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There is one bit of control we haven’t mention and it is an absolute control factor. That is to pull any real old items, especially those you paid under a dollar for and take then to a local auction house. We have a real good one just 25 minutes down the road. Almost everything sells and usually $5 is the lowest price. If lower then can lot them up or tray lot them. Jay loves tray lots. At this point it doesn’t cost you anything, especially if you are going to this auction anyway. They do take a commision on the Sale, but that just substitutes for the Ebay fees.
At our favorite auction house they have several days a month just for dealers to dump off there items. This is where we get some of our items for our Ebay store occassional. But this is a “point of control”. Pull it, haul it in, sell it for what someone bids”. If it doesn’t sell leave until the next week and do it agagin. We sold a bunch of the big furniture pieces we had at the booths this way. Got close to $2,000 for a bunch too large for our new Ebay online venture.
Mike at MDC Galleries
Guess that sort of blows my deep discount sale comment out of the water, except for going even lower than 50%, maybe 75% or even 80% like some of the stores do, then throw in the “make an Offer” on top of that. If the items are at a level where they will be pulled and donated, then why not. Easier than having a yard sale in this heat or having to pull it all out of inventory, kill it in our software, load it all up and take to donation center.
I hear ‘ya man… and when you are 69.5 years old, I really don’t won’t to have to reach very far up for that fruit either. I will take the lowest of the lower now that I have the aches that I have. 🙂 🙂
mike at MDCGaFA
Troy. Funny that you mention this. we had just the opposite experience. You know we did the 30 day switch over starting a few months back Now not to fall into the “Jay Trap” that we don’t have any way to prove any of this.. And I can hear him saying.. “See I told you so” all the way down here in Atlanta, but after we went to the 30 day listings, which meant we had to kill every item that had been in our store for a long time, our sales tanked. We went from over $2,000 in sales monthly to less than $700 over the past sevral months.
It was after I did that, the team here, Lisa and Susan both said what about any organic traffic we had gained out the the Google-o-sphere, any watchers and follwers and those that just visited us occassonly without watching that saw all of our items disappear due to us canceling them. Sure they got relisted but with different ID numbers. Then one of them said that a friend told them that she copied items she was interested in aand pasted the stor eitem into a MSWord document and occasionally clicked on it as a link to go back to our store. Well that click produced a “this item no longer exits” statement. She said she went back to the store and re-found the items and rebooked marked them. So the questioned susan posed was, well what about the next month and won’t this happen again and when will fooling around with our store and items take a reverse tole on our sales?
There is also one thing I have thought about. Even though all the gyrations are quick, a few minutes, if I did enough looking, pokeing, anaylsis, sorting, filtering, how much time would all of that add up too. Susan said I needed to be down in the studio and creating and designing products, not poking keys on a computer and she also included my participation on SL in that comment. And she is correct. If you add up all of the time I have spent working with the SixBit and WonderLister teams, the old spread sheets, the old AuctionTracker, participation on this and several other forums, she said i could have created a bunch of art works and products that would be listed for hundreds and the resulting sales from those would out weigh all of the key punching on the keyboard. I did a rough calculation and it could be in the neighbor hood of several months of my time on things that may or may not have any affect at all on out stores success.
Interesting take on it. I guess. She and our helper seemed to be in agreement. But at least now going back to the GTC format it sort of puts my mind more at rest. Based on what I just said, I guess I should be down in the studio creating products, not talking about products, so to speak. Hhhmmm..
To those who use 3rd party dBases like WonderLister or SixBit or the slread sheet program AuctionTracker.. watch your listing carefully. This Ebay flip flop on the 14 day dwell time a new listing or a 30 day end and relisted item having to sit before a Sale can be applied vs. it’s reversal of that and saying that a GTC listing can roll over and not fall into that trap created a bucnh of confusion within our dBase.
We had about half or store on 30 day then end and then relist as a new listing duration and the other half still GTC. We had a Sale running for a week and when some on the listing came due for their renewal time in the middle of the sale, Ebay got some of the Sale prices confused again, just like they did last year, and some of our listing got relisted at the lower Sale price instaed of rolling back to their “pre-sale price”. Thank goodness WonderLister now has a maximum hitorical price column. We loo at this column which is side by side to the “Current” Ebay price it shows us which items did not revert back to their correct price.
We had 181 items that relisted at that lower Sale price. But thank goodnesss the WL tech guys got it straight for us. Once we all figured out that Ebay was having some issues handling this flip-flop on the 14 no sale allowed rule and then the reversal on that postion, we decided to bulk edit all of ourlistings, remove the 30 day duration-end-relist auto rule, and converted all of our listings back to GTC.
T-Satt if you guys have run a Sale within the last few weeks, you guys may want to double check and see if all your listing did relist back to their “pre-sale” price.
Also now that we have gone back to the GTC duration status that will help the Google searches and also start to shore up the new Shopify store organic traffic.
The WL tech team also said that now that the Ebay engineering team is starting to alter the Cassini search engine away from static keyword searches but go toward the analysis of their buyers behavoral searches and past historical archival search analysis the 30 day, relist and see us as a new listing will be a whole lot less important. And the end and relist every 30 days technique gets wonky with all of the Ebay changes as the listings get ended and relisted continueasly, Cassini is seeing those as now “redundent” listing they said, especially if no “major” changes is made to the scope and make up of the listing.
I told them, no way am I going to relist over a thousand items every 30 days AND THEN go and take each one of them and do a rework on it so it seems like a more relvant presentation of that item. That would be almost like re-creating the whole listing every month. No way. So, back to the GTC.
They agreed that in order to increase sales, the time would be more well spent listing on other platforms to “expand” our audience, thus increase traffic to the item, rather than worrying about trying to trick Cassini to build more views within Ebay itself. They said that traffic will be there and is there for all the reasons we won’t ever understand. So now take our same item, cross list it on Etsy and our own Shopify store and expose it to a whole new audience, some who don’t even go to Ebay or don’t think highly of Ebay.
Made sense to us, so back to GTC on everything for us.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art
And then there are those who don’t care about fish, fishing, fishing equipment, bait, techniques or anything.
They go out to a pond, throw there line in the water, sit back and smoke a joint and never look to see if they have a fish on the line, much less if the bait is still on the hook!! 🙂
Then get up and go back home and forget that they left their pole behind.. 🙂 🙂
mike at MDCG
T-Satt: I just thought of something. I mentioned in a post to Luftmentsh about getting his whole original premise and those of us using dBase inventory management, a quick sort, filter and double sort presents us with this type of data lickety split.
But you just said something. Jay and Ryannes inventory has been building a long time. If I am correct, most of it like the shoes were piled in big bins by color or something like that. You and I have a custom SKU number on each item in our inventory. That number then is “managed” by software that tracks, when we bought it, where we bought it, what we paid for it. contains notes on our research. We have a ton of “item specific data”, to search. sort and analyize in a split second.
But even though J&R have a new, fantastic storage building, the specific items may be lacking any data to analyize in the first place. Other than what Ebay provides , which is fairly weak and thin to what fire power we have at our disposal, along with strong spread sheet creation abilities, I think J&R is fairly hard to review tis type of data. And because of that I get Jay and Ryannes point.
If it can’t be proven, absolutely without question, that these types of manuevers really work, why should they do it. In other words, why should we go back and put all that time into looking over our inventory when it is not known when something was bought or what was paid for it. I have heard Ryanne say many times or ask Jay, when did we buy that, how much did we pay, have we had it long??? Will hard to do deep analisis along the lines being put forth if you don’t have the data in the first place.
We knew the importance of this type data and started a SKU number system and Inventory control Management spread sheet on our first items we ever bought to resell. We have just improved on the tools to analysis that data as we grew. BUT J&R took the approach, “let’s go, let’s grow, let’s make those sales, rinse and repeat”.
Tracking all of this has been a ton of work for us and I can completely understand why J&R would be hesitent, especially if doing so would require going back and putting in tracking data on 6,000+ items, to worrying about any of this stuff at all.
I think Ryanne said that they are now starting to use SKU’s and having their helpers participate. Well maybe a few years down the road that info. may have a value like what you guys are talking about. But I think it is more of a “tool” for them to help find the items in there storage more quickly, thus they can do more with their time, than to be present for a deep mathematical process formula.
Just an opinion of an old “artist-former operations guy” down in the deep south. That and $.50 will get you half a cup of coffee! LOL 🙂
respectfully posted…
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art [for Google!! :-)]A huge amount of our inventory is glass, porcelain, pottery, ceramics and #1 – #9 really doesn’t affect it.
As for paper items,[i.e. stamps, first day covers, art prints, etc. We have a large library room with wall to wall shelves and keep most in there [in the house] which is climate controlled but could be affected by swings in some of the conditions, but good archival protection we use helps with that, especially the limited edition, signed art prints.
With regards to some of the items, we take a look at the items we know are art related but instead of lowering prices, we increase prices periodically to help raise the artistic value and collectibility of some items. Kovels.com and their newsletters letters and their annual catelogs help with the review of the valuation of collectibles. Many paper money, coins, mint stamps, and art prints do fluate in price swings, but just as the stock market has done since 1932 [great depression] it has done nothing but go up over time.
As I said early to your posts. I get it. You offered some tools. Those of us on WonderlIster and SixBit can do a good scan, filter and sort lickety split and see what you have outlined, which we do. All we do is either apply an increase in price or a reduction to the duds, and as you said, that is totally subjective “T” can be whatever we want.
So consider me and probably most others got it. Glad I stayed out of this one…trying to prove one or the other right or wrong and convince others as to why one is right or wrong. Been caught up in some of those before. Led me to not participate here for a fairly long period of time.
Jay also informed me that my posts were fairly log for the SL Forum and that they only have so much band with.
So to save J&R bandwidth glad I got your point fairly quickly and the follow up explanations. So will take the data to heart as we do our “periodic” reviews.
Now to quote a movie “War Games” [I believe] .. after realising that Thermonuclear War was a game that could never be won, the WOPR-Joshua computer asked his inventor..”Dr. Faulken, How about a nice game of chess?” LOL 🙂
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.
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.
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.
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
Congratulations 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
To 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
