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Agreeing with Steven here that there’s a ton of contributing factors. I would avoid getting into conspiracy territory as that will just make you paranoid and result in a ton of wasted brainpower.
My “hot take” on promoted listings are that they make zero sense if you’re selling unique items or have little competition. I was looking up my own items one time and had a bit of an embarrassing moment when a search only returned 2 items – the promoted and non-promoted version of my own listing. I went back through my promotions and removed some from the program. To use a common example from the podcast, if I’m selling the same iPhone cases 12 other sellers are also carrying, then I’ll need to fight for my position in the search rankings. If I’m selling an unbranded vintage doohickey that’s getting 5 views a week, then there’s no way that needs a promotion.
When sales are slow and I’ve done all the listing I can possibly do, I just take the opportunity to do all the boring, business-related work that I put off. Deep-clean the office, reorganize inventory, etc.
Thanks for the input, everyone! Although I was never convinced I’d picked something up worth a lot of money, I hoped I’d have 4 or 5 $15+ lots of items from this haul.
Now that I’ve had time to go through around 50% of them: They are boring, unspectacular matchbooks from various restaurants and hotels around the US. Nothing special, which is a little disappointing, but I guess a good reality check. My mode of thinking was, “Someone decided these were worth collecting, so surely there’s some value here,” further drilled in by immediately seeing another collection at the next sale I hopped over to. Turns out something you can easily toss into your pocket and into a “collection” when you get home has barely any value!
I’m going to put them in lots of 100 and sell them off at whatever price I can get for them. I’ll definitely make my money back, but the time invested wasn’t worth it.
Again, thanks for the help – I’d have spent another 2 hours sorting these had you all not stepped in!
Check out https://www.newegg.com and do some browsing in your price range. You can get some very good monitors for well under $300 the last time I checked.
For something more specific, I would look into any model from Dell’s UltraSharp series. I lucked out and found a U2415 at a thrift store for $10 and it’s the best monitor I’ve ever had. Great color representation and a very minimal bezel.
I’m running a 10% sale alongside this hoping I can motivate some buyers to crack open their wallets. Been doing a lot of listing but not a whole let of selling, but that’s summer for ya
Update: Close to 90% of my listings are now showing up with guaranteed delivery dates. I guess it takes a while for them to update old listings, as new listings I put up worked immediately.
I agree – it does seem incredibly unfair to have such a weird, random rollout of the program. If it really increases sales across the board (their words – not mine) why didn’t they just put it in action ASAP?
Regardless, I finally found only 5 of my listings are showing up with guaranteed delivery
dates. The items shown are 2 random ones I listed last year and 3 items I listed today. Cool.“You will only experience consequences if you have at least ten requests in the line of business and your “item not described” or “item not received” rate is greater than 1 percent.”
Well, that’s ominous. I suppose this is more hinting at “just enable free returns already”.
Zip code requirements would prevent drop shipping from China while claiming to be US-based.
Jay, the eBay ID no longer exists. They registered the account the same day they bought it. I assume they didn’t know about guest accounts and deleted their account right after purchasing.
The eBay rep was convinced that I could cancel the order/relist the item after they did something on their end, but I still wasn’t able to do either without landing on an error page. As of 12:30 the order was still under “must be shipped in 24 hours”, so I shipped it. Don’t really have a good reason for doing it, other than that I was afraid I couldn’t get the defect removed for some reason. I think the larger issue here is that I’m putting too much stock in defects and am willing to make risky moves to keep it under control.
If something goes wrong, it’ll be my fault and my fault only.
I appreciate the input, Sharyn. There were some posts I found on the eBay Community Forum from sellers who got the suspicious buyer notification weeks after a sale had went through, but that was the only similar case I could find. It seems like it’s rare to get notified of a suspicious buyer before shipping, actually.
I’ll be interested in seeing how FVF are handled on this order.
Got on with a support rep. They essentially just read the email back to me and dodged the questions I had about the order being stuck on my Awaiting Orders page or why all the information for the listing was deleted. I asked three times – “When will this be removed from the orders page?” and each answer was a non-sequitur about final value fees, PayPal refunds, and something about automated relisting (?)
I tried relisting, but get this error message:
“This item cannot be accessed because the listing has been deleted, is a Half.com listing, or you are not the seller.”
PayPal funds are still there, so I’m just going to ship this thing. It’s $20 and I’ve spent close to 2 hours trying to figure out what to do.
Just another weird day on the ‘bay.
I see it also – now have a premium store instead of a basic one. This is like getting a free upgrade to first class on a flight when you only paid for business!
Here’s a listing for the typical original Xbox you’ll see in thrift stores:
Additionally, this is the search query I’d use:
There’s a few things that help boost the price:
1) They’re modified to play Nintendo, Sega Genesis, or other retro console games.
2) It’s in a color other than black.
3) Someone has gone to the trouble of setting up software to allow media to be streamed from it. These make good “set top” boxes for watching movies or TV shows.
4) People who build home arcade cabinets use these.To test, you’ll need a game and a controller. Play far enough into the game for it to save to ensure the hard drive inside still works. I’d also check to see what size the hard drive is and include it in the listing.
That’s all I would do if I were planning on selling it for $25 or less.
edit: I should clarify that I don’t sell video game systems usually, but I recently watched a mini-documentary on these particular units recently.
