Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Its very rare they don’t pay but it does happen once in a while. The majority have it set to “auto pay” so they get charged right when I accept the offer.
Offers are my bread and butter. Looking back at my sales this year, of 3,740 items sold 1,020 were sold via best offer and 1,231 were sold by seller initiated offer.
Believe it or not the old system actually worked better for me. It seems that a lot of my customers buy something from me and THEN see all the other great stuff I have and want to buy multiple items. As a result of noticing this behavior I actually set ALL my listings to not require immediate payment. The old system allowed customers to buy more items after accepting one of my offers and then “settle up” by asking for an updated invoice with combined shipping. Now, they accept an offer or I accept one of theirs and they get charged right away. Then they see more items they want and start asking about combined shipping which is a lot harder to do when some items have already been paid for. I typically have to retroactively send combined shipping refunds on several orders every day.
I know the model trains category is probably not the same as others but that’s part of the bigger problem. There is no one solution that fits all the buying and selling methods that currently happen on ebay and buyer behavior seems to be different depending on the type of items you are selling.
When it comes to returns I give the buyer the benefit of a doubt. If it’s obvious we screwed up or the item arrived damaged or missing parts I offer some form of a refund. Most buyers are thrilled to get 25% – 50% off the item in exchange for them keeping an item even if something isn’t quite what they expected it to be. On the very rare occasion that I call BS on what the buyer is saying then I just tell them we have free returns and to please send the item back. More than half the time the BSers never return the item. Luckily model train customers seem to be some of the easiest customers to deal with on eBay that I’ve encountered in the almost 19 years I’ve been on the platform. We had over 3,000 transactions this year and I think I got maybe 3-4 returns and almost all of those have been the last 2 months. Christmas shopping does seem to bring out the fussy buyers.
Yeah the whole thing was just messed up. Both reps I communicated with seemed like they had no idea what the protocol was, the 2nd one seemed like they didn’t even understand written English and the first one thought I had gotten a fraudulent email and I had to prove to them the message was in my ebay messages folder and actually came from ebay. Then after I canceled the sale the buyer started sending me all sorts of messages so clearly the account is not canceled. I’m normally pretty good at rolling with the punches when it comes to ebay but the level of incompetence on the support side of things really surpassed my already tempered expectations.
This just gives me more motivation to keep pushing to not be a single platform seller, I can’t risk my entire business dying due to some stupid mistake or bureaucratic mishap with ebay. My Shopify site is slowly coming together and the ebay/shopify inventory integration is clunky but does work. I’m also selling locally in an antique mall and that has been very successful even if the antique mall fees kind of bother me since they are the same as selling on ebay.
With all of the ways eBay is inventing to get sellers to pay to “promote” their listings these days I’m starting to get kind of annoyed at them. I actually decided to throw a bit of money at their new Promoted Store ads. So far, $45 in “promoted store” fees at 20 cents a click and a grand total of $145 in additional sales since October 5th…yeah not seeing the immediate value since after COGS and fees I doubt I’m making much of a profit off those extra sales. My store followers count does seems to be growing a little bit faster but it’s hard to put a number on the value of that. I do use the basic promoted listing fee on all my items but I never go much above 2% and on the rare occasions that I do, at least in the model train category, I don’t see much of a sales boost.
On another front, Shopify appears to have just finished their aquisition of Codisto and now have a workable tool that allows you to sync your Shopify inventory with eBay as well as Amazon, Walmart and a few others. It’s definitely early days for the tool and I’ve already found some areas that need fixing but I’m well on my way to fleshing out my Shopify store and building new business processes to see if we can make a push to sell on our own website in addition to eBay in 2024.
Nobody is hating, I don’t think I said anything negative did I? I’ve actually considered joining his reseller program to see what it’s all about. There is definitely a place for folks like him and Daily Refinement. Case in point, this group is fine for casual reseller chit-chat but not very many folks in here sell at a volume where you have to worry about employees, SKU systems to track your inventory and the logistics of hauling a carload of items to the post office every day. I’m at that point now for my model train business and folks like him are who you want to be talking to.
What blows my mind is that this guy built a million dollar resale business on just used clothing and just one platform and in Miami of all places, not exactly the cheapest or easiest place to resell. I do think he is a total work-a-holic so I’m sure that helps but not healthy and is probably why he’s winding down the business. He has a new business though, charging a monthly fee to have people participate in his online community he and the Daily Refinement guy built.
@Jay yeah I feel the in-person networking would have been a big benefit so I am a little bummed it’s all virtual. I did sign up for a reseller meet and greet in Tampa that is taking place next Tuesday, it’s a bit of a drive for me but maybe I’ll get some useful in-person networking done there.
@Zach thanks for the update. Over the past year did you attempt to promote your Shopify site through social media at all or were you just hoping for organic search hits? I admit my Shopify experiment isn’t going much better, I gave up on the sync app I was paying $30/month for. Similar to your Facebook support experience it was all overseas support people who would reply to my questions at 3am and never answered in a way where I felt they even understood what I was asking.
My Wix placeholder website that I created a year ago actually seems to be the best solution to drive traffic so far. I use the blogging feature regularly and even started using ChatGPT to help write new blog posts today. I cross-post my blog with my business facebook page using Wix’s facebook integration. I’ve also gone through Wix’s free SEO tuning tutorials and have gotten people contact me to sell model train collections through my website just from showing up in Google search. Wix’s ecommerce platform seems decent and claims to have eBay integration so I’m considering just going all in on Wix and see if I can make it work.
Nice to see your airbnb business is still growing. I’d love to do something similar here in Florida but the real-estate in Sarasota has gotten too rich for my blood.
I’d say your experiment wasn’t a total dud but double the sales at half the price makes you think, did you really come out ahead? Guess it depends on your objectives. Another thing to analyze, were you selling more “old” items or was most of the sales boost from newer items. Either way, not a bad week overall.
I suspect the answer to your experiment question is mostly no, especially for the older stuff. Dead inventory really is a thing on eBay. Before I purged my ebay store of all non-train items I ran a 30% off sale on all of it for like 4 months. A few items sold but most just sat there. After I delisted all that stuff I gave it to my brother and told him he can sell anything he wants on his personal ebay and the rest goes to the thrift store. He’s sold almost everything from the pile he’s listed within a few weeks often for more than what I was offering with the 30% off sale. Why did that stuff sit in my store but sells for him? My best guess is that it’s a combination of the “newly listed” boost items get when you first post them and my strong suspicion that after an item has been listed for a certain amount of time eBay stops promoting it. It’ll still show up in generic eBay search but not in google adwords and not in the “related items” lists that pop up when you view listings. I know for a fact those two things drive sales, especially the “related items” lists. I’ll often get somebody who buys a train car, then gets shown more similar items and ends up buying multiple others from me. They will then message me after the fact and ask for combined shipping and tell me they didn’t know I had those other items when they bought the first.
Well it looks like web.com bought ecomdash so now that’s not really an option unless I want to use web.com instead of Shopify.
Oh man, I totally forgot that sixbit installs the database on the local PC. They want over $100/month for multi channel support and they don’t even have a hosted solution that’s pretty bad. The worst part about it is if I want to do work at home, or on the road, I’d have to remote into my office PC to access sixbit. Ok, hopefully I can find something else that’s not Sixbit.
@Lukastreasure thanks for sharing your experience on Sixbit. I seem to remember Sixbit having the unified inventory I’m looking for but I’m curious how well it integrates with things like business policies in ebay. Do you have employees that do listing for you at all? I seem to remember that was one of the useful things of Sixbit was user permissions.
@Jay, I looked at Sixbit a little while back and don’t remember being impressed but I’ll have to take another look as I was focused on a more powerful listing tool back then and multi-platform was less of a priority. @Old Dad, I completely forgot about ecomdash. $95/month is more than I wanted to spend but if that’s the only thing that does the trick then I might just suck it up and pay. I’ll have to do some more research on them.
