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Regarding your truck, you shouldn’t have to pay a cent. I used to have a 2008 Tacoma, and the frame was replaced totally free of charge back in 2014. If you could call it a drawback, it took 4 months for the repair, apparently the pickup was literally shipped back to Japan. No big deal though, I had a loaner on Toyota’s dime to rack up some winter miles on!
Hi,
Just popping in to share my two cents on inventory woes. I too started a SKU system in 2017, when I had about 8,000 active listings in my main store. Rather than backtracking and adding a SKU to each listing, I just moved forward adding the SKU # to each listing. I now have close to 11,000 active listings, and only about 3,500 DON’T have a SKU #. Hopefully by 2021 I’ll be down to 1,000 or so. I’ve programmed myself to recognize that items without SKUs are old and exist in the outdated inventory system inside of my head.
I put the SKU # in BOTH the “Custom” field AND at the very end of the description, that makes it highly unlikely that the wrong SKU# gets entered TWICE (the item is likely found in one of those two bins if there is a problem). In the ultra rare occurrence of the item still not being found, I have successfully found lost items by searching my active listings on Ebay by “date listed”, and looked at other similar items that were listed around the same time. The lost item is always found with one of them.
Overall it was relatively painless…Just a quick thought about the call that you had about late shipping metrics. For most items of mine that weighs more than a pound, I set the calculated shipping options up with PARCEL POST as the primary option and PRIORITY as the secondary. Ebay does not factor in our shipping discounts when calculating shipping, so PARCEL POST usually appears to the buyer as the slightly less expensive option. When the buyer checks out, their estimated delivery date is based on the slower PARCEL POST option. Using my shipping discounts, I then upgrade the shipping to PRIORITY (the upgrade sometimes saves me a dollar, and sometimes costs me a dollar, but it evens out). Item then shows up at buyer’s door well before the estimated delivery date, and is insured to boot. Keeps my late numbers way down, and makes for great feedback as well. I fact, the majority of my defects for late shipment come from buyers that take several days to pay on an item that had been purchased with one-day handling turned on, but by the time that they checkout, I had switched the business policy to 2 days or more so I could take a day off or go to a auction. Ebay will fix these for me, but it really isn’t worth the phone call unless the percentage gets too high.
MOST buyers will opt for the less expensive option, and some savvy ones will adjust at checkout to ensure they get their item quicker. Either way, it works out for me.
Just catching up on last week’s episode, sorry for the late reply. Your idea of a brick and mortar establishment prompted me to share my experience. 15 years ago, my wife-to-be and I started an art gallery. We operated it for 5 years. Not a huge money maker, but we never lost anything either. We closed it when we started a family and she couldn’t commit to being there full time (I was working full time elsewhere). I seriously started selling on ebay as soon as we closed the gallery to make up the lost income. If I knew then what I know now, I would have kept the gallery open and run my ebay business out of the basement there for as long as I could. There wasn’t a terrible amount of foot traffic through the store each day, and some months only a few sales would be enough to sustain us. A perfect companion business for ebay!
J & R, I am fairly certain that the “bug” regarding waist sizes that you encountered when bulk editing the jackets was not a glitch. Ebay periodically does away with entire product categories, or reassigns them. I had the same issue with some old tweed jackets of mine very recently. The original category number that I had used, #3002, is no longer available. I had to move them over to #182046 (Clothing, Shoes & Accessories > Vintage > Men’s Vintage Clothing > Suit Jackets & Blazers). When using bulk edit, I think eBay’s AI recognizes your suit jacket or blazer as being contemporary or new, where there are more item specifics required. They don’t communicate this well, though. If you ended each item and tried to relist it, you’d probably then receive an error message saying that the category is invalid. Make sense?
Not sure if Poshmark has an international option or not, I haven’t shipped anything out of the country yet. IMO ebay still has a major advantage by offering so many potential overseas buyers. For now PM is a nice little supplement.
One more thing about sharing on Poshmark: You don’t even have an item for sale in order to share it to a “party”. If you have a shiny thing you can simply toggle “not for sale” and still share it. Or simply continue to share “sold” merchandise. That is if you buy into the thought that more likes and shares drives more traffic and ostensibly, sales to your closet. I don’t have hard numbers to back this up, but I have noticed that I generally make sales after I’ve invested some extra time sharing stuff from both my closet and others. One of my most liked items is something that I sold in January and just continue to share.
So I have no idea if you could primarily run a business on PM. I personally would burn out quickly with all of the liking and sharing that is required. I don’t mind the minimal amount of time each week that I invest. Also since the focus is limited to fashion and accessories, I would get bored easily. No place for weird doorknobs here.I forgot about that. I have Parallels for my MacBook and have had TL on the Windows partition for so long that I didn’t even think about that.
I have about 300 pieces on Poshmark right now. Mostly mens clothing and womens jewelry. VERY easy platform to post on from a mobile device. If you focus your sharing to the “parties” that are held several times each day, and focus only on sharing relevant items (don’t worry, they’ll let you know what is and isn’t relevant), the social part of it is quick and easy. From my phone I can share about 20 items in a minute to a party, and then I’m done for the day. Since most “Poshers” tend to be women, I focus on sharing my fancypants jewelry the most. I think this drives traffic to my store and the ladies end up buying shirts, pants, or shoes for their menfolk. I actually have rarely sold any jewelry, but I get a ton of likes and follows on them. I have been doing this since last August, and average about $300 a month in sales with maybe an hour invested each week adding new items and sharing old ones.
Jay
Here is a link to the TL download. It is no longer supported, and buggy as stated above, but I haven’t had any issues with this process. I like it because it is free and once you do it a few times, very easy to do. I have been using it to transfer stock between 3 ebay stores for several years. Since I started using Business Policies on my main store this has required additional editing after the transfer, since the secondary stores aren’t invited to use BP by ebay yet. A minor quibble.http://download.ebay.com/turbo_lister2/TurboListerInstall.htm
Make sure that you have both of your stores linked to your TL and recently synced.
1. From the ebay store that you are transferring a listing FROM, highlight an ACTIVE listing, or many. Right click, and select “end item”
2. Click on Synchronize on top of page
3. From the menu on left, select ENDED LISTINGS, and highlight the item(s) that you just ended
4. File–>Export Selected Items–> Turbo Lister Database (TDB) File–> Export
5. Enter a filename that is easily found (I usually just call it export1+today’s date) and choose where to save (I usually do desktop)
6. File–>Change User –> bypass backup option–> select ebay store that you are transferring TO7. From the store that you are transferring TO, select INVENTORY on left side of page
8. File–> Import Items–> From File
9. Select the folder where you saved the file, and toggle Turbo Lister Database (TDB) in bottom right corner
10. select your saved file–>Open–> Import
11. Highlight item(s) that appear on inventory page–> “add to upload”–> “go upload”–>”upload all”–>”upload now”I would suggest trying this on an item or a handful at first and get the hang of it before doing a mass transfer. If they show up in the new store buggy or messed up somehow, you always have the item saved in your Unsold Items folder in the original ebay store to fall back on. You could simply relist at that point.
Feel free to move this to its own thread if deemed helpful.
-MattRegarding moving inventory from one ebay store to another with ease, I have a method that I’ll take the time to write out if anyone here indicates any interest. The drawback to the method is that you’ll need to download the ghost ship Turbolister. The benefit is that once set up, it takes only a few minutes to transfer any amount of listings, including photos.
-MattI also had a “fall off the cliff” date, but it was in September of 2016. Average sell-through rate went down ~35-40% over the course of about 10 days and never recovered. I’ve somewhat recovered by adapting and changing both sourcing and selling practices. Understanding and coming to terms that my boss is an algorithm has been key.
Regarding the caller with 3,500 45’s. Oh man, you are in for it…
Like was said on the show, you’ll find some emeralds, and maybe even some diamonds. I don’t know how much about pop music you may know or how old these 45’s might be, but if you recognize the artist or song as top-forty its likely not worth your time. There are exceptions of course (like Ryan said, Bowie is an example), but the big money is in obscure R&B, Blues, and even doo-wop. Use discogs.com as a reference. Organizing by label is good way to start. Put all of the major labels (Columbia, Atlantic, Sony etc.) aside and focus on the unknown labels.
I have been down this road before, and it is an exhausting one. At the very least, if every single record is a dud, hopefully the covers are intact. If you are lucky, maybe each 45 is in a generic green/gray sleeve. I have sold those in large lots at ~ $0.50 apiece (usually 100 for $59.99 or best offer), and donated the vinyl itself to a creative reuse center. Collectors sometime favor the vintage sleeves to the plain white ones that you can buy cheaply on Amazon. You could have over $1,000 in just empty blank old paper/cardstock!
I am tempted to switch over to wonderlister after seeing some of the benefits of renewing listings so they don’t get stale. I currently use Auctiva, which certainly has its benefits (and many drawbacks), but nothing like what I am hearing from Wonder Lister. The advantage of using a third party listing service for me is the ease of posting. By basically copying old listings and changing a few words here and there + the picture, I can easily list 250 items a week and not feel like I am spending too much time doing it.
As for free returns, I started turning it on most new listings shortly after the seller update was announce. I omit bulky and fragile items from the program, as well as anything else that might take more than 5 minutes of effort to pack and ship. I also omit most clothing, since I don’t want to be in the clothing rental business. While I certainly have had my share of returns in the past 60-90 days, not a single item that was designated for “free returns” has been sent back. This covers thousands of listings too, so for me it doesn’t seem to be such a big deal.
I did consult a lawyer about ownership of slides and images a while back. I obtained thousands of slides from the estate of a freelance photographer who did sideline photography work for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1970’s. I don’t remember the exact verbiage, but basically I own the slides/images/prints and the rights to reproduce them. Where I would have a possible issue is using a famous player’s name associated with their image, under something called “right of publicity”, which varies by state. The NFL and Pittsburgh Steelers might also frown upon unlicensed uses of the team or league name, and they are notorious for legal action. That said, I was told that it would be extremely unlikely that anybody would take any action against me for making onetime sales, but to refrain from using copyrighted names and brands when selling any reproductions.
