Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Waited to some of the dust settled on Ebay over this. So I let a few days go by and instead of doing a store wide Sale starting last week, we started one today to run through Sunday night.
We went to Promotions, selected to do a Store Wide Sale and selected to include all of our inventory. we waited during the pending period while Ebay compiled everything and after about 10 minutes or so, 897 listings out of 969 went on Sale. We have a combination of GTC and also auto relist after 30 days that are included in the sale.
The 72 that were not included were all that are set up as auto end and relist every 30 days, and that process had taken place, thus these 72 were not 14 days old yet.
Of the 897 that did get picked up in the Sale, those are a good mixture of both the GTC and the Auto List every 30 days.
So as long as we keep the starting dates all spread out over any one month, then most items will be picked up in our perma-sale process that we use.
This is a hypotheticial example, but if a seller ended all of his listings at one time, then relisted them all at once, then a clear separation would take place, whereby all of his store could be included in a single Sale or several mini sales [based on length] during a two week period and then the whole store would not be able to be put on Sale for a two week period. But this scenario is highly unlikely. So as long as we lsit things daily, use the scheduler to make sure they are spread out over several days, then most of the items should be available at almost any time we want to run a Sale. We just can’t be picky about what we want to include. If we run a 3 day Sale every week, we will still select the “Include All Inventory” button and submit. Then after we wait a few minutes Ebay will report back how many items it included in the Sale.
This is what we did today and the 897 is what was reported back. That is fine with us. Now just a wild guess here, but if we add a zero to the end of these numbers, I guess we would have seen 8,970 out of 9,690 listing included in the Sale. That will be fine. We just can’t be as picky, as i said, after what will be included in any one particular weeks, mini-Sale.
As said above, will just have to wait and see if Ebay does any rethinking on this, but business as usual for us I guess.
For the larger sizes Home depot and for a fairly wide selection at half the cost, Staples Office Supply [believe it or not] with Free Shipping on $25 min. order I belive.
Of course Uline has one of the largest selections of every kind of box, bag, telescoping, jewelry boxes on the planet, but not at the low cost of Staples.
We used to order from Uline because their warehouse is only 5 miles up the road from us, but they implemented a $30 Up-charge if you did local pick up at their “will call” desk. Bunch of non-sense, they said in a letter to their customers it was because their yard was getting full of cars and the trucks had a hard time manuvering around. Bunk. Never bought anything from them since because if you only need a $10 item it will cost you $40 with the local pick-up extra charge.
So try Staples, one size box was 42% less cost than Ebay’s price and free delivery the next day or two at most.
Going to print out their shipping supply section and keep on my inventory check list clip board for future oredering. Now how to figure out how to get some real value out of my Ebay $50 coupon. Guess that will have to be 36 rolls of tape!!!! LOL 🙂
mike at MDC Galleries
Just an update… The Ebay store has not added to or included any other shipping selections to choose from. Still only have 5 box sizes, bunch of mailers, tape and tissue.
Think I may just buy a bunch of Tape and then create a listing to resell it at 10-15% less than Ebay is selling it for. That way I can at least get cash back to go buy the box sizes I really need. LOL :-). Actually not a bad idea!
Neat little utility. Ran it for our shop and all photos are present and accounted for. Maybe due to using WonderLister, having all our photos on our new 4 TB external Hard Drive and having WL cancel and relist every 30 days. Guess if it did happen then the relist would have grabbed the hptos off of our hard drive and reinserted on the relist [maybe], not sure. But he main thing is we avoided the disappearing photo event, thank goodness.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Here is some interesting numbers. Just did a quick comparison of 2 size boxes from Ebay store vs. Staples store.
Size 16x12x8 = Ebay $1.01 vs. Staples price of $.72 per box [29% less at Staples]
Size 10x8x6 = Ebay $.72 vs. Staples price of $.39 per box [ 46% less – almost half the cost]So for a one off comparison $100 spent on the Ebay store for 10x8x6 boxes would buy me 138 boxes. The same $100 spent at Staples for the same size box would buy me 256 boxes. Before someone jumps, yes there needs to be a comarison of the test strength in Lbs. for the boxes and a eye put on the “flute” structure. Are they E flute, C flute, or what, but a size wise comparison shows that I am not a good Scanvenger from a budget friendly standpoint of using Ebay boxes. But then again they are paying for the first $50. But as a far out projection, what if they made the cost $5 ea, we would only get 10 boxes.
I would love to be able to spend my $50 on something else, such as buying inventory from another seller or heck just lower my $75 store cost by $16.66 each month. But doing that they would miss out on reselling the converted boxes and custom printing to us.
Being from the graphics / commercial printing background, I wonder how much Ebay is paying to have those boxes custom printed with their logo and what mark-up they are putting on that process?
I think some of the other sellers who buy nothing but Ebay tape then resell it in there stores have the right idea. Recoupe that $50 then go and buy twice as many boxes as one could get from some place else rather than Ebay.
But what do I know.. just an opinion from some old artist printer guy down in the deep South. who remembers watching Dennis Miller rants on SNL. LOL 🙂
Mike at MDC Galleries
Also down to our last 5 USPS Size “C” boxes. When we first heard about USPS discontinuing them, Ryanne mentioned about ordering a bunch herself to “hoard” some for future use and we did the same. Ordered about 200 of them. But, alas now only five left when we did our quarterly inventory hard count the other day.
Now for anything much over 12x12x8 as far as USPS goes we have to get elswhere. And the largest Ebay box of 18x14x12 is one of the ones that Ebay is not offering now. So anything over 16x12x8 and looks like we will have to start outsourcing and buying from box sources.
Anybody have any suggestions on where they get good prices for mid to larger size corrugated boxes and Uline is NOT one of them. We use Staples and Home depot for the very large ones, not bad prices. Staples was the big surprise for us but because we are a Gold rewards member the shipping box prices are not bad. Someone mentioned here on SL one time also about Staples.
Will have to see if $50 goes further there instead of the Ebay store.
Mike at MDC Galleries.
Just looked in the Ebay shipping supply store and we do not see where they have added any more box sizes. They were offering 10 sizes last quarter and now they are down to only the 5.
They only have 23 items total in their shipping supply store. We would really like to order a few of the box sizes they have now abandoned unless they add some back in over the next few days.
We are going to wait and see before we order. Don’t need $50 worth of tape.
Mike at MDC Galleries
Here you go..
1st item sold for $68.77 and 2nd item sold for $20.49Hope this helps.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Fixed on my end too. So we sleep well tonight and will see what the next surprise is when we wake up tomorrow.
Who knows, maybe our PayPal funds will have been drained by a Russian Hacker and all our funds transferred to a Siberian account…. 😉
Have a little something.
here is a Worthpoint.com link to 24 of them sold. You may gleen some info. from the listing descriptions.
https://www.worthpoint.com/inventory/search?query=annie+laurie+purseMost sold from about $15 up to about $80. Looks like at quick glance, she is a decopaugue ?? [spell] artist. Basically cuts and paste down cut out images on boxes and purses and then lacquers a gloss finish over them. Your seems not to have the finish and may be a smaller picnic basket. In any case, check out the link first and read other descriptions.
Good luck…
Mike at MDC GalleriesJust got through reading the article and especially all the comments and answers. Very interesting approach.
Also makes me think that the knowledge of and use of SEO and use of key words will be less relevant. Joe Mezz above is asking for some help on keywords. Well there are some key word app’s out there will provide key words as well as google Analytics, and will also show you the key words being used most often, but difference will that matter if the new Ebay approach will be to analyze a person previous search behavior, and follow their histories and then present them with selections they think they may like or what Ebay interprets as “the buyers intent” as opposed to a direct bounce back of the exact key words in order of Google strength? i don’t know how it is all going to shake out.
Same for us. Hard to get a candelabra, Crock pot, coffee pot, kitchen nesting bowls, art glass vases in an envelope. We dont sell clothes except for a few items. 95% of what we ship is breakable thus boxes and our “specially customized cocoon shipping method”. Adds a little extra weight and time but only 3 or so breakages since 2002. Pretty good I think.
I use poly-mailers to slide over other boxes in most cases to hide the fact they are of different type and cost category if you catch my drift. 😉
We keep 31 different size boxes in stock in our shipping dept. and we also cut and splice a lot of boxes together also to make custom sized boxes. I ordered 100 poly mailers and bubble mailers Jan. of last year and still have about 25 ea. of those. Plus many USPS boxes are “thinned walled” as mentioned before here on SL.
So hope Ebay gets in stock and puts back in those 5 sizes from last quarter.
Here is something from left field. It is almost the end of the 2nd quarter. We do a quarter end inventory count of our shipping supplies and then take our min.-max. list and decide on what shipping supplies we need to order and how to spend our up coming $50 coupon.
I went to the Ebay shipping supply store and they have cut way back on the products. Maybe it is due to them running out before the end of the 2nd quarter and they plan to re-stock but there is just a couple of days left to do that. If this is all they are going to offer, then they are only showing 5 selections of boxes. Last quarter it was 10 size selections. All 3 of the square boxes are not showing and the 12x10x8 and the 18x14x12 rectangle boxes are not showing.
For a suggestion, wish they would offer large rolls of 50lb. brown kraft paper, pads of cut newsprint paper and CLEAR tape. But that isn’t going to happen. As we gravitate toward other platforms we will be using plain generic shipping materials anyway. I still love the Duck HD tape Ryanne uses. The Ebay tape is extremely cheap and of real low quality [thickness and adhesive properties].
Don’t think Ebay will offer anything much that goes “inside” a package as they don’t get any branding-advertising out of something not seen.
This may be more suited in the Shipping section, but thought I would just throw a different topic into the “can’t Ebay get anything right” discussion today. 🙂 We have to be careful we don’t go down the Ebay Forum road of “Everything Ebay does sucks”. We got to stay on the high road path guys. But I do think a nice, tall, cold, Vodka Tonic would go real well right about now. LOL 🙂
Mike at MDC Galleries
I do remember now that you spell this out that you posted something to this effect before. At that time I did go and select a odd ball country, it was like Slovenia or something like that. That hung around for a long time, thinking it would eventually resolve itself. I deleted that one country a few weeks back and resorted back to the old policy. Still nothing.
But this time I think your process seems slightly modified from the first post. I will follow your steps agagin and give it a shot and see what happens. Will need to do it later after I get a few things done here in the office. Will post the results after I see if it works.
Thanks for the tip…
Mike at MDC Galleries
Just looked at my detailed break down and the Seller dashboard shows all of my shipped items as “no tracking number uploaded or supplied” since Jan. 1st, 2018, except for about 1 or 2 in Feb. and April.
Guess we all have to wait it out then.
We have also had a year long glitch still not fixed. We participate in the GSP [global shipping] and our preferences are set so that we do not “EXCLUDE” any countries. If GSP ships there we do too. But yet when you click on any of our listings, and you see the GSP option, below that is the “EXCLUDES and Does Not Ship To” area and it shows every country excluded. Because of this we have not had an International Sale for about a year.
Have called numerous times and they say,… they are aware and trying to fix, or we can still be seen on the foreign platforms so ignore this, or [my favorite] just wait and it will work and sort itself out given time. Well a year has gone by and still every country in the GSP is still showing up as excluded.
So as Ryanne says, “WTF is wrong with Ebay’s back-end infrastructure????”
Seems to just be one thing after another, either internal screw ups or a plethora of drastic changes all hitting the wall at the same time. Change is OK with us, but why make a tidal wave out of it?
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.
