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The more you list the more you sell. The more you sell the more you ship. The more you ship the less time you have to list, so the less you sell. Curse you cycle of exhaustion!
This is where sell similar can give you some help. Especially with the size of your store. Lately I’ve been using it on days when I don’t plan to do much eBay. Either that or I schedule a few listings for that day. Also I’ll skip a day here and there. But I try to list a few extra that week to make up for it.
I guess I’m just becoming jaded now that the shock of this haul has worn off. “Whoop de doo!!! Another pair of Prada/Gucci/Louis Vuitton shoes ONLY worth $250??? What a piece of junk!” I joke…but also serious. I looked at my numbers this week, see multiple $250 shoe sales and felt disappointed. A $250 sale is not ‘enough’ of a homerun? What is WRONG with me!!!
How easily we get spoiled! Kind of expected this to happen though. I’ve certainly dealt with these feelings this year. Especially with media items, my Chicago trip ruined me on spending $18 a book sale. Maybe not forever, but for now.
Sales felt super slow but weekend was better. I sold some pretty stale listings this week and I’m grateful for that.
I have about 20 stale listings with 5+ watchers and I’m thinking about trying a markdown sale for the first time in probably a year. I’ve tried sending offers of 20% or 25% but no one will bite. No reason a markdown sale would work better, but maybe it will shake someone’s wallets open.
My big kids are both beyond stressed, struggling and it was an emotional week. Hanging on by the fingernails and providing an ear for them. It is one time it is good to be an older parent with life experience. I didn’t get a lot of listing done but hope this week I have more freedom for that.
As a big kid who didn’t/doesn’t have this with his own parents…you’re a great mom! And isn’t this freedom to shift away from eBay one of the best things about this life?
I was able to make those shifts from week to week a lot in this past year to deal with emotional/life stuff, and I always felt like I was more present in the moment than most of my family who all work M-F office or labor jobs. I didn’t even worry about making the post office, just dropped my stuff at an automated postal center and waited a day or two for someone to scan it in. Nothing lost, nothing damaged. The USPS in my region is amazing.
If you saw my garage/office I bet you’d feel alot better about yours! The only thing I haven’t had to do to navigate my mess is crawl under things to get around. Give me time – I’ll get there.
If either of you saw my apartment…it’s bad. I don’t feel great about it. I’ve gotten a lot better about keeping most of the eBay stuff in one room and I’ve gotten much better about keeping that room organized. The trading cards are pretty nicely done at this point, and will be even more consolidated once I prepare one more round of wholesale lots with 250+ cards in them. But more random stuff on the floor than I’d like. A few messy piles. Some stuff which I have no idea how it got there or what I was thinking. A few things I’m not even sure what they are. It’s a visual reminder of how I spent my pandemic, and kind of beautiful, but mess messes with my brain especially in winter.
So I’ve got some work to do on my next “off” day.
No better way to put an end to one month and start a new one than by looking at the numbers. It’s doing the work the right way.
I had a really unusual pattern in last week’s sales. My sales figures by day:
Sunday 10/22: $365.95
Monday 10/23: $363.20
Tuesday 10/24: $345.59
Wednesday 10/25: $358.38
Thursday 10/26: $325.93
Friday 10/27: $421.75
Saturday 10/28: $191.95 (whew finally I needed a break)
The sales bar graph on my dashboard was a horizontal line for most of the week. It was pretty fun. It would have been very close to a straight line all week if one Friday sale had happened on Saturday. I have four theories why this happened.
- I had auctions end on Sunday, and those auctions were paid for roughly equally between Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This is close to what happened but I also had plenty of other items from my store inventory sell on those days and of course, the best day of my week was Friday. No auctions paid for then.
- All of my unsold auctions went back into my store inventory as BIN/BO on Monday, and I picked up 2 sales in the first 24 hours (including one for $101) from these “new” listings. I’m sure I had a few more throughout the week, though I didn’t track those as well.
- I have improved a lot at timing more of my trading card listings so they match the news. As an example, I had 12 sales this past week from teams that were in the baseball playoffs, either players on the Rangers and Diamondbacks (who are playing in the world series)or from players on the other playoff teams who were just knocked out. I listed a lot of these cards very recently and many of them sold quickly, sometimes within a day.
- Breaking down numbers like this is random, and arbitrary, and maybe meaningless. This past Sunday I did $80 in sales. Yesterday and today I did about $30 each. Is that the sky falling? No, that’s what you see when you stare at numbers and letters too long and trying to make them make sense. Also when you run bi-weekly auctions!
It’s been a great eBay year for me and I am starting to think about some major changes for 2024. Maybe some big plans in store. It’s exciting. First things first, let’s see how November’s sales go.
10/22/2023 to 10/28/2023
Listings: 407 (first time I am over 400 listings in a while)
Items sold: 66 (28 via auction, 15 via best offer, 13 via seller initiated offer, 34 (!!) via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2372.75 (up 11% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1561.28 (up 6% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $35.95 (down 37% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $169.16 — Walter Camp c. 1910 authenticated type 1 photo
Lowest price sold (net): $7.68 — Dre Greenlaw 2019 Panini Contenders Draft blue autograph rookie card
I am going to try typing out my numbers since copy/paste is not working for whatever reason. In any case…
Card show profits
My net profit from the show was about $400 to $500. One big prize (a trade-in for a bunch of cheap redemptions) which netted me about $350 and a few smaller sales, stuff I bought from one booth and sold at another. I suppose I could have done that for a bit more, but I enjoyed exploring Chicago a lot more. I gave a range on my net because I brought some stuff to the show to sell at the show, and don’t know if that’s technically profit from the trip. But may as well include it.
Book sale profits
I’m not sure how much individual profit on each item matters compared to the overall profit and loss, but I’ll provide my COGS when I remember it and estimate it when I don’t. Most of this stuff was bought on half price day, but there were one or two which weren’t and I think I can remember which is which.
Bach 333 Complete 222 CD box set
Note the damage, which wasn’t from shipping but from the forum’s resident klutz dropping the box and watching it tear (very neatly) down one side.
COGS $125, Gross sale 331.49, Net 225.27
Yo Yo Ma 30 Years Outside The Box 90 CD set
This one was damaged from shipping. Still made a few bucks!
COGS $100, Gross 280.88, Net 202.75
The Menuhin Century 91 disc box set
Like a lot of these big box sets, this was purchased by an international buyer who used a US freight forwarder.
COGS $50-75, Gross 240.73, Net 150.11
Claudio Arrau RCA and Victor 12 CD box set
Promoted listings ate a chunk of this profit, but this was a small set (compared to some of the others) and I was happy to sell these as fast as I could.
COGS $10ish, Gross 80.25, Net 50.32
Hans Knappertsbusch Complete Parsifal Recordings 48 CD box set
I bought two Knappertsbusch box sets. One still hasn’t sold, and I believe that one I bought on full price day for $50ish. Neither of the box sets had any active or sold listings, so I did a little Googling and found discussions on classical music forums which gave me an idea of value. These are long out of print sets made in Japan. This one sold for full price which felt good. Love finding items like this most of all.
COGS $20-40, Gross 217.28, Net 136.95
Marcelle Meyer Complete Studio Recordings 17 CD box set
This one sold at auction for $14.99 opening bid. In hindsight, I could have hung onto it for a few more weeks before sending it to auction. But I like it when things sell!
COGS $5, Gross 21.48, Net 9.32 (yikes)
Philadelphia Orchestra Centennial Collection 12 CD box set
This is the flipside of the Marcelle Meyer sale — I didn’t send this one to auction, and after a month sold it for full price $39.99. There are a bunch of Terapeak sales in similar range so I’m happy with the price I got.
COGS $10, Gross 59.86, Net 34.04
Karl Bohm Complete DG Operas 70 CD box set
This was a purchase over email, and I priced it high and got the thrill of getting a full price sale — $600!!! International buyer who used eBay’s shipping hub, so shipping was a breeze too.
COGS $100, Gross 642.18, Net $490.68
I’ve got more, but don’t want to break the forums, so I’ll save the rest for another post tonight or tomorrow.
Great tips especially about the CC with rewards. That is definitely my plan for future trips and inventory purchases.
I used Priceline to book the hotel and basically did what you said. Like you said, it is ok but not as good as it used to be. Airbnb seems to be similar in most areas. I bought an express deal…but I basically knew what the hotel was because of the zone, amenities and
costof the hotel compared to the express price. Using Google lens on the room is a great tip though.I am having trouble copying and pasting part 2 of my post, which has all the numbers. I wonder why! No links or anything. Let’s see if this post works…
Here is where I sit on this process a couple years later. It’s something I still do every few months in one way or another. I’ve gotten into using auctions lately, so most of my end and sell similar is returning unsold auctions to my store as fixed price with best offer. Then like “magic” a few things sell.
1. I miss eBay bucks and wish that eBay would bring them back. 🙁 I used to load up on all my regular ebay buys (shipping and packaging supplies mostly) on eBay bucks promos, and from the selling end they would lead to a little boost in sales on items with watchers. Maybe someday we will see them again, but until then I’m still in mourning.
2. You will want to choose between end and relist or end and sell similar. Sell similar gives you a brand new item number. Relist does not, but your listing keeps its watchers. Personally I believe that the algorithm likes new listings, so I do end and sell similar 100% of the time.
3. I think you’re absolutely on the right track doing something with listings with zero views or watchers. End and sell similar, cut the price, change the title, change the category or some combination. eBay search is different now than it was a few years ago, particularly with casual users who are more likely to use Best March to sort their search. Adding photos to stale listings is another option — remember we get 24 photos now!
4. I use templates to make new listings and set my auto decline for something like 60% of my buy it now price. For example, with a $20 listing I set my auto decline for $12. For a $50 listing I set it at $35. If I went a little lower, I’m sure things would sell a little faster.
Here is the fastest way I can think to bulk-edit offer settings:
In the second row of drop-down menus in active listings, click item title (next to contains) and select current price. When you do this, the contains drop down menu will switch to is equal to. Type in a price (for example, 19.99) and then select all and bulk edit all your $19.99 inventory to your new auto-decline price of $12 (or whatever you choose). Do the same until you’ve edited everything in your store to the right settings.
In general, pricing is such an inexact science that I think considering lower offers is usually worth it. When I send offers to watchers, I do 20% or 25% more than half of the time. It’s just so much easier for people to ignore notifications and spend their money in random places than it was a few years ago. So if a buyer is remotely interested in my item, I want to give them a reason to buy it before they find somewhere else to spend their money.
Here’s one example: I just got a $20 offer on a $29.99 listing. What would you do in that scenario?
Most of the time I would accept that offer. This time, for whatever reason, I countered $25 — and the buyer immediately declined. Whoops!
I think the listing will sell for $25 eventually, but I felt regret almost immediately. Makes sense. Always more to buy. Always more to sell. Next time I’ll accept the $20 offer.
Yeah i do the same thing with any long posts, I have a notes app on my computer with 8 million little notes in it. I tried a couple times to post my numbers for this haul, but I think the post must have been too long and got triggered as spam because of it.
I kind of remember that story from the podcast but I love hearing all the details. Amazing how much you can remember all these years later. Smart move to keep him talking about his benefit from the deal. Did that flooring end up in one of your Airbnbs?
I made a long post with all the numbers from my trip, but I think the post was too long and it got caught in the spam queue. I could try and repost it, or maybe you or Ryanne are able to get it unstuck for me? Not sure how the forum elves work…
If they accept your $7500 offer, would this be your largest purchase ever? Or have you already crossed that point a long time ago?
Offering on any quantity of items is an interesting process. Since you’ve already bought so many items and have a rapport with them, I feel like you could take any hypothetical offer and shave a few bucks off because you have so much leverage, what the hell else would they do with all this stuff and why wouldn’t they give you a bit of a deal at this point. But there’s a sweet spot between getting a good deal and lowballing, and I think you’ve struck that perfect balance with this haul.
I also hate the hustle culture mentality of always negotiating even when you’re already getting a good deal. Take the deal, Youtube bros! Quit trying to shave a few bucks off when you’re already going to make easy money. But I think it’s an ego thing for some people.
It’s funny, a couple years ago I had never used promoted listings. I was stuck in that mindset of “it’s a money grab.” But one month, eBay ran a promotional rate on promoted listings, and I opted in at a percentage or two above the minimum…and my sales went up like 50% that month. So I kept using promoted listings after the promo ended and my sales remained higher than I expected. I don’t think it was consistently 50% higher but items that had been sitting for a while started to sell. By then, my mindset had shifted to “Why would I mess with something that’s working?” And I’ve used promoted listings ever since.
I use promoted listings standard with a fixed rate, and when I create a new listing, I start it at 5% most of the time. If the listing hasn’t sold after about a month, I’ll kick the percentage up to 7.5%. I’m space limited, so I like to sell stuff (especially bulky items) within a few months. Some listings I will start my rate at 7.5% — usually these are listings where I have multiples or items with a lot of competition. I’ve never tried dynamic promoted listings because fixed rate has worked well for me. Every week, almost without fail, bout half of my sold listings are promoted listings. Sometimes these are popular or unique items, which I would agree shouldn’t need promotion, but as long as things keep selling, I’m fine with it.
I posted a few threads about my end and sell similar experiments a year or two ago. Here is a link to one of them to give you an idea of what you might expect. How the time flies. If you like numbers, there are a ton in there. Keep in mind most of the data is two years old, but eBay’s search algorithm hasn’t changed much since then, so I think the same principles still apply.
My rule of thumb is that if you have items in your inventory older than six months and they have no watchers and low views, I suggest ending them and sell similar. You can click “customize table” in your active listings to show the number of watchers and views on your listings. When I do a batch of end and sell similar, I sort my inventory by oldest to newest, and I like to do the oldest page worth of listings, 25 or 50 or 100 depending on how big my store is. Right now it would be 25 or 50 because I’ve been running a 400 item store for most of this year. The idea behind end and sell similar is that you are likely to get a few sales and offers within the first few days simply because the eBay algorithm likes to see new listings.
There’s a point of diminishing returns with end and sell similar, you can’t do it all the time. But once a month, or once every two months, will allow you to sell some stuff that was sitting in your store. Especially if you combine this process with other inventory strategies like repricing, promoted listings and sending offers or coupons. Maybe the stuff would sell anyway, there’s really no way to know, but once you get your process down, the whole thing only takes a few minutes. In my mind, even selling one item each time would make it worth it. But I usually sell a handful.
I sold these weird calendars last week because of end and sell similar. Or at least that’s why I think they sold. Who knows, maybe my buyer just didn’t browse eBay for the last six months but would have found my listing no matter what. But I think it’s more likely that my buyer had a saved search for new listings, and didn’t check the old listings because they didn’t have the time or assumed it was all overpriced. That’s often what I do as a buyer because the best bargains are either in auctions or recently listed items.
End and sell similar is also a great trick if you’re busy and don’t have time to list. The eBay algorithm loves consistent new listings, and I see people posting on here all the time that sales are slow so they haven’t been feeling motivated to list. Which I totally understand! But when sales are slow, that’s the perfect time to look at your oldest listings and try this strategy. It’s not a substitute for developing a process where you’re consistently listing good, quality items, but it’s been a nice supplemental strategy for me to get a few extra sales here and there.
I am finding that my sales do in fact go up when I promote (sadly not the minimum but a substantial percentage). I think the boost comes from having your items show up on other people’s search pages, like you I sell funky unique junk.
As an experiment instead of offering 20%, why not try 15% advertising for a few weeks and see what happens?
I would love to see what would happen if Jay and Ryanne had the time to truly play around with their store. Try a different experiment every month. One month, end the 100 oldest listings every day and sell similar. One month, increase promoted listings to 10% or 15%. One month, run 500 collectibles listings at auction with the start bid 50% of BIN price. One month, end and cut the prices by 15%.
Jay and Ryanne, if you two ever decide to sell off all your eBay inventory so you can use the storage space for coffee empire purposes, hire me to manage the process. I’ll come down to Luray for a few months and we’ll figure all this out. Maybe you two can dust off the old video equipment and we document the process?
If anyone is reading this post and your sales are slow: play around with these different ideas. Especially promoted listings percentages and end/sell similar on old listings. Adjust prices. Send out good quality offers to interested buyers. Don’t get stuck on your original BIN price. There will always be more stuff to buy. Sell sell sell.
Different tricks and tools might work better or worst for you than they do for me. But you’ll never know if you don’t try.
Congrats on 1000 listings! You are flying through creating new listings lately.
You know I am a big proponent of sell similar and taking lower best offers. I auto decline anything under 60% of my BIN price. I have also been repricing pretty aggressively lately. Basically here is my selling model these days:
Step 1: Create new BIN/BO listing. Min offer around 60% of BIN price. For example, I’ll do a $35 min offer on a listing with a $49.99 BIN. $60 min offer on a $99.99 offer. The lowest price stuff I listed is generally $19.99 BIN/BO and I go $12 offers on those.
Step 2: If someone adds the listing to their watch list, send them an offer 20% off. Maybe 25% if I’m feeling generous or 15% if I think my BIN price is the right place. If no one adds to watch list within the first 2-4 weeks of creating the listing, send to auction with a start bid 50% of my BIN price.
Step 3: If the auction doesn’t sell, sell similar so the item is back in my inventory. If I think the price is a little high, I might drop it down to the next tier. So that $49.99 listing with a $35 min offer becomes a $39.99 listing with $25 min offer. Return to step 2 until the item sells.
I’ve been stuck around 400 listings for the last few months because I keep selling 150 to 200 items in month. A huge part of that is that I have started listing better quality items and items with a higher sell through rate. I have leveled up my scavenging basically. But the pricing structure has helped too.
Different niches and all that, but I think a lot of these principles might apply regardless of what you’re selling. Especially if inventory space is a factor or you just want to get rid of some old inventory or make a bunch of sales.
I ended up pretty busy this week with family stuff but by doing drafts at work and doing photographs every morning before work I was able to get plenty of listing done.
Busy times are what makes batching so important to any eBay seller with a decent sized inventory. It is easy to get 5 listings finished in 20 minutes if your pictures are done and your template only requires a few tweaks. It’s much harder if you have nothing photographed or no good items ready to list.
The end and sell similar “trick” on old listings is great for busy times too. At some point later in Q4, or early next year, you’ll have to try that with some of your hoarder haul items which don’t have any watchers or offers and report the results. I bet you’ll see one or two things sell which isn’t a bad ROI on five minutes of time.
Your taxes are gonna be fun next year!
