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Hey Jay, having a small store (600 items as of today) I have solid evidence about this statement (the “solid evidence” is as known as my selling experience on eBay 🙂 ).
Every-time I drop my consistency in listing my sales drop. This is happening now, over last 2-3 weeks I accumulated a lot of sourcing with little, very little sales.Previously, with consistent sales, I had a marvelous week about 3 weeks ago.
Yesterday night I invested on a lot of listing. I listed a Publix HO train set and I sold it within 4 minutes after listing for another Florida resident for sure.
@PaulDeLeo – interesting, I am a PaulDeLeo too (and one my my Twins as well) 🙂
Paul (from Paulo, the Greek and later Latin form of Paul) Leocadio (from Kardio Leonis or Lion Heart)
Cheers
The Mug-Trucker Hat Connection
The best comparison EVER!!!!!!!
Ever since I heard Ryanne talking about trucker hats a year ago in my case, I try to find cheap interesting hats (I do not know for sure the different between a trucker hat and a baseball style hat, even though some trucker hats of the 70’s style are easy to describe).
They have been good sellers for me.
Also, under the same scope, I look at mugs on the $1-2 range, like the hats. Never been able to sell one hehehehI had hats and mugs I accumulated from my old company. Almost all of them I sold well (got them totally free and they had interesting topics like the stamp of Windows 95 release day, exclusive hats of the first XBOX, etc). But the mugs I got over this year are all in my storage.
The comparison is perfect
About Ryanne and Jay’s second store:
I am investing a bit on branding, or re-branding my store. Changing the opening graphics (I have a website for the official business with the same name), and other things.
I decided to focus on collectibles of sorts and will try to have some branding around it.I was wondering if Ryanne and Jay’s second store would not benefit if concentrating on specific themes? This is just a comment, nothing based on extensive market research or detailed study, just really some brainstorming based on Schultz expertise and what I am considering doing.
Anybody sees any benefit from doing something like this to bump traffic, attention or sales?
Cheers
In response to Western Canadian Ian who sells Wedgwood China on eBay: I am passionate about Wedgwood, specially Jasperware. i have even a nice collection of books references to help me listing. I have been buying batches and caches mostly on my local weekly Auction. If you want to brainstorm on listing strategies it would be awesome.
On a bit longer version of my response, I gave up on selling clothes with few exceptions, and also I have concentrated my focus on collectibles since this is the upper level segment I can make work and put aside volume cheap purchases since clearly my skills do not match. The immediate result is higher revenue with less listing and better net income as well.
I started a great 6-month contract that allows me to listen to the podcasts during commute and also some more travel (Wisconsin and Latin America).
As a reminder, I have 3 businesses:
Consulting/Project Technology company where I get most of my income – http://www.zinnia.holdings
A rental house that we decided to sell after 10 years, hopefully we can make it happen fast
Another technology start up that I transformed into my eBay eCommerce – http://www.sculpit.fitnessFor this project I am trying not to access Internet for personal matters while at client’s office so I have reduced time to participate in the Forum. Good chances to have a second contract after this one finishes so I am giving that extra mile to be successful.
Ryanne, need please your advice.
Because of some (good) time constraints (super busy 🙂 ), I am a little behind on watching and reading/commenting.
The challenge is that some important topics accumulate outside the scope of the current/latest podcast.
Please let me know what and how you prefer me to do.
Just to give you a couple of examples, I want to comment on a scavenging trip to Madison (and a new 6 month long project), the new eBay voucher and generic curiosity about my store sales.Thank you in advance!!! 🙂 😉
Friends, I am on an all year low because of my health, Holidays fully dedicated to my kids (only 2 of the 5 live with me now, so I do not even go to restroom to spend most of the time with them when they are here).
So sales are slow, listing is depressing.
However I had sometime to put my head around my other 2 businesses and at the end I got good outlook to balance my life.Anyway, don’t want to bother much with off topic business matters.
I have 3 main challenges:
(1) Space: my short term goal of 1000 items listed was useful to show me my major roadblocker related to storage space.
(2) Average ticket: it was a mistake to focus on fast listing going after low ticket items. This is a skill I have not yet mastered from Jay and Ryanne and my area seems to be slightly different than the Heartland in terms of finding $1-$5 items that can be sold for $30 or more. Also, I was dedicating my time a lot more on signature/designer items that I would pay $10-$20 but would sell for >$50. Combine topics 1 and 2 and you can see my equation got messed up.
3) Organization system: I need an inventory week to reorganize my storage, it would be a potential full week diving down into my storageAlso, I benefit a lot from having a formal LLC for my eBay business. I have a domain, email address, dedicated email to receive messages, other for customer matters. Also, I have separated and dedicated bank accounts and credit cards for income and revenue. This has been helping tremendoulsy to keep my operating costs super low and to understand clearly the business performance.
It is good to have clarity of what I need to do to take next step up.
Cheers
Friends,
Something I would not delve into was Xmas items, however because of some apparently decent opportunities (two lessons learned from Jay and Ryanne: be opportunistic and buy anything you can find cheap).
So I found many vintage Xmas decoration (like ceramic dolls, electric figurine, and 6-8″ Santa figurines), Specifically, these items, found on auctions and Thrifts, had original labels, some even original receipt, etc.
Until this date they are selling faster than I can store.Interesting thing for me to pay attention.
In summary, two interesting sources of sales success: seasonal items related to special occasions (for example, I sold a lot of Trump and Hernandez items around the time they got to the news) and vintage Xmas.
Heard a lot about vintage HAlloween but I learned these are more difficult.
Odd Customer Issue
I had a very similar customer issue as the one presented by Ray, but on the Flip side.
I had this pair of Giorgio Armani velvet suede shoes I purchased over 15 years ago, been for sale since I opened the store.
Was purchased and returned twice (Italian numbers don’t always translate well when purchased overseas, have same problem with other shoes that belonged to me and to my wife).
Anyway, this person made a good offer, I accepted, the customer said:
“Have the shoes and left you a feedback, Be advised I am not happy with the shoes since they did not fit at all. Had to give them as Xmas gift”
Feedback was A+++ with comment “If there is a feeling like happy and satisfied, this is what I am feeling now, great product”
:=)
Selling Gold and Gems on eBay
I personally prefer to sell gold and silver to local buyers and get fair market value.
For jewelry (usually doubles for brand and craft) it is necessary to appraise and certify to sell. This cost must be added to the sale price, otherwise eBay is too risky and the friend who shared her experience is one of the risky scenarios.About making more money with higher grade/higher cost products
Nov/Dec will yield me $1000/month compared to the $2000/month I had on Aug/Sep/Oct.
I have 600 items in store today compared to the 350 I had in october.
Main difference is that I had more $100 ticket items compared to my $25 ticket items I have today.
I stopped selling clothes and my $200 shoes and $75 Coach purses halted coming since I got cold feet because of Coach’s strategy changes that most certainly is impacting their police methods on eBay and others.Since I do not have Ryanne’s skills to find good cost products and sell them high, with this change – that I plan to review urgently – impacted directly my revenue stream.
I really wanted to go up in my inventory, however the mistake was to change my portfolio inventory. My space is scarce to that level of inventory and what I know how to sell is not there either.
A lot different than 5000 items store, but for me this is crucial. Also, these items take long to sell. It is not a matter of a month or two, it is on the 6 month and over to sell those Bally, Armani Ferragamo shoes that were making my average revenue decent for my store size.
Testing the Free Shipping hypothesis
(or any hypothesis leveraging the scientific method)Just a quick comment on the on going experiment. To support your conclusion either way, you would need a bit more data and observations.
In a nutshell, the scientific method requires a controlled environment, known constants and well defined variables.
For the 1300-1400 items put on Free Shipping, not sure whether or not 2 weeks is enough to say it works or does not.
You would need to have a fixed timeframe and same quantity of similar products for sale Free Shipping to compare with same test subjects with regular shipping.Even though I never do free shipping, based what we do and talk here, I am not sure if your 2 weeks would be enough to tell you the right story without having the proper comparative ground.
Just my $0.02
About TrueGether
They launched in 2013 and below post from that year introduces you to their business model. In a nutshell, their idea is to charge you a subscription fee to allow you to synch among all your marketplaces (which is offered today for free).
http://withfivequestions.blogspot.com/2013/11/an-introduction-to-truegether.html“An Introduction to TrueGether
When it comes to buying and selling online, a lot of people are always interested in finding credible alternatives to eBay. For buyers, they want (of course!) to find the best price as well as a reliable and secure transaction. For sellers–especially those who rely on income from their online sales–it can be helpful to diversify and reach out to customer through multiple platforms rather than putting all their eggs in one basket.
Enter TrueGether, a startup company looking to change the landscape of online transactions by offering a system that is easy to use, secure, and free. That’s right: TrueGether charges no fees, which means no listing fees and no transaction fees.When I asked how TrueGether can afford its fee-free system, they explained that they are developing a release which will allow managing multiple marketplaces from TrueGether. This will be a subscription based feature, and they hope it will generate sufficient revenue for the site. Personally, I can see how this would be a desirable feature for sellers who wish to list items on multiple marketplaces.
TrueGether also distinguishes itself by leveraging social media to build trust in between buyers and sellers, who log in with their Facebook or LinkedIn accounts. In addition, TrueGether adds products to Google shopping for free: when sellers add products to TrueGether, the system automatically adds the same products to Google Shopping.”
Friends,
A few things have been interesting for me you might want to check out:
(1) New/Refurbished notebook computer accessories and peripherals, specifically for recent make, like pre-vintage. Selling interestingly well to Taiwan, India, China, Russia: for reference:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/172425929757?euid=1265c61bb1414c0396b01d5a6e6c0b26&bu=43689323462&cp=1&sojTags=bu=bu
http://www.ebay.com/itm/172393840442?euid=50b9eb0e8a224caab21cfe434a12ab20&bu=43689323462&cp=1&sojTags=bu=bu(2) Smartphone parts and broken ones seem to go. really fast. I had great profit with Windows Phones
CTLady, I also have a FT job 🙂
One of the main motivators for me after leaving a 20 year job was staying home with the Twins a bit (I have 5 kids and have never given same attention to the 11 yo Twins). And my wife always wanted to resume her career, for me I had all the reasons to support her and stay a bit with the Twins.
Having said that, I just hit the 510 items listed mark. I have an aggressive goal to reach the $1000 mark using even slow ticket items to generate me traffic.
I was on the $2k/month for Aug/Sept/Oct, dropped on november and it seems it will stay lower in December. Also consider I had mostly designer clothes and other higher tickets before and it seems my average ticket item is lower since I stopped buying clothes.
Depending on what you are listing will not be difficult to be at least that level
Cheers
