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You always had the option to set your cut-off time (account settings). This breaks it down even further. Not sure how this will affect or conflict with handling times, since handling time is business days and not weekends. What happens if you set your work week for Sat or Sun?
If I can offer a suggestion, first determine how much net income you need or want to make on an annual basis and work your numbers backwards from there. A point that I feel many people miss and causes them to over buy and over price their inventory.
You’re correct in considering margins as a factor, but more important is your markup, sell through rate and inventory turnover.
You want to strive to have your sell through rate as close to the categories average as possible. If it is too low, it’s a sign that your over-priced or in a thin market and need to get your head out of the clouds. Too high, you’re leaving money on the table with low prices and should take advantage and raise your prices.
Typical retail inventory turnover is 3.2 – 3.9 times. If you just start with eBay recommendation of sell it within 16 month or forget it, I believe that gives you roughly 0.65 times.
Looking at these items will more than help you in determining how much you need to sell and equally important how much to spend.
Unfortunately they won’t be promoting your item, only someone elses. It will be interesting to start seeing the complaints for lost sales due to the promotions steering to other sellers. Interesting so, if both sellers pay for promotions, who takes precedence? Kind of disingenuous to promote another sellers item on a sellers item page who pays for promotions already.
Sad thing is, EB doesn’t offer any metrics on how effective the promotions are. Just another black box that unknowing sellers will throw $$ at.
Their vision is disappointing to say the least.
I haven’t used FE in a few years. Although it eventually worked for my needs at the time, the biggest downfall was the program lacked error trapping and data integrating checking. Once you uploaded your csv file, you pretty much crossed your fingers when you processed the file. Either it listed or not. If it listed, there was a lot of spot checking to confirm that it was done correctly. I remember working in batches of categories rather one complete file. Really sad that EB did away with TurboLister. Really no other EB supported batch upload app out there for the common seller.
I don’t know what to say other than to say you’re making it way to complicated. If you know what you paid for an item, then assign that value to that item. You can use average cost, but then using it so broadly across your inventory, you’re getting into the method of how you identify cost for tax purpose. LIFO or FIFO and issue you don’t want to venture into because you need to keep a running balance and cost of the number of items purchased and sold.
And the problem with this, is that you’re doing the above solely for tax purpose. Knowing your cost should also aid you in quickly determining your profitability along with learning to source better and more profitable. What I mean by this, is that many individuals post their sales and COG on a regular basis. And although on the surface, it appears to be great. What’s missing from the puzzle is the total cost of inventory their carrying on their books. Two different sellers with similar sales and margins tell a different story if one has inventory of $1,000 and the other has $20,000.
As to your “death piles”, it sounds like you’re in a hole. And when you find yourself in one, stop digging and get it under control.
If I can offer my recommendation, do this on your existing inventory to determine each item’s COG.
1. Settle on a numbering system (sku) if you don’t already have one. Starting from #1 would be a smart move. Assign your listed items a sku. If you have 100 items listed, you have your first 100 sku’s.
2. Find your total current inventory value. At a minimum everyone should know this regardless if they have an inventory system or not.
3. Subtract from this value the items having an COG value already known.
4. Count everything that doesn’t have a value or is unlisted in your inventory. If it is a box or bag of items, count it as one and label it with its sku#.
5. Take the number in #3 and divide by #4. This is your COG per item that does not already have a value assigned. Both listed and unlisted.
6. Start working on listing your unlisted inventory using the COG in # 5.
If you continue to source before working down your current unlisted items, make sure you assign a sku and value to the items going forward. If you can’t get to it right away, box or bag it and assign and mark a sku to it. Then when you eventually get to the items, you can start assigning sku’s as you pull items out. You have to make this process part of your sourcing. If you are using a spreadsheet program, it should only take seconds per item.
Great work on the spreadsheet layout, however, you’re assuming you are paying the same price or average price on every item. What happens when you don’t? Say you pay $30 for 9 items and $30 for one item. Moreover, the simplicity may be fine for a dozen or so items or even like-kind items, but it’s really going to get whacked when you need to determine the COG on hundreds or even thousands of unlike items were the price disparity is great.
Tacking COG is not complicated. I think people complicate more than they need too. If you’re using Excel, at a minimum, you only need to keep a worksheet with 4 fields.
SKU#
Date paid
Price paid
date soldWhen you purchase inventory, you record fields 1-3. When you sell an item, record the date. At the end of the year, you sort by date sold and and SUM the price paid gives you GOGS. Easy Peazy…
Coming to the discussion a bit late here and in keeping with the context of this thread, I run an online WP site using woocommerce and a couple of plugins that allow me to post and link multiple eBay accounts to my online store. I manage everything, even ebay task, from the woocommerce dashboard, except shipping. Although this can be done as well.
My annual cost is about $400, excluding an eBay store. Number is SKU’s limited only by the quality of your web hosting service.Also, I want to make a shameless plug for an upcoming project I’m launching this summer for those sellers that are looking to expand their online footprint beyond eBay, by having an online store. Due to growth and a change in direction, I will be expanding my ecommerce presence by breaking out two categories and opening their own independent online stores. One store (yet to be decided), will be fully documented in real time. Everything from initial business plan to execution and ongoing management. This project is born out of an increasing number of request to help in opening an ecommerce site.
Details and venue is still being worked out and I hope to come back with further details as the launch date gets closer.
A few other suggestion… A little bit of forethought could certainly help. It also helps to remember all PO don’t operate the same. So your mileage may vary.
Don’t forget to change your cut-off time for orders. Even though this is for same day processing, eBay uses this to start the clock on your handling time. You can add to your advantage the difference between your cut-off time and midnight if that would help.
Also remember, the clock starts and ends on ebay time (PT). Regardless what time zone your in, so you use the following for your strategy.
EB doesn’t’ just look at when the tracking # was created or uploaded, they also look at when the package was first scanned (this stops the handling time clock).
If you’re not willing to wait in line and get your packaged scanned and decide to just drop it off instead, ask your PO when their cut-off time is. For myself, it’s 4p at my closest PO, even though the office is open until 6p. My other goto PO the cut off is 5p
And lastly, this has help me a lot. See if you have a processing center close by. They typically have longer and extended hours. Mine is open until 9p on weekdays, 8p on Saturday and Sun until 6p. A huge +
Like I mentioned earlier, each PO will operate differently. I’ve tried pick-up, but because the carrier didn’t return until late that day, my packages were not being scanned in until the following day.
Hope this helps.
Although it may seem like a good gesture to send something sight unseen and unsolicited, put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. How would you feel about having something sent that you didn’t ask for…regardless if it was free? You as a seller don’t know what the buyer’s intent on using the product they originally ordered. Sending something unsolicited just ads to the frustration to an already poor buyer’s experience.
If you want to offer something, offer something intangible. When something arrives damage that I can’t exchange or when I can’t find the item in question, or my worse…selling an item that I already sold, I offer that I will work with them on offering a significant discount on anything that I have for sale. This is generally an open offer for 3-6 months.
What this does is mitigate the current situation and brings the buyer back to shop at your store in the future.
Just use of advance internet search. Takes a bit of time. If there is anything to be found, it’s not detailed information. Just suspicious or questionable. Enough to give you a “gut” feeling.
I only attempt in on higher ticket items my margins are slim. In this particular case, neither of these were necessarily true, but what caught my eye was the buyer’s email address domain was registered in the country of Georgia. A country I don’t ship to. Long story short, variations of the address started showing up on some dark sites. That was enough for me even though EB said they may just may be exporter. Yeah, maybe so, but an exporter with a questionable history.
Funny thing about this. The package was ready to be shipped and + feedback already given, before I msg’s the buyer and cancelled the order. Thinking nothing more to come of it. Two days ago I received a + feedback… go figure.
Not being able to see the full jacket, I would say from the label “made in Italy” it’s from the ’50-60’s when Bianchi was building motorcycles and selling apparel. Still a huge name in Italy. Similar to Harley Davidson did in the ’60’s. Most certainly not from the House of Bianchi. The label would read Boston and New York. No relationship other than by name.
We’re beating a dead horse here, but just to clarification of how the process works… Seller shipped a “gift” to buyer, buyer HAS NOT RECEIVED IT YET, Seller issued refund, buyer can’t open case because refund has been issued… translation, case close because refund was tied to transaction.
eBay and PayPal accounts are still linked.
If a seller refunds a buyer through PayPal from the transaction created from the sale, PP notifies EB of the refund. This will show up in the seller’s EB dashboard Resolution Center as a cancelled transaction, refund issued.
Similarly, if a buyer opens up a case against a seller, EB notifies PP the funds are put on hold until the case is resolved.
The only way a seller could skirt this issue is if they issued a refund through PP directly to the buyer by using the buyers email address (sending money to someone option). This does not seem to be the case, because the buyer can’t open a case against the seller because the transaction has been closed and refund made.
No problem. I ship from a different zip codes for two reasons (none are to drive sale). First, I live closer to a post office in a different city than my registered PO. About 12 miles round trip. I did this after I needed desk help on a package that I shipped and was told that help could only come from the PO zip code.
Second, I have inventory in two different states that I ship from. The label will only show one address, but the bar code and zip will indicate differently.
I believe the use of using PO Boxes have lost some of it relevance as it pertains to safety when people shipped valuable items with little or no tracking and when acceptance of checks or money orders were made. Now I think it is more out of convenience.
Another issue with PO Boxes is that FedEx, UPS and DHL will not deliver to them. Delivery competition from these companies really didn’t exist a decade ago.
