exceptions to me. The highlights are you can ask Pay Pal to reimburse you 12 times a year for return shipping up to $30/return. You can return an item as normal (if you paid for the item using Pay Pal) and then ask Pay Pal to refund your return shipping fee up to $30 within 30 days.
You have to active the service using the links provided below:
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/returns
https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/returns/terms
