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I fell off my listing a little bit towards the end of the week… I think I took one day off. Steady sales, but not as wonderful as in years past for this time of the year… Still focusing on decreasing the crap items in my store and improving my STR. I am still shrinking my store and gradually removing the stupid and cheap things listed in years past and replacing with more expensive and desirable items. If the item is not above 50% STR (and preferably closer to 100% or more) I am leaving it on the rack.
Our Store Week November 26 – December 2, 2023
Total Items in Store: 780
Items Sold: 19
Gross Sales: $490.44 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $266.49 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $32.47
Highest Price Sold: $30 (Free People Jeans)
Average Price Sold: $23.02
Returns: 0 (But 1 cancel due to typing wrong size in title, oops, dang!)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $49.82
Number of items listed this week: 30$ Amount listed this week: $1208.43
Hope everyone has a successful week!
My Store Week November 19-25, 2023
Total Items in Store: 835
Items Sold: 21
Gross Sales: $608.37 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $300.72 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $62.34
Highest Price Sold: $59.95 (Ariat Jeans)
Average Price Sold: $27.00
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $272.87
Number of items listed this week: 35$ Amount Listed this week: $1464.30
Sharyn, maybe try a one day experiment and try promoted listings for a day… try their insane recommended rates. I had a horrible sales day (crazy no sales day) yesterday so just cranked it on… you will see your impressions double or at least significantly increase by the end of the day and a few hours after kicking it off the sales will start coming in. I think promoted listings are more effective than markdown sales now. I do get a lot of (0) feedback users, so somehow the promos are being successfully marketed to people out there shopping elsewhere. Good luck with your cool Holiday inventory! Happy Thanksgiving!
@retro-treasures-wv Yeah.. the good old days of $4 shoes… I remember those days! No longer…haha… we are all adapting…. I really appreciate you sharing your STR “formula” and thoughts about STR. You are so spot on. I am finally willing to spend more for better items and my business is growing a little more every day… I do like the idea of Pros vs. Casual Seller.. will be keeping this in mind next sourcing trip tomorrow for sure. Happy Thanksgiving to you and anyone reading this!
Retro, Way to go… I’m always in awe of your numbers. You have super scavenging AND ebay skills. I can’t believe you can knock out 52 listings a week while working another full time job. That in itself is a full time job. Obviously you have refined your process in order to get it done fast… what are you secrets? How long does it take you to do a listing? I am still struggling… I have been selling now for 7-8 years and sometimes I still feel like a newbie. I am serious about improvement though, photography is my bottleneck and I am determined to improve my process this coming year… I’m still using my phone and a piece of poster board on my kitchen floor and manually editing all the photos to make them look good (which takes a long time). Yeah, I know… time to do better.
Jay, your store sounds like the coolest place in the world! I imagine you are always busy with plenty to do there… but is there ever any “down” time? Is it possible to work on eBay listings remotely from the shop if you are ever slow? Would you even want to? eBay is still going so well for you guys… even if it isn’t your only focus.
Last week was a good sales week… I think a record for me. I had 3 high dollar sales (Paid more than usual for 3 bigger ticket clothing items with a 100% sell through rate and they all sold within 3 days so that helped a lot!)
My Store Week November 12-18, 2023
Total Items in Store: 838
Items Sold: 26
Gross Sales: $883.44 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $539.65 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $91.42
Highest Price Sold: $94.95 (Rock Revival Jeans)
Average Price Sold: $33.98
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $150.23
Number of items listed this week: 35$ Amount Listed this week: $1189.49
Christine, You can do your own store “reset” without calling eBay (not that I think it does anything, really… but I have tried it before in moments of slowdom) It is essentially a bulk edit on all the items in your store… you don’t even need to make any changes (although you could raise or lower the price by 1 cent or something).. just the act of loading all the items into a matrix and then hitting ‘submit all’ is what does it, even without any edits at all. Although.. here we already know the best “store reset” of all… and that is to simply start listing more items, lol 🙂
Yes, Jay, the cha-ching will never get old! It does feel like a recession is looming, doesn’t it? Great week, Christine… all your hard work is paying off and I hope you are feeling better. Not much to say about the week… it was just on the low end… and looking back, I can see I had minimal promoted listings going and only one very low markdown sales (5%)… Going forward, I have decided to turn dynamic PL’s back on and run a 24-hour sale each day this week, so stay tuned for an improvement in next week’s numbers.
My Store Week November 5-11, 2023
Total Items in Store: 840
Items Sold: 24
Gross Sales: $498.53 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $224.91 (minus returns, supplies, eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $34.12
Highest Price Sold: $38 (Seven 7 Jeans)
Average Price Sold: $20.77
Returns: 2 (1 was a stain that I “missed” and 1 was a cancel due to out of stock, I washed a pair of kid’s jeans with our personal items and I think they ended up getting sucked into the vortex, ugh!! defect!!)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $68.07
Number of items listed this week: 35 + 3 into a brand new, baby draft bank, woohoo!$ Amount Listed this week: $1203.65
Not the most exciting of weeks… I ran a 70% off sale on my oldest listings and things still didn’t move much. I ran a few 99 cent auctions (with free shipping!) on a few pieces with missed flaws as an experiment. A pair of jeans with a hole (and not the good kind) in the back took off in a bidding war and sold for $20 with great feedback. I then got a little over-confident and ran a few more cheap auctions and lost a few $’s on the shipping for several more pairs of jeans and a shirt… I won’t be doing that again anytime soon. When I cranked up the Promoted Listings, I started getting some traction… when I lowered it again, things slowed way down. Still listing every day and trying to find my happy medium. Intentionally passing on some good items with a lower ASP… it’s hard to do, but hoping it will pay off longer term.
My Store Week October 29-November 4, 2023
Total Items in Store: 842
Items Sold: 29
Gross Sales: $820.96 ($650.86 ebay, including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $391.83 (minus eBay fees, shipping, taxes, returns)
Cost of Items Sold: $51.04
Highest Price Sold: $37.95 (NWT Nike Sweat Pants)
Average Price Sold: $23.66 (inc. shipping)
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $88.24
Number of items listed this week: 37$ Amount Listed this week: $905.78
@retro-treasures-wv in an ebay facebook group that I am in someone was just complaining about their “missing listings” tonight (same boat as you, above) … and it turns out that eBay is ALLOWED to remove stale listings… ones without a sale in over a year (it was an announcement from 2 years ago.) News to me… but here is the link (see last bullet). That could have been what happened to you. Also, this is just another reason to consider “sell similar” at least once a year, so your listings will not potentially be removed without notice! I really wonder if I don’t have any missing as well… I plan to do a re-inventory sometimes next year and I will check.
For item specifics, I do fill out most of the recommended… you can even add some extra keywords… you could add “Christmas” for instance, under Theme… then your item may show up in someone’s search if looking for presents… If the item specific doesn’t apply (like “compression”) I just leave it blank.
My Store Week October 22-28, 2023
Total Items in Store: 845
Items Sold: 31
Gross Sales: $917.32 ($813.73 eBay, $37.14 Bonanza, $48.95 Plato’s Closet, $17.50 Zitfit)
Net Sales: $425.13 (minus eBay fees, shipping, taxes, returns)
Cost of Items Sold: $45.83
Highest Price Sold: $71.95 (2 pairs of jeans to Sweden)
Average Price Sold: $27.19 (inc. shipping)
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $44.90Number of items listed this week: 35
$ Amount Listed this week: $731.39
Overall, this has been a very good week for me. The daily listing is really paying off now. Tomorrow is Halloween and lots of kids activities but I will try my very best to keep up the momentum. I am also attempting to pay more money for better items. It’s a hard habit to break as I have been sourcing from the $.99 rack for so long. For the Sweden sale, the buyer wanted to combine shipping (which you can’t do in the eBay shipping program). She kept sending me comps on another US seller that was offering International First Class Shipping so their shipping was lower (of course, without tracking!). I was very hungry for the sale so I decided to cave and added International Priority to one listing and upped the price and told her I would sell her both of the pairs she wanted. Next I stuffed both jeans into a padded flat rate mailer. It’s been about 5 years since doing this… so the process has changed.. there is now an HTS number and of course the customs form and having to go to the post office… it all took an extra 2-3 hours to figure it all out and make the extra trip. If these “dont’ fit” or are a return I am going to be so bummed. It’s nice to offer these shipping options to close a deal, but I really am grateful for the ease of the eBay shipping program. The craziness of it all is that the charge was apx. the same for both options… so no real savings for the customer. It just seemed that way to her because I was able to pack 2 pairs into one package.
Hi and welcome back from NYC… Glad to hear you had a fun trip! Thanks for telling us about your “sell similar” experience. From everything I have researched about it online, if you do no other tweaks or changes and simply end and sell similar, it will provide a temporary (24-48 hour) boost to the algorithm and then the items will fall back to their original placement in search after that time…. but with as many items as you guys have listed, that “boost” is going to have some kind of noticeable impact, even if it is just for a day or two. I guess the numbers will speak for themselves! As Craig mentioned in another discussion, there is a point of diminishing returns on sell similar… so I think it is interesting to find out what is the “right amount” of time to wait between doing it. I wonder, does anyone else check their “Quality Listing Report” under the traffic performance tab? I like to see how I rank on eBay in my top 10 listed categories and this report shows you that information. For being an extremely small seller I was surprised to see how high I rank in certain clothing categories. (For example, in a few categories I am in the 200’s… out of 100,000’s of sellers.) I did notice after ending a listing for a nwt hat (that had many watchers, but I think I priced it way too low, so just ended it because I couldn’t modify due to sending out an offer) that I fell from something like 500 in rank all the way to 1100 in new hats… I do not have many New Hats listed. I have no idea what this means as far as future sales… however, I just wanted to share this because it made me think that ending listings that are actually “good performing listings” could even have a negative impact on your overall ranking and maybe search placement, even if you get the one-two day “boost”. So going further, I will always be only ending the old listings that are getting no views so I don’t fall further down in ranking. Of course if something has been sitting around for a few years without selling, than it’s not performing “good” though, right?
Anyway, my post was also deleted but Sharyn gave me the idea to check my tabs and I had the old post still open so here it is below:
Stopping in to post my numbers for last week… I enjoyed seeing all of your numbers. Congrats to everyone who had the “big” sales… that is exciting. For me, it felt like a very tough week, and I had to pull out all stops to keep the momentum… including coupons, sales and promoted listings… oh and lots of very very low dollar offers this week… I can sense the buyer expectations for clothing at least is changing and buyers are wanting rock bottom pricing on the everyday stuff. I think buyers are watching and just waiting for sellers to send offers now (and not just 5% off.. but at least 20% off). I am getting many many watches and very little “offers” compared to even a year ago and I even got a serious $1 offer on a beautiful Nike sweatshirt, sorry, but no thanks! On a good note, this is my third week of consistently meeting my minimum daily listing goal of 5 per day. Hopefully I can keep it up… one more to go for today at 3:17 am, but taking a breather to post the numbers and then back to bed for me…
My Store Week October 15-21, 2023
Total Items in Store: 835
Items Sold: 20
Gross Sales: $451.91 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $223.16 (minus eBay fees, shipping, taxes, returns)
Cost of Items Sold: $30.50
Highest Price Sold: $25.60 (NWT Plus Size Chaps Floral Blouse from the bins)
Average Price Sold: $22.60 (inc. shipping)
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $64.45
Number of items listed this week: 35$ Amount Listed this week: $796.30
