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I’ve done that already. I analyzed the data enough to know something really went wrong on eBay in September. Sales, impressions, listing views – they all fell off a cliff. I have 7 years of detailed data but my numbers are directly comparable in scope/scale to the last two years. This year my store was trending up in correlation with my enhanced listing habits (though not as good as expected) until September. I am listing 35% more items this year over last year. I expected my already decent upward trend to get better in Q4. Instead everything fell off a cliff. Immediately the entire trend changed as soon as I reactivated promoted listings.
eBay is fully pay to play now. They might as well go ahead and admit it.
So today marks a week since I restarted promoted listings.
of course my PL listing views is up – i expected that. One of the theories i found online was that unpromoted listings were being hidden from search if buyers used filters.
Well my organic listing views on ebay are up 40% and my external organic views are up 98% week over week. That is a WILD swing and in my opiniom could only be explained if that theory that my listings were being hidden was true.
Sold items is up 90%
i’ve sold 55 items since turning PL back on and 31 have sold with the PL fee.
i know this is only a weeks worth of data but i feel confident to say that ebay was actively screwing me since I didnt have PL turned on. The only real question is : is it a ‘glitch’ or a ‘feature’?
Ebay is playing with fire right now. They can say their profits are up and everything is great, but a reckoning is coming.
but hey, i’ve sold a ton more items which was the outcome I desired. Hopefully that trend continues. I want to hit 100 sales in a week at some point in the next 2 months and I want to close out strong to cross my arbitrary goal of $100k in pure item sale price in a calendar year.
So I can officially talk about this now. It was ME!!! It was alot different this year since I had to do a video submission rather than just a written submission. Then there were interview rounds. They said there would be multiple rounds of interviews. About halfway through the first interview the guy went ahead and told me that I was chosen as a winner. It was kind of shocking acutally.
This really did feel like a validation of all the hard work I’ve put in over the years.
I have been assigned a coach, The $10k funds should show up next week, and I have no idea what the ‘pro level streaming kit’ will be. They said I should have everything by the end of November.
I guess I have to at least try selling on ebay Live? I have no idea how I should approach it. I’m hoping my older children will take an interest and help me run it. I’m prepared to hand the keys to them and let them make good money on it. I actually quite a coincidental conversation with a local guy I sold some golf clubs to on FBMP the day after I found out I was getting this grant. He sells golf clubs on whatnot. He is very successful and has grown it organically with no social media. Just the whatnots. Maybe I could do very well. We’ll see!
In the meantime I gots to get to spending this cash next week!
I did a deeper dive yesterday after posting here. I ended up restarting promoted listings capped at 8% dynamic and changed my nifty end/relist policy to 60 days from 180 with no price reduction. You can now do rule based promoted campaigns, with the biggest benefit being you can schedule a delay in when the promoted campaign takes effect. So all my new listings will not get the promoted flag until they have been on the site for 3 days. I considered doing 30, but I wanted to give this the best shot to be successful. At the end of 60 days when it is relisted there will again be a 3 day delay before the promoted listing takes effect.
It is what it is in regards to ebay at this point and I’ve done everything in my power to make the best of it. Listing desirable, quality items with reasonable shipping costs WAS good enough and now it’s not. Allegedly there is a quirk (I think ebay considers it more of a feature) in the search engine that hides unpromoted listings when buyers apply filters. Now that won’t be an issue.
If my impressions, click throughs, and sales rapidly rise then I’ll happily eat the extra fee. My margins can handle that. If not, then ebay is in far more trouble than anything I can influence.
Justin Resells is great! Honestly I think most youtube resellers just watch his video and then base their commentary on all the work he already did.
His production value is also great now that he has a producer/editor.
It’s not all doom & gloom, though there is something off with ebay. I think all these other sites are taking away market share from them much more significantly this year. My Posh, depop, and Mercari scales are scaling rapidly, while my ebay sales are declining even though I’m listing more than ever. My pricing, shipping costs, and quality of items/listings is better than ever. I don’t do promoted listings at all as I have been phasing it out slowly for over a year. I pretty much haven’t had promoted listings since around April/May. I can’t tell you what it is, but something is significantly off with ebay since the beginning of September.
My first half of 2026 was going great on ebay. It was the best 1st half ever. August was trending similar to last year. I was looking forward to absolutely blowing everything I’ve ever done out of the water. Then once September hit the trend line completely did a 180 and October is even worse.
Overall I’m having a record year. I’ve still sold more items this year on ebay than last year, but I am on a downward trend there. I should be selling 100+ items a week right now but ebay is holding me back. It is frustrating!
Meanwhile my monthly sales on sites off ebay (posh, mercari, and depop) have been growing linearly all year at a rate of 13 sales per month and now making up around 60% of my total items sold per month.
TLDR; Get your eggs out of the single ebay basket and spread them around. You’ll end up with alot more eggs!
I noticed a coworker was putting a ton of small packages in the USPS bin at the front of our office so I asked him about it. His wife has been selling on vinted. She is killing it. It is a great place to sell $10-20 clothing. If it was on Nifty I would do it. It isn’t worth the effort for me to list there right now. I have my system pretty well ironed out to track orders across 4 platforms, but I couldn’t handle one that isn’t integrated into Nifty. Especially if it is not set up for inventory management or control (I’m looking at you, Depop!)
Regarding ebay Live, I was approved for it I believe early this year. I had no desire to do that and didn’t feel my inventory really fits the mold. I have no idea why ebay approved and recommended me for it. The ebay grant this year revolves solely around ebay live. Worst yet, you had to do a video submission to even apply this year. Ewww! I prefer my anonymity on the internets…
I talked with my older kids about it, and I decided to go ahead and apply. I did my video – the first online video I’ve ever done where I actually put myself on camera. My plan is if I get the grant I’ll start up an ebay live with my oldest kid as my employee. She’ll run the socials and ebay lives. It will be her own little sandbox. Maybe I’ll join in, maybe not. Who knows! As a Xennial who has lived my whole life in a constant state of rapid change, what’s one more change and adaptation?
I made it to the interview rounds and have my interview later this month. Boy I sure would like that $10k!
I have a balanced store 1/3 each in items sold for clothing, shoes, and misc hardgoods. It is pretty surprising what random stuff sells on depop and poshmark. I can list pretty much everything I have on Posh and Mercari. Depop is everything except items with electrical components.
Books, homegoods, games, media, sporting goods etc all sell well on Posh.
ebay is still king in regards to ASP and overall volume of sales. 50-60% of my items sold are on ebay.
Yes, photos of rulers are wildly deceptive, especially with the lenses in a phone. Any time I’ve ever took a photo of a tape measure I have to adjust the angle of the camera to make sure the photo shows what the actual measurement is. The dry erase laminated sheets work perfectly.
Don’t feel pressured to sell in categories you don’t want to. You sell the stuff that crushes my motivation. Sure I will dabble here and there in art or fragile home goods, but that is as far as I go. It has to be a truly special item that I find pleasing in some way. One of my favorite items I’ve ever sold was a large vintage decoupage portrait of a young lady on a piece of wood. It was just such a captivating photo – the eyes just seemed to stare into my soul. Apparently the buyer agreed as it sold for $200+ many years ago. Generally though I don’t enjoy sourcing, listing, or shipping these things. I have to mentally slap myself when I start to consider these bulkier or fragile things while sourcing. It just ain’t my bag!
If you don’t truly enjoy clothing/shoes, then just dabble. Maybe dabbling could turn into more down the road. I started with dabbling in shoes. Now I have well over 1k active listings and am currently sourcing/listing/selling 30-50 pair a week.
And since I’m here I do have one more update.
I totaled my Sienna minivan at the beginning of July. That sucked, but there is a silver lining. Since it is a toyota it holds it’s value. I paid $38,500 in 2021 right before the chip shortage. The dealer was desperate for a sale so it was an awesome deal on a new van. My total payout was $39500. Yes, I got MORE than I originally paid even after 5 years and almost 60k miles.
The crappy part is the short time frame to get something else. I’ve adapted to so much chaos and change this year that I was inspired for more change, so I heavily researched EV’s. At the very last minute before my rental ran out I found a Chevy Blazer EV that was a dealer demo at local dealer that only had 4k miles. It is warrantied as a new car and qualifies for new car loan terms. I paid $29500 and they gave me a free Chevy V2H capable Powershift Charger. I don’t really want that charger so I listed it on ebay. This is a $2k charger! Mind you this is a loaded $56k MSRP SUV. I had cash in hand but since I got new car financing so I financed $25k and put the rest of the payout in a high interest savings account at 4.2% APY. I’ll end up making money putting it in a high yield savings vs paying cash and I’ll keep that huge chunk of cash on hand in case we move or add on to our house.. I can easily pay the $540 car payment with ebay funds as I have with all my other vehicles.
I’m installing my home charger this week. I get a $300 credit towards the $500 price of the charger and I’ll get a 30% cheaper rate on power to that charger as long as I avoid 8am-8pm on weekdays. A full tank of power will cost under $7, or about 3.5 cents per mile. My Sienna Minivan was around 13 cents per mile. There is also a FREE public charger at the Library that is a 5 minute walk from my day job location. The maintenance manager just installed an outdoor port for me to use in emergencies and in the winter at work – also for free.
If you have not explored EV’s yet, I highly recommend it. I was in the dark and since I live in coal country, ignorant people like to demonize it and quote outdated info. These cars are the future and the future is here. The battery will outlast the car, and there is practically zero maintenance. The next gen battery technology will be even better. There are sodium Ion batteries on the horizon the does away with rare earth metals like lithium and cobalt.
I LOVE my Blazer EV. It is super roomy, super comfy, and has sports car AWD performance. All the bells and whistles that came with this one in particular were just icing on the cake. My commute is 50 miles round trip a day, which is perfect for an EV.
Prices are dropping quickly, especially on used cars. A couple days after I bought this one, the local KIA dealer called me and offered $33500 for a brand new EV6 Wind. They don’t sell well in WV, so that was a really great deal. That’s also an incredibly nice car I recommend you check out if in the market. I’m keeping an eye out for a cheap Chevy Bolt for my daughter. Nice ones with 60-80k miles can be had for sub 15k now, but I’m hunting for one significantly less than $10k. While I hate buying a 100k gas car, I’d happily buy a 100k mile EV. It’s likely good for another 100k with no maintenance other than tires and still have 80% or more of the original battery life.
Nifty is awesome and I am sooooo glad I bit the bullet and started it last December. It was alot of work to get started. Cross listing manually with a 4k item store is….a slog. To date I still only have about 2500 items cross listed of my 4000 item ebay store. I also had the painful experience of switching to business policies on ebay.
But I did it and here I am and I’ll show some numbers as to why cross listing is essential now. List and forget is completely dead. Note that all numbers are sales price only, no shipping and before fees. It’s easier to compare apples to apples this way.
In 2025 from Jan 1 to 8/25 I had 939 sales for $44805 My store had 2989 items on 1/1/25 and 3641 on 8/25/25. My average store size was 3143. I averaged 46 new listings per week over this time.
I started cross listing slowly in late December and ramped up throughout Q1. I completed flat rate business policies switchover in March/April. Nifty also refreshes all my ebay listings with a 5% price reduction so my store is fresh – no stale listings.
My store had 4006 items on 1/1/26 and 4055 items on 8/25/26. My average store size was 4040 this year to date. I have averaged 63 new listings per week this year to date.
So almost 1000 more items on average, no stale listings, more new listings than ever before, and shipping was streamlined to a flat rate model of $5.99, $7.99, $9.99 and $12.99. You would think my ebay store would be experiencing amazing growth, right? Well…not really.
To date this year I’ve had 1157 sales for $41862 on ebay alone. That is some SCARY anemic growth compared to the work I’ve put in to grow. It’s not even growth as I’ve been selling off old stale inventory for cheap. I did all that major work just to maintain where I already was. It is terrifying to think how bad my sales would be if I had made none of these changes.
Now when it comes to cross listing I use Poshmark, Depop, and Mercari. This year to date I’ve sold 875 items for $21582. Items that have sat forever on ebay sell quickly on the other platforms. And a reminder – I only have about half my ebay items cross listed so the sales velocity is higher on these sites.
I’ve narrowed my focus going forward on clothes, shoes, and small misc items that are 1cuft or less in size, so everything I list will be cross listing compatible.
I averaged 34 sales a week last year through August and this year I’m up to 60 per week. I’m averaging 74 sales a week this summer. I’m a little scared of how many sales a week I’ll have in Q4 this year. I expect to break 100 several times. Shipping is SUPER annoying right now. I fully expect to cross $100k in sales this year (sale price only – before fees and shipping/tax not included.) That is only possible due to cross listing.
So what other benefits are there to nifty?
Store refresh automation: It’s automatic. Items on every platform get refreshed with no input from me.
Auto offers: I used to spend time every day sending offers. It’s all automated on all platforms according to the rules I have set up. There is alot of customization for this to work however you want it to work. You can even set up a delay for how long to wait until the offer is sent once a person looks at your item.
AI listing: Simply put, it is awesome once you are used to it. I now pay my two oldest kids to list for me. Currently I’m not really listing except for occasional items. My daughter lists clothes and misc items. My son lists shoes. When listing clothes she photos the items and has a dry erase template she writes down the measurements on and takes a photo of the template. I have every possible measurement on two templates.The AI tool integrates the measurements into the listing description and item specifics. It only incudes the measurements that have written entries. You can create custom rules for the lister to follow . You just add notes and prompts into a template and it follows the rules. Once the listing is generated the kids do their own proof read and then do a price search on ebay or terapeak. The recommended prices on nifty are a work in progress. I don’t recommend using them. They’re right only about 50% of the time. Once they are done they mark their drafts as ‘ready to list’ and then I do the final review and post them live. I pay them $2 a listing with a $5 bonus if they do 20 listings in a day. It takes them each about 1.5-2 hours to list 20 items so they are both making $20+ an hour. IMy daughter is saving up for college/car and my son is taking flying lessons and saving up to pay for his lessons (expensive!)
Side note, they’ve both scored high enough ACT scores to get a free ride to college. Higher scores than I had even. Nice!
Sorry for the side quest – back on task!
The listings that nifty generates are quite good quality. It hits so many excellent keywords, there are SEO optimized keyword sections in the item description, there are endless AI templates to help streamline shipping options. I’ve time trialed myself doing shoe listings with AI. I can do 15 pair in an hour start to finish, including basic cleaning. This is robust listings – far more detailed than the basic listings I used to do that didn’t even have a description other than “see pictures for details & condition”.
Bookkeeping: Nifty has some excellent tools to analyze your metrics. You can track your COGS (I’m not using this yet – another huge up front undertaking), your inventory SKU’s, and whatever else you want. I don’t know how anyone could use Poshmark or Depop to manage inventory. Depop doesn’t even have a SKU system and Poshmark is very rudimentary. I do all inventory tracking direct in Nifty, which then pushes that info out to the different platforms. So if ebay ever glitches with the SKU system, I am safe. I can just do a full refresh on nifty and it will completely fix all my ebay listings.
Ask Otto: Nifty has it’s own dedicated AI chatbot that is VERY useful. You get a certain amount of free credits to interact with OTTO each month, and after that it will start consuming your monthly credits. I’ve added some metrics to my weekly numbers this year to track clothes and shoes sales more accurately, as well as tracking cross listed vs ebay sales. I have been doing all this manually – so each week I would log each sale and mark it as ebay or cross listed, and then mark each sale as clothes & accessories, shoes, or other. This week I described to Otto what I have been doing and it generated the same report automatically. I double checked the classifications of my sales and the numbers and it was perfect. It got every sale properly classified. Now I have a report I can run each week I can trust that will generate my metrics without me having to spend 20-30 minutes logging data.
And the newest tool that Nifty just launched is AI bulk cross listing. Man I REALLY wish this was around when I started. Now if you have a bunch of ebay listings you can bulk cross list to all platforms. It does take 1 credit per item same as fully generating a listing, but I get 1000 credits a month on my pro plan. More than enough to do all my listing and do some bulk cross listing. I’ll make sure to use up my credits each month on bulk cross listing the rest of my items until I’m all caught up. Going forward all my new listings are already cross listed so there is no extra work to make more sales.
TLDR, I pay $90 a month to make an additional $600-800 a week this year without any extra work once it is all set up. That’s an impressive ROI. I can entrust my teens to do ALL my listing and their listings are very high quality. I just spend 20-30 minutes a day proofing up to 40 listings. The rest of my time is spent with shipping and inventory management.
Ebay is unusually flat for me. If I was only selling on ebay right now I’d be very frustrated. Fortunately I started cross listing back in December.
Since the beginning of February I’m averaging 25 sales for $600 each week combined on Depop, Poshmark, and Mercari using Nifty… even though less than half my items are cross listed. That number is trending up the more I cross list. I do all my new listings and I try to do 100 old ebay items each week.
For the year I’m averaging 51 sales a week, which means ebay is only accounting for 50% of my sales and that percent is trending down. I currently have 4100 ebay listings and less than half of those listings are cross listed.
Another rough project I took on at the beginning of April was switching to business policies and flat rate shipping on ebay. The goal was to sell more items based on reasonable shipping costs. I modeled my rates based on Depop’s rates, so $5.99, $7.99, $9.99, and $12.99 for anything other than huge items.
I was hoping that business policies would get my shoe sales weekly average up, but it didn’t. I was still only selling about 12 pair a week. So 5 weeks ago I started a concentrated effort to cross list shoes – at least 20 pair a day. Over the last 4 weeks my shoe sales have doubled to an average of 24 pair a week.
So I say all this to say that ebay…is not good. I have fixed my shipping. I have refreshed my entire store so no stale listings. I am listing more than I ever have before in the first half of the year -averaging 51 new listings a week so far. Something has changed, something is wrong.
I do all that and I’m selling just as much stuff off ebay. Even worse, stuff that has sat for years on ebay sells like hot cakes on the other platforms.
My sales are trending up in alignment with my increased efforts everywhere else. Why is ebay flat?
Anyways, I’ve laid all the groundwork in the first half of this year to make a real run at $100k gross sales (sale price only – not including shipping) this year. Hopefully ebay starts to pick up as well so I can get there. My second half sales are always much stronger than the first half.
One last note, I shipped 66 items last week and I am on track to ship 70+ this week for the first time ever. That is ALOT of shipping and ALOT of work for a part time gig.
Nifty.
The automation only is $22 a month. That will auto relist your items and auto send offers. $22 is worth it to keep your 10k item store fresh. Implementing a price reduction when relisting is optional. I have implemented a 5% reduction and only end/sell similar after 180 days. Once my whole store is within 6 months I’ll reduce my end/sell similar daily cap from 100 to 50, just to spead everything out a bit more. I have no desire to relist every month, and with a 10k item store I think ebay would penalize you for that much turnover without sales. Having a fresh 6 month store is, in my opinion, the sweet spot. I was working to get to a 1 year rotation manually but it was alot of work.
Since I let Nifty take over I only have about 700 listings that are older than 6 months. All of those will filter into the relist cycle over the next 60 days.
There’s nothing wrong with having long tail items, but it is definitely a different era now. It will only get worse the more AI is integrated. List it and forget it is no more. You have to have some kind of refresh activity or you’ll be buried.
I would even recommend you run 10-20 old listings through an AI tool each week just to get some fresh keywords and refresh the title and item description and item specifics.
You can train ChatGPT and create a custom GPT where you can feed in a few listing URL’s each day and it will spit out revisions in whatever format you want that you can cut/paste into the listing. Refining the custom GPT to just spit out the actionable items and leave out the fluff is very helpful. I made a tool a while back to use when sourcing where I set all the paramters to the point I can upload a photo of an item while scavenging and the tool will just say “yes” or “No” if I should buy it. Then I say if I bought it or not. Then when I’m done shopping it will spit out a formatted file with all the listing info for the items I buy. It’s a great tool for shopping commodity stuff like clothing, shoes, toys, and games.
As a matter of fact, this listing refresher tool was a good idea so I started doing this for myself.
My sales/impressions numbers this week are on par. Nothing out of the ordinary. I haven’t even listed anything new in 2 weeks.
I also don’t think blanket end/sell similar is good for your store, the same as blanket editing or ending promoted listings is not good.
eBay seems to prefer gentle pruning rather than plowing everything down.
I sell old stale items regularly after relisting. They do even better on posh and Depop. Mercari is doing better but it has been slow since they only allow 100 more listings for every sale I make. In 2 months I only have 6 sales on Mercari. I have to be selective as to what I cross post there for now. I’ve sold over 100 items between posh and Depop so far even though I’ve been slow to cross list.
It’s a setting as to how many it will sell similar each day. I have mine set to max 100. So even after 2 months I still have listings from 2024. It will eventually get them all.
no I haven’t used the listing tool yet as I don’t have business policies. That is a requirement to use the AI tool. I’m at a point I could use them, but I don’t have the time to deal with that conversion headache at the moment.
I have used it to create some draft listings to sell some baseball bats. Worked great. I copied the titles and descriptions into eBay as drafts. Sold several of those bats already.
I do pay my oldest kid to list my clothing backlog and she does a good job. Kids her age HATE AI. She don’t want anything to do with it. She does occasionally use google to reverse image search at least.
Strong disagree. I’m almost completely out of promoted listings – down to about 200 left in a 4000 item store. I am letting nifty remove them as part of the auto end/sell similar along with an auto price drop. I have it set to relist anything older than 180 days. FYI, if you didn’t know this the nifty auto end/relist will always remove your promoted listing. You have to add it back manually.
My slow process of ending promoted listings over the last year has resulted in zero drop in sales. I’m still growing year over year. I’m meeting my goal of 40 sales a week on ebay with the added benefit of an extra 15+ sales a week on depop/posh/mercari. I’ve broke my all time weekly record of sales twice this year already. I’m only up to about 1500 cross listed items as it is a manual process, but so far the sales I’m getting from cross listing are well beyond my expectations. I’m gunning for $100k in sales (sale price only – not including shipping) this year.
Listing quality items with good STR trumps promoted listings all day long. As I’ve been saying for a while now you have to phase them out slowly so ebay don’t crush your store. I did that experiment a few years ago and the sales ban hammer was REAL.
Nifty will slowly remove the PL for you and even apply a price reduction for you for your stale items. I recommend you give it a try. It’s worth it for that feature alone. If you just want ebay automation (auto end/sell similar, auto offers, price reductions, etc) that is only $22 a month.
