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On the road all week so have changed my handling time for 5 days, hope it does not low sales too much. Transactions slowed last week for me, couple good sales made week decent.
8/12/18 – 8/19/18
Total items in store (beginning of week): 324
Items sold: 7
30 day sell through rate: 9.26%
Total Sales: (no shipping): 373.49
Average price: $53.36
Cost of items sold: $110.49
Gross profit: $263.00
Highest item sold / best sale: PACMIN AIRBUS (2005) 1/100 A380 EA ENGINES Model Airplane w Original Box sold 285.00, Paid 50.00
New items listed: 10
well side T-Salt.
One thing i pickup up from I believe R&J is Go Daddy book keeping. It is totally awesome and helps me a lot get a picture of my business after all of the costs (aka the miles to buy stuff, to ship etc…) I think this is a good option for anyone starting and trying to treat things as a business even while smaller
yea – they definitely do not work a lot of the time to be clear for me too. For me i just don’t mind the extra step, since with a store i can automated the relisting while i am listing initially
hello all – i got away from posting my numbers for quite a while but have been listening to the podcasts as always. Lots has changed on my end but still plugging along. This week had a semi nice score on some high end handbags – outside my normal zone – and ended up selling a couple items from the lot off nicely but the majority ended up being fake. The silver lining i guess is i have learned some of the ‘low hanging fruit’ to identify fakes, so that’ good i suppose. Will still turn a nice profit off the handbags as i bought em with a “margin of safety’ and really paid next to nothing for them allowing me to turn a profit already off a couple of sales (the putter was part of the same purchase)
8/5/12 – 8/11/12
Total items in store (beginning of week): 327
Items sold: 12
30 day sell through rate: 15.73%
Total Sales: $225.453 (no shipping): $225.53
Average price: $18.79
Cost of items sold: $32.20
Gross profit: $193.33
Highest item sold / best sale: Ashdon Golf The Guided Missile Putter $50.00 / cost 6.67Just figured I would share some analysis I have been doing. Below is a chart illustrating fee’s based on the following scenario(s):
^Sale price of $34.00
^Shipping $20.00
^Consumer Electronics category regular rate (not a special rate item like 3% for guitars or something)
^including paypal fee, insertion fees or portion of store subscription fee for the item, final value fee’s under store and non store / top rated not top rated scenarios.
^premium store assuming max 1,000 listings in case of store scenario fee’s
^Items that sell after various time periods representing “normal sales’ for various STR rates and/or “dead inventory” costs
^assuming .25 cent insertion for both above store credit, and no store, ignoring the free listings ebay gives for promotions or non store members every month.:: Personally I have been reviewing my business and working to get a more firm understanding of the costs of doing business on Ebay, as well as looking at merits of different strategies around STR rates, top rated vs not top rated, etc.. Since a comment on the blog got me going on this particular spreadsheet i just figured i would go ahead and share it in case it is useful to anyone else.
With a store for listings above the free credit, top rated seller
Months above store credit store Fee’s %
total fees top rated
5 $5.65 17%
12 $7.40 22%
16 $8.40 25%
28 $11.40 34%
62 $19.90 59%
1 $4.65 14%With a store above store credit, not top rated
above store credit Fee’s %
Months not top rated
5 $5.86 17%
12 $7.61 22%
16 $8.61 25%
28 $11.61 34%
62 $20.11 59%
1 $4.86 14%With Premium Store with 1,000 listings, top rated seller
store Fee’s %
Months top rated
5 $4.70 14%
12 $5.12 15%
16 $5.36 16%
28 $6.07 18%
62 $8.11 24%
1 $4.46 13%With a premium store with 1,000 listings, not top rated
store fee’s %
Months not top rated
5 $4.91 14%
12 $5.33 16%
16 $5.57 16%
28 $6.28 18%
62 $8.32 24%
1 $4.67 14%No store not top rated
no store fee’s %
Months not top rated
5 $7.94 23%
12 $9.69 28%
16 $10.69 31%
28 $13.69 40%
62 $22.19 65%
1 $6.94 20%i got that message too, it also said lower the price by 5% and ebay will message them
Thanks for the encouragement. I have begun implementing some faster moving tactics as I’m intrigued with the ideas we discussed. I’ll keep you posted as I’m kind of excited to give it a try. I have found other sellers who sell simular stuff im into that seem to have good businesses with the faster approach.
SoCalJoe – well said, Ebay definitely is not my BFFE. There revenue growth rate over the last 5 years is 5.5% which is about the same as walmarts. They are currently trading at 18X free cash flow. I like selling on their platform for now but if i had to get involved in their stock it likely would be a short so i would hold off on labeling then a good business and time will tell if these decisions are good for their own self interest or not. Full disclosure – i am definitely not a shareholder.
right – it went from 20 to 10. The 20% may have covered the costs of the new free return policy, measuring against 10% may be more difficult.
As you guys point out often, it is not productive to sit here and complain, but the policy is significant. I wish Ebay would focus more on activities that add value. This may or may not have a positive effect on the platform long term, but from the vantage point of a small business it certainly does not feel right, and looks at the moment more like smoke and mirrors to try to raise quarterly EPS. These days my response is to ask Ebay for a seller discount to make up for their policy — it may be a rhetorical question in effect but is a fair question i feel.
I think there has been a lot of positive perspective from more experienced sellers about appropriate response to offset costs, which i appreciate. I am a bit frustrated so i will sign off for the moment on this chain and focus on more productive things — and will chime back in to the forum when i can add value.
This also is my concern though with electronics. Maybe coincidence but i am dealing with 2 likely cases of fraud in the last 2 weeks – only one of which took place after switching to free returns however.
The more I look at the free return situation the more i realize that the 20% reward for being top rated is completely gone and the increased costs likely will be more than 20% This pattern does rub me the wrong way as it feels a lot like a bate and switch in terms of guiding my behavior with incentives in a disingenuous way. I made a business decision to become top rated and the rules of the game completely changed only a couple of business quarters later.
Furthermore my ‘hypothesis’ is that folks that are looking to make trouble on ebay with sellers do target top rated sellers and likely will all the more do so with the free return situation. They know top rated folks guard their reputation and suspect that they will more likely make the business decision to give in to demands to prevent negative feedback. It is easy enough to resist and Ebay has backed me up historically, though it makes me wonder more if top rated is worth the trouble.
Perhaps having less stellar feedback on Ebay would not be that bad? And lastly — free reruns may be the standard with on premise businesses, however, it is pretty common to see on premise businesses shutting their doors and going out of business too.
Yea, that’s what I want – EBay to just chill out. I think the calculated pricing idea illustrates how misguided it is. EBay should but the effort into real things instead of this nonsense. Like videos in descriptions for example.
Indomatt – are you leveraging file exchange, employees, or some other means to list over 256 listings in the week? If you dont mind sharing, how many of the 56 hours were needed to list 256 items?
So after complaining on the forum a bit this week about the new ebay policies regarding free returns I decided to just pull the trigger and try it out. If I am going to have the mindset of growing a larger business i figure i cannot get stuck in the weeds over the small stuff, and Ebay is telling us what is important in terms of how they rank sellers. I also dealt with a questionable fraudulent buyer this week, and even through the scenario was my word against the buyer, Ebay totally backed me up and i did not lose a dime all based on my reputation and feedback on Ebay – so that helped me muster the courage.
I made a few minor changes on how i am reporting numbers to myself and subsequently the forum. Most notable I am now tracking 30 day sell through rate on a weekly basis as it is how i think about things in general anyway, and i also am now tracking my money spent on new inventory on a weekly basis as cash flow is what really matters to me anyway especially these days as i continue to ramp up to a size i need to be at.
A little better week for me listing wise and look to keep on tracking up to continue to grow and hit my goals of 2,000 listings before summer and 3,000 before end of 2018 (with over 100K listed).
I have not listened to the podcast but as usual looking forward to as i go about my day.
2/25/18 – 3/4/18
Total Listing in store (beginning of week): 1208
Total items (including multiple item listings): 1327
Value of inventory listed beginning of week: $ $40,511.20
Value if inventory listed end of week: $ $41,665.01
Items sold: 20
Weekly sell through on 30 day schedule (based on number of listings): 7.10%
Total Sales: $ $654.66 (shipping backed out)
Average price: $ $32.73
Cost of items sold: $ $60.70
average cost of item sold (pre fees): $3.04
Gross profit: $593.96
Best sale: Antique Metal Mounted Mirror sold for $139.24 cost $1.45
New items listed: 96Much less traffic now, yes. But looking at the bigger picture down the road these platforms are very much serious. Even more so, Facebook. I love ebay personally. I believe all of this competition is great and should cause ebay to improve continuously. I actually believe we will see the days where fee’s drop in exchange for competition over growing volume.
I listened to the 10 K on the Bay guy the other day while having my AM coffee and thought it was interesting that he was saying he was an “Ebay infulencer” – which apparently means he talks with Ebay management and stuff and Ebay spends time learning about what he things etc… to help shape policy. As far as what he was saying anyway he seemed to feel like it had pull with Ebay.
Anyway — reading the post about the village and the kingdom made me feel like someone from this community should be an infulencer, if such a thing exists. No disrespect to the 10 K as he clearly is a bright guy, but i would think Ebay would want SL type of infulence as well given that Ebay does have a large segment of small business people selling vintage stuff. I would think Ebay policy would have a lot to learn from folks doing this for so long and not just listening to newer people from more of the mainstream lines of business.
