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Very interesting site. I found this article when reading up on it: https://www.thebalance.com/ebay-listings-rank-higher-with-myrealkarma-4022369
Seems to claim that it can help SEO and drive traffic to your store by putting all your information (social media, non-eBay stores, etc) in one place, while also cross-promoting listings. It seems easy enough to claim your account, so I’m going to give it a shot.
Is there an explanation of what “experience rating” means?
This is cool! Thanks for taking the time to detail it all – you’ve inspired me to look into promoted listings/sales.
Buyer claims the item was damaged upon arrival and wanted to ship it back. Which is fine, but when I asked for pictures of it to file an insurance claim, they said they’d gifted the item to a friend of theirs and couldn’t take pictures of it as a result. The rep said that because the buyer admitted to giving the item to someone else that it was no longer under buyer protection.
At this point I’m considering just refunding them and being done with it. It’s a bulky item and would take a lot to ship back, and I’m not sure risking a defect would be worth it.
Sharyn, you’re right – definitely needs a call to eBay, although I honestly wonder if anyone on the basic support tier staff actually knows what rate tables are given how limited information is about them to begin with.
Jay, it’s essentially like defining your own rates for calculated shipping on a state-by-state basis. Besides pricing things a bit lower, I was looking at getting competitive on shipping while not just using the discount Sharyn mentioned since I still wanted to make a little money in some cases. I feel like it did have a positive affect on my sales, however, I think I’ll just go the route of offering the discount and maybe tacking on some handling to cover a bit of the cost.
The phrase that sticks out most to me is “more predictable access to funds,” which implies they’d be doing something like weekly or bi-weekly payouts similar to Amazon (as I understand it.)
I’m not worried as long as Paypal remains a checkout option.
Speaking of free shipping, I did a price check on all my electronics priced at $50+ and noticed that a lot of sellers had moved to free shipping. This was true even for heavier items (10lbs or more.)
I decided to do an experiment and listed a DVD/VCR combo $30 above my usual price point w/ free shipping. It sold within a handful of days to someone a few states over, running me just around $16 for shipping, meaning I walked away with more money than I thought I would for offering “free” shipping. I then ran the same size/weight over eBay’s shipping calculator and was glad the buyer wasn’t on the west coast, as shipping went from $16 to nearly $50.
I’m glad someone brought up eBay’s shipping rate tables, because it’s exactly what I was looking for.
Since I already use business policies, I was able to create a shipping rate table that I can now apply to all of my electronics I’d like to ship for “free”, although it’s more like “free if you’re in the midwest, discounted if you’re not” now.
I guess we’ll see how buyer psychology plays out. Just looking at where my customers have been located before, it’s apparent that high shipping cost has chased away potential buyers in some states. A $40 with $30 shipping isn’t exactly the greatest look, I’m guessing.
About listings without UPC codes not being relisted:
A few months ago I switched all my listings over to Good ’till Canceled. My store was small enough before then that I didn’t mind using the bulk editor to relist, and occasionally a listing would fail to go through because either the UPC or MPN were missing. Why was I even able to list them in the first place?
After moving over to Good ’till Canceled, I started noticing that my active listing count was going down and the “unsold” count on the app was non-zero. I thought maybe I’d accidentally listed some things at 30 days, but was surprised to see they were GTC. I went to relist them on the app and got an error message (“NULL”,) and went to the desktop to relist instead, where I got an alert that the UPC and MPN was missing.
Neither UPC or MPN codes are available on my version of the eBay app for Android, so it’s useless for relisting right now. However, it does seem to allow me to list items WITHOUT the UPC or MPN since there is no way to plug them in. I assume these items will go unlisted after 30 days.
Worst of all is that I’ve been getting no emails for these listings being taken down. It’s only by chance that I saw the number of unsold items go up on the app.
Items Sold: 13
Profit: $326.05
COGS: $66.53
Average Price Sold: $25.08
Highest Price Sold: $86.16 (Pioneer Home Theater System)
New Items Listed: 12
Total Listings: 174I won my first auction this week, paying only $60 for about $1,000 worth of high-end audio equipment. That in addition to a few other good finds made this a great week for increasing the value of my inventory.
Still on the road to 250 listings, which is where I’m expecting to see consistent daily sales. Finding inventory is the bottleneck ATM, but winning the auction this week definitely opened my eyes to a whole new genre of sourcing.
Jay,
Yup! His entire Amazon shop was filled with popular models of this specific item. I’ll admit that it’s a pretty good business strategy, but I’d assume a dropshipper would be prepared to eat the cost of a return should it happen. Cost of doing business and all that.
Items sold: 6
Profit: $245.58
COGS: $45.15
Average Price: $35.08
Highest Price: $119.81Worked through a pile of equipment I’d set aside for parts/repair/testing and listed it all. Only about 5 or 6 items and one of them sold right away. It was an untested HDD for an Xbox 360 S, so we’ll see how that turns out once the buyer gets it.
I’ve been revamping my inventory system that I run on a small webserver at home. Previously, I could only track stats (COGS, etc) by month, but now I have a handy weekly view that includes the stats listed at the start of this post. Nothing major, but it works perfectly for me.
Re: Dropshipping. I’ve been on the receiving end of a dropshipper’s buyer wanting to return something that’s been way outside my return window on eBay, but since “item is defective” seems to go outside of that timeframe, they just used it. I didn’t know I was dealing with a dropshipper until I tried communicating with them and got a bunch of snarky, pointed comments that were more or less “You’re insulting my intelligence. Accept the return right now.” Some basic research – like checking their old seller IDs – led me to an Amazon store where my item was listed as a different condition than I’d listed it for 1.5-2x the price. I accepted the return, but when I got the item back the buyer had actually included 3 printed pages documenting the return via Amazon, including an email correspondence with the dropshipper (or in this case, the Amazon seller), which I attached to a message between me and my buyer. He shut up immediately. I then sent the information to eBay and they returned the money to me in full, marked the dropshipper for bad behavior, and told me to block him until they could ban him from the site (he had dozens of pages dating back 5+ years full of negative feedback left for other sellers.)
Without evidence, you are pretty much toast. I feel bad for anyone that it happens to since it typically seems to be expensive electronics with insane return shipping cost.
I just switched my small, 150+ listing store over to business policies. eBay automatically generated policies based on each of those listings and their unique shipping policies, so while no damage was done, the end result is the business policy page being flooded with entries for each of the unique listings. E.g., if I arbitrarily decided to have a First Class package with $1 shipping when I was making a listing, I now have a business policy specifically for $1 First Class items.
Other notes:
* Dimensions are intact, as is weight.
* When you first land on the policy page you’re greeted with a number of popups instructing you to click buttons like “Consolidate shipping policies” and “Clean up policies”. However, clicking them only shows a message that you should “check back later”, implying the process is being performed in the background. How will I ever know when they’re done? Can I safely make changes without having them undone?
* The policy page claims you can view the listings that apply to each business policy, but instead it redirects to a page showing all of my listings, even if the page says that only 1 listing applies to it.
* I don’t understand how you could possibly convert a large store over to this system without being completely overwhelmed. The way eBay automatically generates policies based on your existing listings is unreliable and has resulted in multiple policies for the exact same conditions, and since I don’t know how long I have to wait for eBay to consolidate the duplicates for me, I’m afraid to make any changes myself.
* The design of the page itself is suspect. It’s “old school” eBay, so the page isn’t responsive to changes you make – you have to refresh each time. For example, I changed all of the listings under one policy to use another policy, but the dialog box disappear and nothing changed. I ended up refreshing the page and “Update in progress” appeared next to that policy.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s well-intentioned functionality in here somewhere, but eBay has a long way to go towards making it more accessible.
Edit: After an hour or so I’ve come up with a system for combining duplicate policies:
I have several policies with incremental names (Calculated:USPS Parcel Se,1 business day#13, Calculated:USPS Parcel Se,1 business day#14, etc). These were automatically generated by eBay and each have a single listing attached to them and appear to be the same. In a few cases, each one had a different price set for handling, or just a different list of places I won’t ship to, allowing local pickup, etc, so eBay made a policy just for that listing.
To fix this, I opened up each of the duplicate policies in a new tab, then compared them against the others to find which policy was the most appropriate. I then combined the unnecessary policies into the correct one.
I can see what eBay is trying to do with this system and it’s growing on me very quickly. However, if you’re the type of person to customize shipping for specific items, converting over will be a chore depending on the number of fringe cases.
So, for people with large stores that need to set handling time often, what you’ll be doing is going into each shipping policy and setting the handling there. As far as I know, there is no way to edit multiple policies at once. Still easier than editing 500 at a time, though.
Total Items in Store: 174
Items Sold: 15
Cost of Items Sold: I break COGS down at the end of the month. Guessing $65 – $70
Total Sales: $336.54
Highest Price Sold: $29.99 (Homedics Percussion Massager)
Average Price Sold: $22.44
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 12Interesting sale: Damaged Texas Instruments calculator that I was waiting to find some replacement parts for, but decided to toss up for $25 after letting it sit for a number of months. Gone in under half an hour.
Plans this week: I’ll be going through all my “long tail” listings and making adjustments as I see fit. I plan to switch some of them over to auctions so I can reinvest in faster-moving inventory.
Well, I definitely can’t top cooking up road kill…
Early on I was buying up anything I could get my hands on that had a sales history on eBay, so I’d say a quarter to a half of my inventory is long tail stuff waiting for the right buyer. As I get better at sourcing (more picky and willing to pay up), items have been moving much faster – roughly 50% of the items I’ve listed in the last 3 weeks have already sold, for example. I’m unsure whether the items not included in that 50% will end up being long tail or not, but time will tell.
I’ve considered going the auction route on items that have been sitting around. It’d be nice to get my money back to invest in items that will move quicker, while also reclaiming the space.
You’re right about the storage unit. That’s something I look forward to exploring early next year.
