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suggest don’t use a listing template either in the Ebay listing area or in another 3rd party app. I suggest creating a customize “List of Item Specifics” and have that Item Specific area always pop up as a template and just go down the blank fields of the item specific area and input everything about the item. Create blank fields titled, Colors, features, comments, material, sizes-dimensions, pattern, uses, etc., etc. Many times Ebay will present blank fields for these but sometimes not. If you have your own customized item specific area then you will always have those blank fields as a reminder to put in that information. The word “Plastic” would have been entered into the “material” field and you will be done.
Just a sugesstion. We use a 3rd party listing app and our customized item specific area pops up with each new listing and if there happens to be a duplicate because Ebay requests the same information say like, colors, just hit delete as you go down the item specific column.
Our opinion only.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art in Atlanta
Yep.. That is what we do in WonderLister. Just sort/filter on the “Bin Number”, up pops a list and if there are only 3 items in that bin, we re-assign into another bin that has a very low content. Move those items into the low level bin and bring the empty one back to our office for refilling with new items.
T-Satt.. “to lazy”. I sit in my chair and let my fingers manager my inventory within WL. How much lazy can this be. Sit in my pajamas, cup of coffee in my hand, listening to soft music and re-arrange 100 items using two fingers. I like my definition of “lazy” better than yours. 🙂 LOL
Oh and BTW sometimes I take the laptop into our storage area and place it on our rolling cart and just walk around and reloacte items right then and there and just edit the location field in WonderLister. That is my “exercise program” version.
mike at mdc galleries in Atl.
Mark: In WL why don’t you just create a “custom field” and put the other data you put into the spread sheet into the custom field you created in WL. We have 6 custom fields we created in WL Buy Date, Where bought, scale weight, photo folder location, Etsy field, Shopify field. Those can be sorted and filtered, reports generated and bulk edited just as any standard default field already present in WL.
we also created about half a dozen extra Item Specific fields and by placing an asterisk “*” in each field, it will stick [stay] in our generic listing template and always be available on each listing ready for data entry or we can bulk edit, sort, filter on thos also.
BTW.. this can also be done in SixBit for those users.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
T-Satt: May have some info. to share on the “SmartPost” issue. I have been talking to my local USPS carrier. She said their office has been getting a lot of calls on this issue and they finally had a in house production meeting and a district rep for USPS came in and talked to all the local PO employees. They said that what happened is the following.
The FedEx SmartPost program had negotiated that the USPS handle the last leg of all FedEx SmartPost packages. Every SmartPost package that is dropped off at or picked up by FedEx is sent to the destination zip’s closest USPS distribution center. So basically the FedEx program is pretty much about a 50% process that is now handled and delivered by the post office.
Then in Mid Januaury the USPS changed the prices it charges FedEx by increasing the weight rates, adding the new DIM weights and changing the the rates it charges FedEx for it’s part in handling the FedEx packages for them.
She went on to explain that the use of FedEx SmartPost is like using FedEx for the first leg of the shipment, then FedEx sub-contracts the last part of the delivery and that part is now costing FedEx a whole lot more than prior to Jan. 2018. In turn fedEx is having to pass those newly added extra costs along to the customers [us sellers and shippers] and that which has ended up in a much increased cost of the FedEx program.
I mentioned that it sounds like the USPS doesn’t want the FedEx business any longer and she seemed to say the SmartPost Program has always been a pain in the rear end anyway. She also went on to say that the district rep also mentioned changes in sellers platforms internal policies like Ebay, Amazon that are now introducing “Guarantted delivery” programs and money back programs that the USPS does not like being on the back end of that process. The USPS mnagaers state that FedEx drags and gets delayed many times for assorted reasons and that the USPS gets fingers pointed at them because they are the last ones to touch the program and they are tired of being the bad guy on “failed to perform” deliveries. She stopped short of actually saying they are over charging FedEx to handle the packages they can’t or won’t deliver but seems to think FedEx is getting stretched on the local stuff and prefers International delivery over local deliveries. The USPS out mans and out trucks FedEx 10 to 1 according to her and they would like for those who use FedEx to just start using the USPS directly since they deliver most of the fedEx packages anyway on the last leg.
So, unsure how much is fact or fantasy, but it sure seems to make sense that if the USPS is charging FedEx more for the work that FedEx is sub-contracting out to them, that in turn those costs are being passed down to us sellers and thus the “SmartPost” program now costs more.
We talk to our carrier 2 or 3 times a week and she seems to be more than willing to keep us informed on what is going on inside of their local office atleast.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Hi Sally and Welcome!
You will find a ton of information here on the SL Forums and back in the old blog [which all are searchable BTW]. But if you don’t know what you don’t know may be hard to find by topic.So if you are just getting ready to approach Ebay either as a Hobby seller or to start doing it more seriously may I suggest the Ebay University located in the Seller area.
Here is the link: http://pages.ebay.com/pe/en-us/university/
This is a good place to start because most of the basic topics are covered and you are getting the information straight from the horses mouth. Then once you have reviewed most of the topics then SL members can help clarify and expand upon this information. One of the things experienced sellers find out is though coming “straight from the horses mouth”, Ebay does speak, at times, two languages, out the side of it’s mouth and maybe with a forked tongue. LOL :-). In other words they can contradict themselves and also be very unclear at times. So a place like SL is a great place to read about or ask about things for that needed clarification. But one must get the basics down and also Ebay does have rules and SOP [standard operating procedures] that you need to become familiar with. You must do the leg work [due diligence] up front on those. The Seller Center and University is what I feel, in my opinion, the best place to start.
Good luck and maybe one day we will see your posted number for thousands of items and a grand number for your monthly sales.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art in Atlanta
check these links out
https://www.worthpoint.com/inventory/search?query=1932+olympics+seat+cushion&category=
the oldest one sold in 2016 for $114 and the other one for $44.
Good luck.
I noticed a very sluggish system most of yesterday and in the afternoon I did several reboots and also ran a couple of utilities to clean things up in case it was coming from my side [my rig]. Only got the can’t access notice twice but ran very slow all day.
Since 7:00 am this morning everything seems fine. Good response time, good speed and have mutliple tabs open on two browsers and all seems well.
Guess whatever it was, they got patched up overnight.
You hit the nail on the head.. Jay’s dicta. “LIst, then list some more”!
Yeah that is what we all kind of figured at this mornings production meeting. And at the mark up rates we use and by buying as low as we can, we figure those margins and pricing spreads will cover what few returns we would ever have. Again since 2002 we naybe have had 3 or 4 returns and also only 3 or 4 breakages and we ship tons of glass, crystal, pottery. 7 Dinner plates going out in a few minutes.
Well that is true. But we also bump those up so high and that we use a special “cocoon” process to package and wrap most of our items that the weight is fairly high also.
As an example.. if an item comes in at 15 ozs. with our packaging we usually push that to 1# 2 ozs. That makes the cost go from $5.50 USPS to up to $8.45 Priority zone 8. BUT we then ship out First Class at 15 ozs. at $5.50, then less our discount for about $4 and change and we make $3 to $4 on the shipping and 1st class will get to far out zones just about as fast and in many cases faster.
So now, if returned, Ebay will use the heavier weight and create a label for $8.45. Remember the Ebay fields for weight, is for Shipping weight, not actual scale weight.
So just interesting on how they are going to do it on items that have Free Shipping on them. But as said, now with Free Shipping a seller and make a whole lot more money, even with Sales and Best Offers.
I suggest looking up two videos by Danni Ackerman with the title Free Shipping in the title and watch those. They outline the money making method of Free Shipping. She Ships everything Free Shipping, lamps, large and heavy, etc. upwards of $40, $50 dollars and also will pay to have FedEx pack it for her and still makes money.
It is not too many items we are offering for free shipping that range between 2 lbs. to6 lbs. that we don’t have $12 up to $25 plus a 35% M/U on top of that that is not built in and we are still selling those.What Danni Ackerman says is that most people are buying on their phones and they don’t want to take the time to do the math to add the cost of the item together with the shipping. New age buyers, look at the picture and total price and buy. Almost to the tune of 65% of the buyers. I can’t tell you how many buyer messages we get asking questions and when we mention those are already answered in item specifics, they message back and ask what are Item Specifics, or I can find that on my phone. So, much I have a short text message on my desktop to just click and paste into my reply box.
New age customers hate doing the math. They just want a total price, they mostly now expect it.Example… I have two vintage Hull vases on my desk. Magnolia relief design. Beautiful. Fairly hard to find style and design. They have a Sold History on several platforms we use to rpice with of approx. $85 each. We got them for $3.25 each at an auction. the scale weight is 2.6 lbs. and the “cocoon-double box” method of our packaging we will list it at another 2 lbs.So this is how I am going to price each. 12x10x8 box at 4.6 lbs. That rounds up to 5 lbs. in USPS charts. Now with how we are doing free shipping. we don’t know where it is going so we take worse case scenario and use Zone 8 price column. That shows at $23 at over the counter rates. So, $23+$85×1.35% M/U= $145 that we will list this at and include Free shipping in the listing and Make an Offer. Now to arrive at the actual selling price.. We are almost always running a Sale so let’s use 20% off Sale and we will in most cases go another 15%-20% off on make an offer or if low balled counter offer back upwards to around the 30%-40% off total. So now, starting at $145 we will be at approx. $102.00 to $87.00. Now we are back to what the item sold for at the higest price we researched out. And in 85% of the time we don’t go to the 40% level, it is more like the 30% level.
Now the question is how much was the real shipping by the time we actually “cocooned” the vase and shipped and knowing that the actual box size is approx. correct, what about the real weight?
Will a return buyer actually re-create the cocoon, use the same box within a box, will it be lighter or heavier than originally sent. Interesting bundle of hidden factors BUT with such mark-ups as we get on vintage, rarer-harder to find collectors pieces we are OK with Ebay charging use a return fee based on whatever they want to use because we in this cases have 27 to 31 times our money return on the investment.
Just an opinion, but when something will sell at a known range and you build in the highest cost shipping you can and allow discounts and room to haggle-bargain the customer get’s his “percieved” WIN [bargain-deal] and we still smile all the way to the bank.
Take a few of Jay and Ryanne’s Sales on the extreme high end items they sold, just the Louis Vitton suitcase had enough profit in it to pay for all of their returns for a year [just a WAG – wild ass guess] but that sort of how we are looking at it.
Now this will not work on common, commodity, well available type of products. When we start listing the original artwork we have, the returns are going to be extremely high. But we will see.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Jay, that’s the rub to this whole thing. I am going to quote you… ” when we do an experiment, who’s to say that what we did actualy caused a sales increase or would the increase in Sales have happened anyway due to other factors” or something like that.
We also have started Promoted Listings this year, and doing much better on SEO phrasings and key words and there placement, we also have been taking the weight of an item, looking at shipping it to Zone 8 then marking that up 35% more and adding it to the price, we also are having 15% and 20% Sales running every five days, we are now nameing all of our photos and when they are being used in other places is google crawling the photos, I sure see a lot showing up now in Google images and some being picked up on Pinterest [funny that when we are doing research on some of our items we are seeing our own past sales coming up as benchmarks..[haha], we are starting to use the MDC Galleries name on almost everything we write, so who knows what will be the one driving force that increases sales. Add in the plain fact we had thousands of items pulled from closing down those booths and now we are starting to mfg. a few of own own products and art work plus now opening up those art portfolios of prints I made for dozens of New England artists.So keeping good numbers or not, it would be impossible to nail down exactly what will be the increase in Sales. Now if no increase in Sales, that would surely point to the fact that “NONE” of the above would have helped, but I really doubt that will be the case. We are at approx. 920 items and by fourth quarter expect to be at around 1,500, 1,750 or more [hopefully]. That alone will surely drive Sales up by using your own mantra. List it and surely somebody will come if unqiue enough. There is a buyer for everything at some price, sooner or later.
So I hear what you are asking, but unsure if there will be anything to report other than Sales have increased, and if we do everything listed up above, I think, with fair sureity, that Sales will increase… even if we have to eat a few returns. Like I said in another post about employees who used to steal anything not nailed down, that a 1% loss on 18 million dollars in Sales was a $180,000 loss and that was off the bottom line. Also we had quality control issues that resulted in returns and re-prints. We always priced our proposals for our world class accounts high enough that if we had to reprint there whole job we still would win. America..What a Country!! We had to produce almost $720,000 or more to make that up. It was a fact of life, it is in all retail and mfg. formulas, and a fact of life.
So I probably can tell you right now, we will have an increase in Sales, how much unsure, but we will. But what will be the actual manuvers we are taking that will drive those Sales, may not be able to say.
I used to love our one salesman in charge of the Walmart account. It was over 1 million dollars per year and his annual commission was $100k plus and he claimed landing the account was due to the fact he was a 10 handicap golfer but always lost to them when he played. his charm and personality. LOL. But I fired Walmart as a customer, too demanding and we lost money on them. Operations 101 and the salesman, he was gone also. But what was it that made Walmart come to us, price, quick turn around, capability and large capacity.
So if we figure out what are the real driving forces in Sales increases during the coming year you and the SL community will be the first to know, for sure.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Think u missed the “free” shipping. If I charged a buyer $30 for something with free shipping. Ebay has no way to know if I sold a $1 item with a $29 shipping charge built in or a $29 item with a $1 dollar shipping cost built in. So what is Ebay going to charge me for the return of the item?
With free shipping how does Ebay decide on what the costs will be for shipping.
Changed my business policies this afternoon. Only took about 15 to 20 minutes. Clciked on Free returns and also un-clicked the restocking fee button. We have already had 30 day returns for about a year. So now, free returns, no re-stocking fee and just like Jay and Ryanne, will just wait it out, keep tracking the numbers and see.
We are also moving more toward free shipping on things under 3 pounds or so. We just use the zone 8 amount, then mark that up to account for Sales and offers and letting it fly.
we will just see how it goes.Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Tina: Just thinking… what about items with free shipping. What will be the rate for the return, especially since the buyer will probably not have a scale to use or if they let the post office weigh it, what about an over size box being used that may push it into DIM Weight costs. Just thinking out loud! Hhmmm.
