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Be willing to walk from every sale
I don’t mean try and pretend that you don’t care about the items, I mean truly don’t care. Change the way you think about what you’re bartering for. People are instinctual and it’s a hard game to try and cover up the desperation of someone that truly wants something… Seller’s can sense it and they’ll use it to their advantage. On the opposite, they can tell when someone doesn’t care that much, and that’s when they’ll fight to make the sale.
I think about every deal like this “If I’m not getting the price I want, I walk. If they let me walk, I never would have gotten it at the price I wanted anyway.”
Lots of people will let you walk away… but just remember, they were never going to let you get that deal for the price that you wanted, you’re either going to end up wasting energy and time fighting a losing battle, or you’re going to pay more for the item than you intended because emotions started to come into play.
Now and then though, they won’t let you walk… and you’ll get that last minute offer to sell at the price you wanted. You’d be surprised how many times they’ll actually undercut your original offer out of fear of losing the sale. Just don’t regret the missed items…. move on… it was a lost cause, we’ve just gotta be willing to be honest with ourselves and remove the emotions. And for all the items you’ve lost, you’ve gained so much more by not wasting your time and energy and investing it into something productive instead.
What’s funny to me, is that personally, I find even when it’s going slow for us, I’m still amazed at how well we’re doing. I was ready to cop weeks or even months on end without sales until I got my inventory up, so even though I may act like I’m sweating the slow times, I’m still managing to surpass my own expectations with every sale.
Had our first international sale yesterday too, so that’s a good milestone to cross off the list 🙂 Good way to learn how customs forms work too… by jumping in the deep end and promising a customer you’ll handle it 😛
Had our first refund too… oh well fair game, item arrived broken. Posties must’ve used the package as a skateboard ramp or something… anyway apologised to the customer and gave a full refund, then got the best glowing feedback we’ve received so far 🙂
Wow 10,000 is quite the goal! I personally have set my sights on 4,000 by then 😉
Tell him you sold it coz you didn’t know how to program phone numbers into it*
EDIT: Terrible advice dont do that…… id probably just explain that you aren’t able to provide technical support to him for the item and then maybe take the time to point him in the direction of a website that can help him.
Hi, coming from Australia I know them feels…. only 20 mill people here. That said though I’m still constantly amazed at just how much stuff I manage to find every time I go out hunting.
Week 3 10-16
Number of Active Listings: 235
Items Sold: 6
Avg Selling Price: $46.10
Cost of Goods Sold: -$3.00
Total Sales: $276.62
Returns/Refunds: $0.00
Unpaid Items: $0.00
Highest Paid Item: 2x Antarctica Souvenir Minted Silver Coins, both went for $95 each.Super slow week for me that got saved at the end by a few last minute purchases. Didn’t get much of a change to do any scavenging this week either so going to have to focus on that a bit more next week.
I’d also set my goal to reach 300 listings, which we almost achieved… until eBay pulled down 30 of our listings because we used the word “Swarovski” when we were selling handmade jewellery using Swarovski crystals, go figure…. contacted eBay they basically said we needed to talk with Swarovski and get authentication, hit up Swarovski and they basically told us we’re going to get trademark violations if we use the word regardless they’re gonna make the claim…. I could explain to them how Australian consumer law and copyright works but that seems like a lot of effort for items I’m selling for only $10-20, so probably easiest to just remove the word and relist. What’s more annoying is when they remove a listing you can’t just go back and edit it and relist, they just delete it forever, which is great coz it means our SKU’s for where they were stored in inventory also got deleted…. so that was fun searching for them. We also decided to pull down about another 20 listings because we felt we’d slacked on the photos for them (items when we first started) so they got unlisted and put back in the death pile.
Nice one! I think it’s important that we have a place like this where we can come and have a whinge and complain and egg each other on to keep trucking 🙂 We all know how retail works and that there will always be slow patches, at the end of the day the decision on when the money comes in comes down to the customer… but we also feel the fear when it does happen. It’s nice we can prop each other up to keep working towards a goal rather than becoming too focused on whats happening to the point where we aren’t listing anymore.
Well I spoke too soon, next day the guy came back and offered for two more items 🙂 suddenly my $0 week got over the $200 mark with only 10 minutes left of the week to go haha. So close to reporting a $0 week……… but not this time 😉
Well, things are still slow but I at least woke up to a $95 offer on a coin I had up for $99…………. done. Thought I was about to do a $0 week for a bit haha.
Keeping the faith! Up to day 6 with no sales but using the nervous energy to list list list rather than pout.
Yeh our sales tanked this week too… to the point where we’re still waiting for our first sale this week…..
But I’ve been looking at it as an opportunity to build my number of active listings without the number going down on me 😛 Try and flip a negative into a positive and treat it like we’re being given a cheat week to increase our inventory numbers quicker.
I personally think Shopify is great but not to run in tandem with an eBay store. I’d run shopify as it’s own separate store and use it as a means of diversification, just like starting an etsy store. The biggest thing is you have to sort your own marketing out and you do need to spend the extra time promoting on social media.
I personally wouldn’t activate the paid subscription until you’ve filled your store with LOTS of inventory first, to justify the sub prices. Luckily you can build your store for free and only start paying once it goes live.
Shopify is great if you have a niche that you’re really interested in and start a specialised store dedicated to that niche. I have a Shopify store for my fish breeding business for example. The type of thing I’d never sell on eBay.
Was a good read and makes a lot of sense. I think my generation is conditioned to save more. I had friends who started working in high school purely in preparation for their University fees and since then, most of my friends are living extremely frugally. They aren’t afraid to spend their money to enjoy their life but they aren’t amassing things. Of course there’s always exceptions, me for instance, I collect old video games so I naturally I have amassed a whole load of stuff.
At the same time though, in all other areas of my life it’s the opposite and it’s the same for most people I know around my age group. Most of the time it’s about saving money to protect them for the future, I honestly believe what’s driving alot of this amongst the younger generations is just fear, they’ve seen how their parent’s managed to get a house and get by and how much harder that’s become over the years…I think the fear of it getting even harder is causing a lot of young people to become early investors in their futures.
They do them sometimes when someone dies and doesn’t have anyone to leave their stuff too, or if someone has defaulted and done a runner, theyll auction off the property assetts. Definitely something I need to investigate further here. Police auctions too would be a good one also.
A lot of the time though, all the items will just get donated straight to charity as a tax writeoff. A lot of people will just send the Salvation Army or Vinnies (like Goodwill) around to collect the goods and then write off the value of the assets. It’s normally less work than actually selling the goods and they’ll normally get a higher value overall from the tax break than the money they’d make from the sales. You normally get the auctions when someone doesn’t have much money to begin with, so their income is low enough that the tax break wouldn’t benefit them.
Wow nice one! I’m sure that equipment will sell, I’m a muso myself and I’m jealous of that pickup.
In other news I flipped my first clothing item from a thrift store today and funnily enough it was 2 items within an hour, sold a pair of womens jeans for $25 and a pair of mens work pants for $22, only paid about $1 for them each. I know it’s nothing special but that’s my first time buying and selling a clothing item so I’m happy to cross that off the list. Always feels good when you enter something new and it pays off.
