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Good deal and it may help if you have to prove something to an Ebay rep. Show the before and after. The photos also have time-dates to them and it can be noticed when the photos were taken. We just keep those photos in the folders we use to store listing photos just in case.
11/17/2018 at 9:02 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 380: What Do Lifetime Sales Really Mean? #51850That is why 3rd party software [i.e. EAT-Easy Auction Tracker, SixBit, WonderLister, and hopefully InkFrog for J&R] have extra valuable features over and above their other functions. Even GoDaddy and Quicken should have most of these numbers IF U HAVE BEEN using them long enough. If not, then Ebay numbers will have to do.
mike at MDCGFA
Yep I agree. It seems those with high feedback are buying on Ebay as a source for reselling, stocking their booths or stores and seem to be the ones we also have that try to create a scene after the fact to see if we are a “scared seller and easily intimidated” and can scare us out of our own fear into giving them a partial refund.
We don’t do partial very much at all. You don’t like it, we want everybody to be the happiest buyer we have ever had, so just send it back. This is how you request a return, do it and we will give you a free return label. Almost every person that tries this now, we never hear from again.
Some comments we get after that is never mind I’ll keep it, too much trouble to re-pack and re-ship to return. what ever, we don’t care. Like it and love it and keep it, or if unhappy, don’t like, or what ever agagin, we don’t care, just send it back, do it this way and here’s your free return label. So some send back some don’t, again just a cost or doing business and one of our standard operating protocols. It has served us well.
And most of the thanks for developing SOP’s is Jay’s calm approach to doing daily business. Just adopt a ” It is what it is approach” and you will be just fine.
Mike at MDCGFA in Atl
Yep as Jay says.
But staed a little differently:
I once asked here on SL about a pile of clothes our daughter gave us to sell, but they were all size 2 adults. When I asked if they were really worth selling, Linda Sheilds replied, everybody is a size 2 at some point in their life. That coupled with an old “Jay-ism” “Everbody, has to start somewhere”. We too once had zero feedback the first week we signed up”. Well if Ebay has thousands of people signing up per day, then all of them have zero feedback.
If every one of those thousands of daily new comers to Ebay were to buy a one dollar item from you, in their first 30 days, you would have thousands of dollars of sales in that month. You certainly wouldn’t say no to all those sales by canceling them. If this person you speak of had paid full price and you heard, double cha’ chings, bought and then paid for, you would not cancel the sale just because they had zero feedback.
You even had zero feedback the first week you signed up for Ebay.
Now about getting a return and the item being substituted out for a fake or a lesser quality item, especially in stamps, coins, autographs, while it can and does happen, as Jay has said many times, it is a very small percentage, and Ebay has done much better than decades ago to curb this sort of thing. But a trick we use, is on higher priced, unique items we always ask for a return of any and every item, even if we do pay for the return postage. We tell the buyer we need to inspect the item BEFORE we will issue a refund. And inform them we have ceratin hidden chareteristics on the item that we need to see to verify and then we will issue the return.
And we do. Sometimes on metal objects I use a small awl to scratch a very small dot or two dots hidden in the scroll work. Other times on stamps or sports cards, since I can grade cards, we shoot several additional photos that we never post in the listing that shows a frayed edge, the centering of the image or we shoot through a magnifying glass and get a few extreme close ups of a specific detail, a serial number or even a flaw on the item. Then when something comes back we look at those photos to determine if the return is the exact item. But we only go to these lengths on items over $100 or more.
Just a thought to help in this case and also going forward.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art in Atlanta
We only have had about 2 or 3 sales per year with Bonanza. And the printing of their labels at times messes with our printer and we have to change settings, then change back for Ebay-Etsy.
Also Bonanza messed with some of the WonderLister settings some how. Never understood what the tech guys were saying exactly.
And Bonanza gave us all sorts of badges but were always sending emails on how we could buy “Boost” programs to get more exposure, extra sales tools, buy a website store from them, on and on.
I just got rid of the bother of having to deal with it.
mike at mdcgfa
11/16/2018 at 3:16 pm in reply to: Promoted listings experiment RESULTS: Reducing all promoted listings to 1% rate #51817We dropped our promoted listings down to the 1% rate and impressions, clicks, dropped by 27% for that month and sales dropped by about $500 or so per month.
I have now gone back and put the promoted listings back and I can see on the chart from Ebay how the numbers of clicks are going back up.I don’t use the trending rates, I import all our listings into a spread sheet then run a very quick formula to average the whole trending column, which comes out at 6.02%. Then I set all of our listings to that amount. I selected to run the promo. until right before Christmas and will see what the graph – chart looks like and how Sales go.
We build extra into our pricing to allow for running a Sale and also to make up for offers. So as far as I see it, the 6.02% for promoted listings is nothing more than a 6% off Sale. And we have way more than that built in. We can dump off 30% or more and still have a number we can live with if we run a 15% Off Sale and take another 15% off that comes from an offer. So, agagin that 6% promo fee is already built in.
mike at mdc galleries and fine art
Jay and Ryann. I just closed our Bonanza booth. Did you also then close your account as well. I see it is a two step process. Close the booth first – DONE and the last option is to close the account. did you guys do both options?
mike at mdcgfa
Hey Ryann, question. You did end your Bonanza account didn’t you. I think I read that you did.
We hardly ever get any activity from them. Only a couple of sales this year. But they are always synching up with Ebay and pulling every new listing into Bonanza.
mike at mdcgfa
That’s interesting Joe. I think several memebers here including Jay and Ryann also closed down their Bonanza account. Ever since then I have been meaning to do the same with our account.
We also have a Shopify account but have been just using it as a “parking place” for a backup of our store. We never did or have submitted the Shopify store to get verified or submitted the site map to Google to crawl the site. Probably reading what you are aying it was a good thing. Between the Shopify store and Bonanza that would probably be seen as a triple duplicate of information?
So, guess I will take a few minutes and go and close out our Bonanza account and will make sure we don’t go live with the Shopify store.
Now what about cross listing on Etsy? We have 284 of our 1,132 Ebay items also cross posted on Etsy. I think the fact that Ebay and Etsy have their own internal traffic that Google is not as involved with the crawling of these platform stores and duplicate items would probably not be seen as such?
Mike at MDCGFA
Oh of course. I use Quicken for Business and all these types of reports are readily available to us also, which we do use on a monthly basis along with the company balance sheet and P&L statement. I was just replying to Jay who said he did not have numbers any further back than 90 days in Ebay and I was telling him the long way would be to just copy his SL posting numbers. But he and Ryann also us GDBK and probably have the numbers there as well.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
Jay.. a simple way to get your annual numbers would be to just go back and look at the first post of each pod cast you guys have created. You should see 52 weeks of your nmbers that contains the data you post each week. several years ago, I tracked you guys numbers for a whole year and ran a spread sheet on them watching your higest items sold, your monthly sales and then an year end look at your numbers. Back then you guys were more like 3-4k items, but gave me a good picture of what it would take for us to pull out of the booths and go full time online.
You wouldn’t have some of the detail T-Sat has captured, but the year long numbers are there. Then maybe some numbers from any hard copies or digital Ebay invoices you may have saved.
Just a thought.
mike at mdc galleries and fine art
Now this is the way I like to see the numbers. As an agrregate or atleast a cumulative of several months at a time. Watching numbers weekly is like watching the stock market swings hour by the hour. But this type of [posting tells a whole different story.
jay… How about a thread with a challenge. A thread that will hold anyones whole year end numbers for 2018? What you listed for the year, total sales for the year, total costs paid for the items for the year. Your top 10 yearly solds, the bottom 10 lowest price solds, the years top 10 biggest blunders, the years top successes, the years worst customer nightmare, how many positive reviews, how many returns.
Data like this can be analyzed, torn into, exstrapolated, interpolated, charted, graphed and any thing else you want to do with it. [hear that T-Satt?].. I will post my year end numbers if you create the thread, I challenge others to post and follow suit. Include what you know and are going to report on your taxes, leave out what you don’t know. One large, long thread for all 4,000 SL members numbers in one great big year end lump sum. Then it ends but there for posterity. Then when newbies come on board and ask, can I make a living on Ebay, should I quit my job, how much can I make, what should I buy, what should I sell, what is a good niche, then it is there for all to see.
Make this an annual Big event.
Cool..Thanks. Will try to posts short progress type reports / updates as we progress.
Sure thing.. Land in Atlanta isn’t cheap. Inside the I_285 is crazy and, it is hard to find in most places. What land is available will usually have ledge [rock] buried underneath or have other issues.
Most small .25 to .33 lots run $38k to $65 k per lot. WAY TOO high for a start-up or a first time home buyer. Builders all around here want to build $350k to $600k homes.
So we finally found 4 lots 25 miles up I-85 north in a small bedroom community right outside of a small downtown street like where your store front is located. 5 minutes into the town.
We got the lots at $11k each=$44k total plus some small over due taxes, etc. for about $45k total.
Having my friend as a partner who is a Georgia licensed General Contractor, we will be pulling all our own permits and supervising everything myself. So the GC profits and the Superintendants cost is all going to profit.
These homes will be starter homes for first time buyers. About 1,800 to 1,995 SF each, with some stone work, fireplace, screened back porch, hardy plank siding, tile, granite counters but everything contractor grade.
We have all of the subs we used to use, actually 2 or 3 for most of the trades and still have good credit standings with them.
Of course at this stage, this is very broad brush, but…We are targeting to list the two ranch styles which will be on slab grade for about $175k to about $180k. Then the last wto will be ranch style but have walk out basements [unfinished of course] and will list at about $195k-$199k.
We are very confident we can build at approx. $50 per SF and think we can squeeze out at $40 to $45 per SF cost to build. So about $90K to build plus $11k for lan = $100k gross total and trying to Target about $100k gross per house, then of course will come some “soft costs” out of that and what we have to “throw in” to close, like some commissions, perks, etc.
We can build a house from scratch in 4 months +/- weather, rain or cold depending. We are going to do the first two slab ranchs fairly clsoe together, then the 2 walk outs late next year.
We are hoping to get as close to approx. $350k to $375K as possible in about 14 months or less +/-.The money comes from several sources. A small investor friend who has kicked in enough for the land and we will re-pay out of first house, the we will self fund the 2nd house, using personal resources. Then use the roll-back retained earnings for the last two. Projects like this you can’t dig into the income up front and run willy nilly with your profits. You have to be willing to plow back most into the company, but still keep a small revenue stream coming.
And we could of course go to the bank and do a construction loan of but prefer not to go that route if we can help it.I can do some periodic posts if anybody is interested as we go, but know SL isn’t a place for real estate transactions.
Mike at MDC Galleries
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This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
RTWV: We too use promoted listings and a fairly good amount of our sales come from “Promoted Listings”.
So here is a part of a thought process. We usually have enough margins built into our prices to allow for us to be comfortable with having periodic sales of 10%-20% +/- [we alternate] and also take offers on anything over about $30-$35 on top of that. So, we use the 5% to 6% Promoted Listings selection, then what we do to offset that is to just only run 10% to 15% Sales and also not take anything much less than another 10% or so on offers below the Sales price [when we are running a Sale].So in other words we always have about 30% to 40% built into our pricing over and above what our market research shows as the higher “SOLD” prices we find on Ebay Solds, PicClick Solds, and WorthPoint Solds. That EXTRA Margin gives us room to play with Promoted listings, running Sales off and taking Offers all combined.
Example if we are not running a Sale, do not have promoted listings on then sure we may contemplate a 35% to 40% low offer and still be good to go. But if we have a 6% promoted listings turned on, have a 15% Sale running, then we would only accept an offer on items of no more than about 15% +/- below that.
Just like FREE SHIPPING. There is no such thing, just build it into your pricing structure.
Interesting thing is that when we cross list on Etsy, all this extra is built in and things are starting to sell and at the listed prices, so all that extra fluff goes into our coffers.
Just a single viewpoint..that and my morning cup ‘o java. Now on to building my roject Management Spread sheets for the new houses 🙂
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by
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