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I also have this with 0 needing identifiers. I’ve been keeping my listing recommendations clean each day. Not happy to get this email since my bar codes are mainly retailer specific with fewer digits and have been rejected by EBay before. Also just helps eBay show my buyers lower prices from other sellers on my item. Hopefully they will cancel this again. Not much notice – 9/18.
08/22/2017 at 11:24 am in reply to: No Podcast? Hey We Had To See An Eclipse in 100% Totality! #22083Total Items in Store: 349
Items Sold: 8
Cost of Items Sold: $9 used + 79 new
Total Sales: $228
Highest Price Sold: $43 (Set of two new decorative hooks – paid $16 early summer)
Average Price Sold: $29
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 3 RA listings – added multiplesEclipse was partial and foggy here on the West coastline, so I have to admit I wasn’t really feelin’ it. Your photos and some on Facebook make it look much more interesting.
I’m scraping along here with some ok sales considering I’m still finishing out the crazy busy summer and back to school business. I did list a few multiples for new items. I’ve also been trying to at least clean out my listing recommendations daily since I discovered the option to put them off for 30 days. I have to say that so far I do think adding free shipping to some first class items has made a difference. I think I might be a convert. I watched a video on youtube and it made me realize that I had written off “sell one like this” in favor of using my own listings to start with because I had some boilerplate I liked at the bottom. Now I’m using almost no boilerplate (just encourage buyers to use the shopping cart and visit my store) and there are many more item specifics Ebay has added since then. So I plan to revisit sell one like this. Looking forward to seeing the new rental photos. Have a great week.
Total Items in Store: 335
Items Sold: 10
Cost of Items Sold: $4 used + $135
Total Sales: $316
Highest Price Sold: $50 new pajama bottoms (paid $24, listed 9 months but sold immediately after I added free shipping)
Average Price Sold: $35
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0A fairly good week, though I did make less than double on some older new RA items. I’ve started a free shipping experiment and did sell a couple of NWT items that have been sitting in my store for quite a while so that’s pretty interesting. One also had a promotion on it. The other I had dropped the price much lower before to try to move, but the free shipping (due to the timing) with a higher price I think really did it. The item only weighed three ounces. I’m definitely going to continue free shipping when I list new first class items and see how it goes. No sense in being stubborn about it now that I feel comfortable with estimating shipping costs. I consistently weigh at listing times but will have to think about my ongoing sales % and pricing. Overall, I need to see more movement out of the store since sourcing is so easy for me. Hopefully free shipping will help.
Another thing I’ve been doing is cleaning out my listing improvements page daily. This week I found a toggle on the analyze listing page where you could ask Ebay not to bug you again for 30 days. So getting some relief from the same ones popping up again and again with unhelpful suggestions. One day I only had one. Hit the toggle and cleared it. Then my store door changed from red to blue. Tin foil hat time.
I made another post in the forums about this summer just being chaos for our family. I look forwarding to school starting in the next couple of weeks and I’m hoping to get Fall and Winter pile items listed if life smooths out. Plan to keep shopping to a minimum and it will be hard because it’s rummage sale season around here. Have a great week!
I’m pretty sure that I’m slower than that even with my new bare bones descriptions. I thought the topic was interesting. It really depends on the type of item too. I love art and pottery but the research really slows me down. Bed linen photography slows me down.
Congrats to those above making progress. Fun to see the empty box photo.
Well, I never completely feel off the wagon and I did learn to become very choosy about my purchases. This weekend my absolute favorite indy thrift had a grand reopening with all new inventory. It was painful but I decided not to go. I’m sure I would have picked up better merchandise than 70-80% of my vintage death piles. BUT, this summer has been absolutely chaotic with the kids’ schedule, deaths of friends and pets, surprise houseguests, vacation, kids’ online bullying, back to school prep, and all manner of other chaos. Very, very Ebay unfriendly.
Even though virtually all of my piles live in the garage, I have lots of cleaning out to do inside with our stuff and the clutter is getting to me. I’ve got a few boxes of holiday stuff to get up this Fall. SO, making a pledge again to resist the sourcing urges. There is just so much quantity available and so little time to process it!
Susanne Wells made a video I found interesting about a reality check on listing time relevant to my struggle and part-time or parent sellers without listing software or employees. Here’s a link in case anyone is interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijwIt6yi3UM&list=UU0jQVSDUTGLj83382j2DPMA&index=1
08/08/2017 at 10:28 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 322: Don’t Forget To Make Your Own Weekends #21538Thanks to the elves who answered my questions above. Only some of my items pop up as possible promotions and I usually pick just a hair above the trending rate, or if that fee is too high, a hair above 5% (a round # I think other sellers might be choosing). Haven’t had great results yet and I wish more items were available to promote.
Regarding the improvement requests, others may not be noticing so much if they sell mainly used items. It’s all new items in my improvements feed. I think the recent increase is due to Ebay adding new categories and now NOS vintage items are showing up – mostly craft kits for me at this point. They are flagging items with no comparisons (no UPC) so I’m not sure how they know it’s 100% less likely to sell than competitors? The entire category maybe. So I’ve decided to try a free shipping experiment for the kits they pick on. The other new items are mostly things I have sold a number of times before (hence my own listings are used as comparisons) and the recommendation has more to do with my not offering free shipping rather than the price it seems. I’m just going to tinker with the price up and down on those if I have time.
I saw in the news that 67% of Ebay transactions are free shipping already, so I’m really considering doing more of it going forward as an experiment. A lot of my items cannot go first class or in a PFR, so I’ll have to up the prices if I really want to embrace it.
08/07/2017 at 11:15 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 322: Don’t Forget To Make Your Own Weekends #21458Hi Cindi, can they still use the shopping cart and get guaranteed delivery with a muiti-item purchase from one store or do they need to immediate pay each item? Thanks.
08/07/2017 at 11:11 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 322: Don’t Forget To Make Your Own Weekends #21454Brian, what strategy do you have in choosing the % for your promoted listings? Thanks.
08/07/2017 at 10:53 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 322: Don’t Forget To Make Your Own Weekends #21448Total Items in Store: 336
Items Sold: 5
Cost of Items Sold: $102
Total Sales: $214
Highest Price Sold: $90 (Set of three new art plates that seemed to be blogged about or pinned somewhere, cost $48, purchased in Spring)
Average Price Sold: $43
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 5Tough week for listing. We attended the out of town funeral of a good friend our own age. Hope to never do that again. Overall, it’s been quite a hectic summer with a lot of kid transport and unusual stuff going on. I can’t wait until school starts and then the back to school business subsides by second week of September or so. It makes me chuckle when you talk about your nephews being exhausting and demanding and not conducive to working. Some kids are harder than others and in different ways, plus their needs and activity levels change over time. Your sister is a good mom taking them to the country and limiting their screen time.
On the upside, I can list a lot faster now than when I started Ebay a couple of years ago. On the downside, Ebay is starting to hammer daily with their listing improvement requests on 10-15% of my actives. I don’t personally find it very helpful for a few reasons. Mainly, they show me my own items, compare with items that are not really the same, flag items that are only 50% less likely to sell than competitors, show my brand new listings, recommend free shipping on everything including lower overall cost items vs. comparison sales, etc. Wondering if anyone else is noticing this or cares?
I really didn’t want to do free shipping because I prefer the shipping to be kind of a wash, but I’m now trying it on a few underperforming first class new items where the solds were higher than my overall price with shipping. No immediate sales resulted so far. You want to think buyers will just search by the overall lowest price, but Ebay is telling us they will treat free shipping items better in search for those who don’t plus maybe people aren’t used to filtering on the phones. I suppose I should listen to this now that I’ve become familiar with estimating shipping costs. As a buyer I do love free shipping and I’m getting used to getting it from major retailers. I guess the allure is that I evaluate the price independently before seeing the related shipping, and if I then see that’s it’s free shipping I’m like “hey – that’s a nice bonus”.
I just made my second free shipping order from Amazon since canceling Prime. Three weeks and it hadn’t shipped FBA products from the warehouse. Tried to cancel, they emailed “sorry, it’s too late”, then shipped later that day. This could be a nice opportunity for Ebay coming on the with Guaranteed Shipping program for the holidays. Have a great week.
Thank you everyone for your thoughts. There is a lot that goes into pricing, but original art or rarer items can be harder to price for me as a adolescent part-time seller. This is especially true since we only have access to 3 months of sales data on Ebay. It’s tricky when you don’t have enough data available (there were a number of Worthpoint hits on Google but I don’t have a subscription.) So, that’s when the gut comes in and a though to other seller’s current prices. I’m always using my gut to make purchases but often I stop to research the solds too, so it’s a mix. The market will tell me if I’m too high and I can adjust within the year. In most common cases I’m on the high side of the solds or maybe a 50% or less above, then I do the perennial 10-20% off sales. I had a tapestry sale not long ago that was pretty rare but I matched a price on Etsy and the quick buyer essentially told me she was thrilled to find it so cheap – oops. It’s all a fun learning experience. Interestingly, someone just put up a new listing today on these for $199 so I’ll be watching that pair.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by
ChristineR.
Thank you both. Mike I kind of factor in what you describe but there is way more gut involved in my process and I’m too small time to buy subscriptions. Normally I do not pay more than $15-20 for used items, but it was half price day and these really feel and look like quality and just spoke to me. Since I have limited time for Ebay sometimes I splurge a bit on items that have been priced by people who know what it is. The most fun is finding the overlooked items though. So, my COGS is overall higher than many trash elves, but I seldom lose $ and my duds I’m thinning cost only $1-3 (mostly handmade items and relatively uninspiring pottery). I’ve found these bookends priced at $295 and $395 online without best offer, but Ryanne your pricing is inspiring!
Thanks Mike! I’ll probably go higher with best offer but this is good to know for sure.
Wanted to comment re the Ikea RA conversation. Plastic bags are banned here so I bought all of my great reusable Ikea bags on Ebay. If I lived near an Ikea, I would totally source certain items there (probably lightweight textiles and kids’ items), though I would never list something I didn’t own and you are not supposed to use stock photos.
It’s fun to buy one of a kind vintage items and the return is amazing. But it’s also fun to speculate with RA and get great design and quality at a low price, then hold and flip for 2-10x the money and there is way less holding time if you are doing it right. Retailers are stuck having to produce and liquidate all of their duds and meh items. As resellers, we can go in and cherry pick their most special and undervalued items. If I think I can get more for something on Ebay than they have it priced at the retailer or predict they will sell out of it, I’ll even pay full price and sometimes it sells while it still available in the store and/or on the retailer site. I’ve been called out in messages for this once or twice, but I don’t see anything unethical about it. Some folks are too far away from the retailer or have never heard of it before, plus I ship globally with GSP and reach other audiences with Pinterest or Google. Anyway, it’s a whole other fun game about scavenging that I love.
Yeah. I use Google Shopping sometimes myself but I think you are right that not much traffic to my listings can be originating there (wish we could see details in traffic!). My pinned items and photos often show up on images very high and most people would be using Google organic search. Ebay adopting a clean background also goes against their new colorful marketing theme, so I hope this is one thing they won’t want to emulate about other sites going forward.
Total Items in Store: 364
Items Sold: 2
Cost of Items Sold: $18
Total Sales: $55 Ebay + 1 Facebook Sale: $30
Highest Price Sold: $35 New large measuring cup
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 32A dreadful week despite listing, which is very unusual for me. The second sale came after I revised the prices in the listing improvement section on that item. Ebay came up with way more listings for me to improve than ever before, about 15% of my inventory. Fortunately they also added a place for you to just tweak the price without opening and revising the listing. I tweaked almost all of them a little bit, upward in some cases. Hope for a better week this coming week and I’m focused on building up inventory. Can’t wait until school starts again and there is less running around.
Thank you to those who provided the Ebay Open updates and links. I’ve turned on 60 day returns and turned off the restocking fee that I wasn’t using anyway except to make people pause if they are likely to return. As soon as I can get on the Guaranteed Shipping program I will go for it since I’m always taking the kids here or there and work is right next to Fed Ex. I have had some missing PO scans but not enough to keep me from trying the program. I’m starting to add an overnight option to all of my listings as the final shipping method choice and have run a few new item promotions. Finally, I’m doing a bit of pruning to some old items or creating new listings. Despite the backlog, I find it very hard to give up on dud items I picked. Not sure why – it’s totally irrational.
I’m a bit bummed about the white background requirement for Google Shopping as I really enjoy designing my listings and using color and sometimes patterned paper or wood backgrounds. Hopefully Ebay will not adopt a requirement. Hope everyone’s week on Ebay was better than mine. 🙂
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