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That item could be just as fake as anything else.
So true, maybe I should have made up some great Indiana Jones type story to go in the description. Next time…
@craig-rex – I am fascinated by your stories. I pass on lots of cards frequently because the one time I took a chance and picked one up it turned out to be fairly mundane cards and a lot of work researching for little return. I guess like so many things, you have to put the time in to learn the niche. Thanks for sharing!
@Lauren – Sorry to hear about your health problems. Take is slow and take care of yourself. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Best wishes.
Mike
Just to update, my total listings has increased from 1132 to 2474 as they have begun to be duplicated across multiple ebay sites. So far only one sale, to Spain, which was unexpected as it was some prints from the late 1800’s, old west scenes. A long tail item I wouldn’t have expected to go overseas.
The program is confusing in a few unexpected ways. Since it duplicates all your listings, you have to filter your results to see your original listings. Not a big deal but a surprise the first time I logged into my eBay listings page.
After the sale the second issue arose. When the duplicate your sale they create a new item ID. That’s what I mainly use for inventory tracking so the IDs aren’t in my inventory to match. When I can’t match the ID I search on the title. With the listings translated to other languages title words don’t necessarily match either. Minor annoyances if it increases sales. We’ll see.
One other thing I’m concerned about is that it might cannibalize sales I would have gotten anyway. I had 45 sales last year out of North America last year out of 993 total. Should be easy to gauge.
I’ll let you know if I suddenly see big numbers. 🙂
A little late to the game this week. Listened to the podcast on Monday, but it’s been busy with non-eBay life stuff. Glad to hear that your first week was a success. I can imagine the satisfaction you must get from watching it all in motion. Best wishes for your continued success.
Not a crazy week for sales, but not the worst. I’ve got a good portion of the store on a 30% off sale (items over 2 years). Not driving a lot of sales but two of my 13 from last week came via the sale. Sold a really long tail item after 1596 days. A new record for me. It was an old Chinese wooden shelf that I has listed for local pick up because it was too large to ship easily.
I sold the last of my lot of pre-Columbian pottery that I purchased at an auction several years ago for $40. A lesson learned regarding the importance of provenance for some items. These items were mostly vase-type vessels likely over 1000 years old. With provenance of place and ownership they would be museum quality pieces that could fetch big prices in the thousands. Without provenance, they ended up going for anywhere from $50 to $200 each and it took a few years for them all to sell. Too many fakes out there. Someone here on the forum warned me that might be the case. Fun to research though.
Spent the week listing a bunch of ephemera I had sitting on a shelf for ages. Lots of interesting items from cabinet card photographs to antique church programs.
Sales Report for: 5/1/21
Total Items in Store: 1146
Items Sold: 13
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $499.93
Net Sales (After fees): $408.84
Cost of Items Sold: $94.24
COGS Percent 23.05%
Net Profit Margin: 62.93%
Highest Price Sold: $125.00 Pre-Columbian Pottery Kero
Average Price Sold: $38.46
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 9
Promoted Percentage: 69.23%
Average Days Listed: 459.69
Longest Listed: 1596
New items listed: 28@Sonia – Thanks for posting your issues. I’m finally getting around to finalizing my taxes (took them to the accountant yesterday) and was driving myself mad trying to reconcile the differences. After reading this, I’ll have to recheck my numbers. I am curious, what report did you use to identify the missing shipment fees? Do I need to pull each month’s invoice, or is there some other method that you used?
Previous years I’ve been very happy with GoDaddy, but I’ve spent so many hours trying to reconcile where the differences between what eBay says I sold, what Paypal says I earned and what GoDaddy has in there system. I will definitely need to rethink using them going forward.
@antique-frog – I guess I fall into the invite only group. As far as I’m aware, the program they’ve invited me to doesn’t have the limits you mentioned.
First thing I noticed different this morning was that the listing which have been posted to additional sites now show up as additional items on my active listings page. Fortunately they have a filter, but was a bit confusing first off. Filter allows you to filter by country that listings are posted in. Must be a slow process to translate listings as there is only one listing cross posted so far.
@incompetentpicker – Thanks for posting this. Definitely concerning if they haven’t worked out this bug already. I’ll pose this question to the eBay rep that reached out with the invitation and let you all know what I hear.
Looking at their specifications I see one small rub for me. It states that the label address must be parallel to the long side of the envelop. That rules out my use of my standard 4×6 label that I use with my Dymo label printer. Only takes a few minutes to swap in a different label, but most of these items are small dollar for me to begin with making a few minutes potentially outweighing the benefit.
@mickdog – I agree. Doesn’t really make sense that they restrict the categories. Anything that fits in an envelope should qualify. I assume they are worried about abuse, perhaps where people stuff a padded envelope the way people stuff flat rate envelopes. No reason I shouldn’t be able to send my vintage photographs this way as well. One step at a time, I guess.
Congratulations on your grand opening. Nice to see all your hard work paying off (again). Definitely see a road trip in our future to come visit. Took at look at your AirBNB places to see what openings there might be this summer. WOW. You guys are booked almost solid. Must feel good after last year. Looks like there are still some openings at the Hawksbill, so you might see us soon.
Both our children are finally back in school part time this week, so looking forward to having a little more time to focus on getting things posted. Strangely quiet after more than a year.
Best week of sales we’ve have since in 2 months with 4 sales over $100. My biggest sale ($200) was a large Amethyst geode that a friend gave me when they moved. It had been knocked over and broken into large pieces, but could still be put together like a puzzle. Would have been worth a lot if it was still in tact. Also had a nice sale of a vintage Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder for $172. This one has been sitting in my death pile for about 2 years because it had some problems and I kept thinking I’d find the time to troubleshoot. Finally posted it as needing repair and it sold in two days.
Sales Report for: 4/24/21
Total Items in Store: 1131
Items Sold: 25
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $1,052.80
Net Sales (After fees): $879.11
Cost of Items Sold: $104.29
COGS Percent 11.86%
Net Profit Margin: 73.60%
Highest Price Sold: $200.00 Large broken Amethyst Geode
Average Price Sold: $42.11
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $8.05
Sold via promoted listings: 13
Promoted Percentage: 52.00%
Average Days Listed: 366.24
Longest Listed: 1369
New items listed: 10Thanks for the show.
@huncrelan – Good to see you back on the forum. I agree that there isn’t a significant difference and I’ve never been too concerned about having someone to the house. I have to believe that those stories we hear on the news are really few and far between considering the number of transactions that have to be going on. Kind of like the old hitchhiker stories that used to go around before the internet. That said, it may be different in areas with higher crime rates.
That must be really tough for Susan. I hope she’s able to find some relief.
Thanks for the podcast. I see a few of those wrong address issues a year. So far, all have come back to me and I’ve been able to have the buyer send me additional shipping funds via paypal. I’ve never had an issue with eBay and sharing address information after a sale.
Sales this week weren’t frequent, but sold some more expensive items that saved the week. Best sale was a bank draft from 1807 for $60,000. That’s the equivalent of $1,340,000 in today’s dollars. This was another piece that came from my trunk of historical documents and old money. The gift that keeps on giving.
Sales Report for: 4/17/21
Total Items in Store: 1146
Items Sold: 11
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $762.92
Net Sales (After fees): $645.69
Cost of Items Sold: $163.97
COGS Percent 25.39%
Net Profit Margin: 63.14%
Highest Price Sold: $275.00 Antique Bank Draft
Average Price Sold: $69.36
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 5
Promoted Percentage: 45.45%
Average Days Listed: 237
Longest Listed: 717
New items listed: 19@retro-treasures-wv – Sounds like good advice. Am wondering whether I will need to leave GoDaddy behind like J&R.
Which reports are you running that have dates included? One of my eBay annoyances is that they don’t include date posted or date sold in most of their reports.
@Lauren – Sorry to hear that. I’ve been watching your progress with ListPerfectly as I’ve been considering it, too. I Googled your issue and what I find is a limit of 150, but perhaps they’ve changed their standard. Seems really odd that they would block you without any recourse for appeal or communication. You noted in the other post that you couldn’t even see or contact your buyers? Did they block you from Facebook completely, or just the Marketplace?
