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With all the dialogue that has gone back and forth on reviewing “old” inventory and then deciding how old is too old and what to do about it, I haven’t heard one word about putting a 50% Off Sale on everything either over a certain age or under a certain dollar amount AND CLICKING ON M/O!! If some thing is “Old” whatever you define that as.. the if it is a $10 item at 30% OFF Sale AND M/O may just get it sold and out of your hair.
No use changing prices all the time, just run a % Off Sale and take an Offer. Or take anything over 5 years old and place M/O and include in the Title Gotta GO.. Make an OFFER.
I’d take two dollars for a $10 item I had for 5 years and it is still staring me in the face.
Our some buyers scan for deep discount Sales. So anything under $XYZ dollars at 85% OFF Sale. Even run a promotion on that Sale.
Just a different angle I guess.
Jay wrote: “I think of each item as just a collection of search terms. The more terms we have listed, the more search terms we have out there to be found.”.
I think this may be the reason I am seriously thinking of taking our 30 day auto relist off of that process and changing them back to GTC. With Ebay messing around with new policy changes all the time, it creates some issues within WonderLister.
If I also take my own words to heart about Google taking it’s sweet time to crawl a listing, then keep deleting that listing is not giving Google the time it takes to find it or if it does, then someone clicks on it, they will see an ended listing not an active one, organic traffic will be of interest as we build out our own store, and we are not even sure [as you say been proven], that the end and relist as new even does really do anything, and does applying promoted campaigns whereby we pay a little extra commission to Ebay work better than having all new lisitngs every 30 days, and the final factor of changing back to GTC is just one more thing we won’t have to fiddle with.
Also toying with taking the few “Free Shipping” status off of those larger items we have and pulling that zone 8 inflated price off of those items will get us back to some sort of normalcy.
If we are supposed to be retired now and do this for fun, it is getting to be just so much to have to keep dealing with. Maybe better to leave as GTC and Calculated shipping, then work on building out our Shopify Store and getting back into the studio to create art, lamps, mirrors, clocks and of course paintings and prints. Way more fun than constantly “pushing the data” and number crunching that is beginning to be an everyday churn now.
Ryanne, As T-Satt says, any of these software pograms will not only have a learning curve to use them, but also there will be new types of issues you have never come across before and you will have to learn how to deal with them inside of the software.
Currently I have 11 listings that have evidently been moved to WonderListers “Archives”, but why, they were new listings uploaded just a week ago. To fix, I had to create an email to WonderLister, explain the situation in writing, wait for a reply. They also want us to compact the database and send along to them to examine.
I just want to start”creating again” not bird dogging databases and chasing Ebay’s leap frogging all over the place. Those leap frongs create issues in 3rd party softwae trying to keep up and manage it all. Now Etsy is also making a bunch of changes.
Ugghh… I will stay with WonderLister because it will synch and manage all 3 of our platforms evetually.. but no use creating my own headaches by bouncing all around myself.
Just me doing a bunch of thinking this morning while waiting on WL to reply for the 3rd time.
Mike at MDCG&FA
Interesting about Barnesville. Went to school there for a while at Gordon Military College which has now been converted to a Univ. of Ga. satellite branch. Walked up and down the city streets many times.
Most of our relatives are in Thomaston, GA. a short distance south of Barnesville. I grew up in Columbus, GA about 60 miles south.
Got to watch John Wayne make parts of the movie the Green Berets’ in Columbus. Most of it was filmed out on Fort Benning, but the night time house scene was made across the street from my house. We walked across the street and up a small path in the woods and we popped out on the edge of the set. They used a house up in the woods because they said it was in the style of a south east asian house simililar to those in Vietnam. We watched them shoot ecah day and night for about two weeks. Tons of trailers around for food, make-up, dressing rooms and of course we were within a few feet of several of the stars including John Wayne. Man was he a “big guy”.
Understand.. and was talking about a one time thing to get rid of old inventory. Just saying that there are other things one can do with extremely old, unsold items, when you start to cull them out rather than just throw them away.
And everyone always says, talk with your CPA about how to properly handle old items that you are going to get rid of completely. Thanks for the details.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
Or a technique we learned in art school is to use a 3-d pantograpgh or even a hand made CNC machine. [see this link for a homemade model]. They even be bought in the mid hundreds for a mfg. model. Dremel also makes one.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/410812797239255192/You lock in the “model” / “Proto-type” on the left and then lock in a block of your chosen material on the right. Then it sort of a tracing process. You follow the contours on the left using a needle like pointer and the grinding wheel on the left removes the negative material on the raw block on the right raw piece.
You can give varying charateristics / individualize the one on the right by skipping around with the pointer on the left. Sort of not following the proto type exactly each time.
Can be used for wood, plaster, resign, stone, etc. There are even hobby type kits that come with a couple of proto forms and a block of material used for the duplicate.
In this case since the wood has such a varying texture and shape, that adds to the individual variance [character] of each.
All this guy needs is just one of each original to use as his left guide and uses it over and over.
In art school we had one in the sculpture dept. and students used it to make dozens of small pieces that in turn they attached to larger sculpture pieces. Wood workers use them to duplicate corner molding pieces for door fluted casing and medallions they use on fireplace mantels, etc
But who knows, maybe he sits there and holds each raw piece of wood in one hand and a knife in the other, sitting on a low stool amidst a pile of wood chips on the floor and cranks them out every 5 minutes or use a CNC duplicator. Hhmmm… what do you think, I know what I would be doing.
For an “OPerations Management” view point Think High Demand requires high output = automation = profit. I seem to gravitate toward the high speed duplication process. But who knows, maybe he has tons of YouTube videos showing him patiently hand carving every one. It’s possible.
MIke at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
07/08/2018 at 9:44 pm in reply to: Jay, you are right! 500 listings is good — 1000 is even better! #44795Congratulations on hitting the 1,000 mark. Boy do we know how hard it is to sell, then make up those sales with new items but keep adding to continue the growth.
We hit 1,000 yesterday and have about 1,007 today. It is a road to climb and to think Jay and Ryanne have over 6 times our amount. Now that may be a goal we can’t reach, who knows, but we set goals at about 250 intervals. so, 1,250 is our next.
Mike at MDCG in Atlanta
07/08/2018 at 5:12 pm in reply to: eBay is not updating ID numbers so Google Searches says item sold! Help!! #44781To those who have gotten some SEO under there belt it is fairly well known that Google spiders and bots crawl the web almost constantly. But with such a vast number of web sites, listings, postings [probably in the billions] it takes as much as 90 days for a Google bot or spider to possibly get to your site. A new listing on Ebay, even with Ebay spreading the news, will not neccassarily get picked up by Google.
Now when it does, there is a formula for what Google will show in it’s blue headline link based on keywords and their placement. Then after Google does pick up on your store and or listing it may be months before a spider or bot returns. Then according to the newer aspects of the Google Panda and Penguin alterations to Googles old alogoryhtyms, they search mostly for new content. That is the reason behind those instructions to always be either writing new content or alterring content. The bots found you the first time, now they are seeking new info. If they don’t find any [ a stale or dorment listing], they move on. There is too much ground for google to cover to dwell on any site more than a few mille-nano seconds.
So yes to the GTC listers, this is good news if you leave your new listings for weeks if not months. google will evently pick up up. But to the 30 day listers, when you kill that listing, then the Google bots upon their return will find a dea listing and report it as such. They will not automatically go searching to see if there is another newer created duplicate listing.
The bots will return to this geographical web area sooner or later and at that time they may find the new listing, but if it is several months, that listing may have been ended and re-created a couple of times.
So the 30 day relisters are not going to get too much in the way of help from Google. Google is just too slow in it’s detection of new data and getting it listed. The GTC guys do have a much better chance of being found [eventually] and then that listing, when clicked on within a Google search, the searcher [buyer] getting taken to that listing. But there is a BUT.. even outside of Ebay, if Google does come crawling agagin either a bot or spider, and it finds “stale” [undated information, same old wording, layout, photos, no changes at all, it too will internally declare there is no fresh content here, log that into it’s memory and not really return any more. Maybe it will come by and crawl agagin, but who knows how long.
So, some posters I have read on some of the SEO forums I used to frequent would advocate, do postings, blog articles, your own domain information pages then return to do updates on that content every few months. If left alone Google will see that article or page of info as dorment and not return. The original content will stay though. That is why some listings take you to dead pages or ended listings. The original listing is there with the link back to your store, but if that original was based on the first or older ID number, then of course the click through page says the item is ended. It has as far as that ID number goes. And at this point in time, a Google bot or spider has not crawled your newly, “relisted” item post under a new ID number.
So here is another thing to consider in the never ending battle of to relist or go GTC. If you are only concerend about internal Ebay searches, each newly relisted item and new ID is searchable immediately. If you are trying to build off site, Google web traffic, then a longer listing with some periodic refreshing is in order.
But as Jay has said before, and I agree, very little traffic comes from outside Ebay for Ebay stores and lsitings. especially since google slammed Ebay for their “black hat” link farm tactics several years ago. But also it is more of an understanding of how SEO really works and that is what Google is built on.
I bet a lot more sales would be made if Ebay allowed duplicate listings. Then sellers could have “two” stores and list the eaxct same items, only one store would end and auto relist every 30 days, and the other would be all GTC. That would cover all bases.
But unless you are trying to build your own organic traffic on Google, it is best not to worry about that unless you have your own domain name and your own web store or a Shopify store. We do and those listings will produce interest from Google’s bots and spiders finding them. We are now in the midst of creating our own Shopify store and there we can have the same listings we have on Ebay and leave them just as a GTC. Google will find them and then those who click on the Google finds will be taken to our store not Ebay, and that is fine by us.
Those unfamiliar with optimizing web sites can Google that of course and get tons of information as to what may be needed to build organic traffic to your own store. Even Shopify has it’s own online University for training on the “how to’s ” for all of this.
We get picked up a lot organically just for the fact that I include our store name in almost everything we list, describe, post, reply on, write or blog about. Miami Dade College of Art is also MDC Galleries but we are MDC Galleries and Fine Art and most of the time we are on Googles first page up at the top above them and they are a well established museum.
There is a lot to it and hope this may provide some tid bits of info.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
I got your point with your very first post. We used a similar technique / criteria when deciding what to keep out of 3,000 plus antique booth items.
Here is something we decided to use as a screening criteria: When we saw the piles of stuff we were not going to keep or list on our new online venues, we had a conversation with our CPA. We talked about just dumping old, broken, chipped, and dirty items but he said no donate them. And the intersting thing was, he told us why. He said that many places publish a valuation guide to aide in deciding the value of donated items. He said a few of his other clients print out those lists and use it as a guide to place a value on the donated items for the tax year. He went on to say the Salvation Army list was very generous, much more so than Goodwill. Well he was right.
As we reviewed the list we saw many items, especially on the very detailed ones, were showing a donated price much higher than the prices we had on some items at the booths. We still keep those lists as guides right here on our desks. The SA list shows both a low and a high range on their whole list. He said to use a number in the middle. Boy were we surprised. So we created a spread sheet, transferred everything we didn’t think would be suitable to loist and discovered that over a thousand items had an overall average og approx. $5 to $12 per item. We racked up over $8,000 in deductions.
Now this isn’t free money and it is only applied to lowering your adjusted gross income but that still adds up to lowering your income tax bill. In J&R case or any other SL members hitting the $80,000 annualy or more this would be a big help.
The other interesting thing is that once you have that much of a tax deductible donation if you lower your tax bill to zero, which we have now for several years, the unused portion is still active and carries over and can be applied to the next years taxes.
Now given that I see some SL members offering ties, shirts, blouses for $5 to $15 dollars, you may be surprised that the tax deduction on shirts is $2.50 to $12.00 so we used $7.25 per shirt, shoes is $3.50 to $25 a pair so we used $14.25. This was more than we would be selling them for. They had more value to donate them than to go through the long process of listings them and on top of that to let them sit for 5 years to get less than what we could claim as a donation.
Some categories are crazy. Lamps range from $5 to $75 so a mid range was $40 for us. We dumped evey lamp we had at the booths at $40 each.
Now to the final point..Take J&R large inventory, if sorted by age first [anything over 5 years old], then secondary sort price [anything under say $12.50 or maybe $15], then cross reference that and see what the donated value would be.
>>> The hypotheical example… if they found a thousand [1,000 items] and the mid point donation value is $8 then that is an $8,000 donated value. At their income level that would make a dent in their adjusted gross income and hopefully lower their taxes by a good amount.I asked our CPA would having a huge donation all at one time run up a red flag and he said not in this range and besides you have a printed inventory list with a descrion and an allowed prive value that is already approved by the IRS. And you have photos to boot. He said the red flag donations are much higher that the few thousand here.
So that is a thought when deciding to screen older items and cull out old inventory. Does it have a higher value just donating it than keeping it for years and waiting for the sale. The decution becomes it’s own instant Sale redeemable come jan. first 2019.
Just another view point guys…
Mike at MDCG in Atlanta
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This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
I just love this… BUT FIRST an Announcement.. We just hit the one thousand mark of items listed in our Store!!! :-). After almost a year and a half after shutting down six antique booths we have arrived at the end of the culling phase. After selling many items as we listed and making donations of tons of items we call “Ooppsies”, [items we should have never bought for various reasons, we have reached the end of the culling – sorting process. No more antique booth left overs.
Now we can move on to things that we currently buy and list almost as soon as we acquire them, and we now can start to go into our art print portfolios and a large stamp collection and also focus on art pieces we will be making ourselves.
Now to your formulas. This is great. When we first started using the database inventory management, control and auto listing program WonderLister, I knew I would need, sooner or later some data to use just for the purposes you outline. We created custom fields in the database for date we purchased, where we purchased and a few other criteria.
Now that all of our old inventory from the booths is listed, we have to begin to go back and take a look at the PA/T formula you outline. Using the custom field we created, we see that we do have some items that were acquired as far back as the summer of 2013 and those got transferred over to our current Ebay store. Now granted, even though these items are approx. 5 years old, they spent 3 of those 5 years floating in those antique booths, never selling. But we also have the date originally created in the Ebay store also.
So, now that all of that older inventory is accounted for I think it is time to maybe apply your PA/T formula. Storage is not a factor, so the PA/T will be the focus.
Now some of that 5 year old inventory may only have made it into our online venues more recently, we may have to use the “length of time” based on when it got listed online, not when we bought it and placed in one of those booths. But still this will be an interesting look into the age of our inventory vs. the potential profit reward. Some of that 5 year old invetory may be new to the online store but if it is only a $10 or $12 item, we may still wish to do some culling in those areas if it has been listed for say a year. That is where your “T” comes in. What is our threshold for wanting to give more time to sell it.
What will we do with most of that old inventory. We will most likely move it into our “Clearance” store category and then throw some 50% to 75%, or maybe even more Sales on that category and see if we can move / clear most of it out. If after a given time it is still staring back at us, then probably time to pull and donate it just as we did hundreds and hundreds of older, damaged old booth items. This will also pull us back off from the Premium store limit of 1,000 items which we just hit and leave room for some of the higher dollar items we still have in the art portfolios and the items we will be making in our studios.
So thanks for the formulas, insight and explanation. We should be able to do this very easy within WonderLister.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.
Yep.. one of the strongest geometric configuration known to man. Not tough to understand why most bridges are built with triangular structures and supports!!! ๐
USPS also has two sizes / lemgths. We sometimes telescope them together for longer rolled canvass paintings.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
Yes as you mention Ryanne if it is a smaller print this is suitable also. But I would like to maybe offer a little tip to improve on the flat sheet method.
That is to use 4 pcs. The reason is that corrugated cardboard is made up of what is called “flutes”. Sort of small parralel channels running with the grain. That is why corrugated cardboard is easy to roll and make coffee cup sleeves out of. But if you use 2 pcs on each side and cut the cardboard to size so that the flutes are not parralel to each other but tangent to each other [otherwise noted as cross grain], that strengthens the “sandwich” a whole lot.
As far as the interior goes for flat shipping posters / art prints, leave an inch or so all around the print when sizing the sheets. Take the print and sandwich it between two pices of newsprint paper or kraft paper first or if small enough put into an envelope. Then lay this paper “envelope” with the print inside centered on a sheet of cardboard and tape it down. This is why we use a paper envelope so we can tape it in place between the cardboard and the tape won’t touch the surface of the print. It also protects the print from scuffing. When this envelope is taped to the interior of the cardboard sandwich and an inch or two left around it, that prevents the print from sliding around inside of the sandwich and possibly dinging the edge or tape from coming into contact with the edge.
Now for the exterior, to make the cardbaord sandwich waterproof, if small enough slide into a bubble envelope. If too large of a print sandwich, we just wrap the cardboard sandwich in 8 mil black poly construction plastic we keep in stock from HD. We wrap a few things in this black plastic.
But in any case… bottom line, “criss-cross” the flutes [grain] of corrugated to make it more resistant to bending.
Just a tip…
Steven S: Oh I do hope for you that your $800 poster makes it. Even insured sometimes they will try to say it was not packaged properly.
But on a positive note, for any of our prints we double box anything over $100. Ether a tube in a tri-angle method, or first a tri-angle box then into a long square box. We keep plenty of flat sheets of cardboard around and many times will just make our long box for the triangle to go into and as I said abaove, we also use thin walled PVC [plumbing] pipe both as an inner box or an exterior box depending on the size of the print.
mike at MDCG
We send fine art prints, some pretty expensive and have a few suggestions that we use.
One technique we use is first we slip sheet the poster and then roll it up. The slip sheet protects the print from scuffing and also we then tape the rolled print and the tape only touches the slip sheet. We make sure the diameter of the rolled print is smaller than the diameter of the tube and the tube is longer by a couple of inches. Thus leaving space all around the print inside the tube.
Then we put this tube into one of the free tri-angle boxes that USPS offers.
Now you have a round object inside a tri-angle structure. This is failry good protection.But the catch here is those boxes are Priority so no First Class light weight postage. When we have to go longer we splice two USPS tri-angle boxes together.
Another method we have also used, we place in a cardboard tube as stated above, then slide that tube inside of a thin walled, white PVC tube that we get at Home Depot. [the tube within a tube method]. This works fairly well also. We keep a few 8 ft. pieces of PVC in the workshop and just cut to length as we need. We do quickly run sandpaper up and down the PVC to sand off the printing specs on the tube.
Of course we use dunnage at both ends and tape them off to keep both the print in the inner tube and the paper tube from sliding back and forth. Usually the USPS tri-angle boxes is OK but we also ship higher costing art prints and priority which is just a couple bucks more is fine by us.
Also there are some very good UTube videos if you Google / search on “how to ship fine art prints, how to ship rolled art work, then just apply some of those techniques to the less costly “posters” category.
And of course there are numerous videos on how to ship it flat. We use several methods of this type also. We incorporate either masonite, foam boards or both inside of those sandwiches, but agagin some of our limited edition prints can run higher in price than most lithograph posters.
Hope this helps a little.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.
Amen.. and some of us see partial refunds as basically a bribe against him leaving a negative feedback. Run your business smart, run it secure in mind and spirit. You do something wrong and are guilty, then fess up and pay up for your error, but not a bribe. If you did nothing wrong, then stand pat, stand strong. We are American Small Business that employ over 75% of the work force of this great country.
Too many scammers are out there, so have your SOP’s and stick to them. Offer help when a buyers asks, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. If Ebay is moving into the 21st Century with modern best practices to compete then so should we.
Some here at SL have been talking about books lately, my suggestion is a Paperback book called “Ninety Days to an MBA”. Great Reading on all the things we think, in our opinion, a business owner should have at least some awareness of, in my opinion.
Since it is the 4th of July .. may I offer a slogan addendum .. instead of only using “Made In America” lets change it to “Made, Sold and Resold in America” ๐
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This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
Yes what Ryanne is saying is the simple straight forward J&R method. But in my longer reply I wanted you to see the reasoning behind the benefit of developing SOP for most situations and sticking to them. It is a business sensibilty and process that leads to amethodical improvement in a business infrastructure.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by
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