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Make sure that you’re rounding up when measuring, not rounding down and always measure at the widest points. With large boxes (and especially frankenboxes) there can be large variances depending on where you measure. I get the feeling that FedEx measures packages much more precisely than USPS.
Hello all,
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3978
Items Sold: 46
Total Sales: $885.78
Cost of Items Sold: $170
Average Price Sold: $19.26
Average Cost of Item: $3.72
Highest Price Item Sold: $96.95 Jabra Speak 410 Speakerphone
Number of items listed this week: 32 worth approx. $956
YTD Sales: $31963
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +14%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 456
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 348
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 212I put extended handling on my store and did a backpacking trip for 5 days last week. It’s been a while since I’ve been completely offline. I left my wife in charge of handling customer service which gave her the first taste of that aspect of running an ebay store. Sales continued at a pretty normal level despite the long handling times.
I enjoyed the story about the BeautyQueen. I pictured some kind of fancy color (blue/green/pink) so I was surprised to see it was a cream color. I would never have guess what that was worth by looking at it.
Hope everyone has a good week.
50% commission is tough.
If you’re comparing a 50% commission rate with the eBay/PayPal 15% rate, you’d have to have an awfully high scam rate to make TRR worthwhile.
eg:
– Sell four $100 items on ebay. After fees you have $340
– Sell four $100 items on TRR. After fees you have $200
Even if you got scammed and lost one item completely on eBay you’d still end up with $240 with ebay compared to $200 on TRR.Even having one scammer every four sales on ebay seems incredibly unlikely.
That’s an interesting exercise. I doubt that many people do Premium, Anchor or Enterprise level stores on a month-to-month fee. By the point that you get to that level, you’re pretty much committed to an on-going store and it makes little sense to pay the higher fee. (It’s still billed on a monthly basis even when you’re on an annual rate).
One factor to consider is turnover eg: if you list and sell 100 things in a month, those count as new listings also, in addition to the listings that automatically relist each month. I found I saved money when I switched from a premium to anchor store at around 3300 listings. I typically sell 200+ things per month. Many of those would sell within a few weeks of listing. (That math doesn’t quite work but I definitely saw my ebay invoice decrease at the time I upgraded). The big jump from $50 in free supplies to $150 in free supplies has some value too but it wasn’t a big factor for me to decide to upgrade.
I have a whole set of shelves dedicated to broken-down boxes. When I get new boxes I throw them into a pile in the garage until my wife complains about “box mountain” and I have to go and cut them all down and file them away in my shelves. I’ve only ever bought a handful of large boxes over the years. Most have been scavenged. I buy small boxes in large quantities because of the volume of small items (like hats) that I ship every day.
I’m a little late to the party but….
Thanks for the podcast. It was interesting hearing you talk about things from a beginners perspective. I was giving some eBay tips to an elderly friend of my wife’s family on the weekend. She’s been talking about selling on ebay for at least 2 years and has never gotten around to it. She ordered a scale on the weekend while I was talking to her. I secretly hope she doesn’t attempt to sell. I don’t think I could keep my patience if I start getting a steady stream of phone calls from her with eBay questions.
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3999
Items Sold: 61
Total Sales: $1334.94
Cost of Items Sold: $163
Average Price Sold: $21.88
Average Cost of Item: $2.68
Highest Price Item Sold: $144.95 – Radio Shack Pro 162 Scanner
Number of items listed this week: 66 worth approx. $1543
YTD Sales: $29670
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +13%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 446
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 342
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 206.5The week started off slow but definitely got better. Sales were better than the last few weeks but that was partially as a result of finally having new, more valuable items to list.
I hope everyone has a great week. Sell trash. Be free!
Yep. Storage is cheap now but that wasn’t always the case. That’s why I think the current approach is more of a relic of the way things used to be rather than an intentional decision. I would love drafts to survive an extra month.
I’m sure ebay could do more with drafts functionality. Old drafts dont make them money so I don’t think it’s a focus of any of the teams. In the past there was probably a concern about the cost of keeping millions of draft photos around so they have some kind of hokey process that causes photo decay over time. From what I’ve seen, the listings themselves hang around for a long time it’s just the photos that disappear. I have no idea why the photos decay rather than just disappearing all at once.
Thanks for the podcast Jay and Ryanne.
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3994
Items Sold: 51
Total Sales: $1046.91
Cost of Items Sold: $118
Average Price Sold: $20.53
Average Cost of Item: $2.32
Highest Price Item Sold: $101.96 R-Type III for Super Nintendo
Number of items listed this week: 55 worth approx. $1697
YTD Sales: $28335
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +14%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 438
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 280
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 202
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.28%
Hats sold this week: 39 (76% of sales) worth $677 (64% of sales $)Sales-wise this was a reasonable week. It was mainly low-value items again but it was pretty constant. I took a couple of days off work as it was my birthday week and I dragged my wife to some estate sales on my birthday. We showed up to one house clear-out and everything was free so I walked away with several bags of stuff until my wife got hangry and dragged me away. I also stayed a a hotel overnight a couple of hours north of here (Sacramento) and spent a day doing garage sales there (as there are still very few locally). I was pretty surprised by how carefree people were about wearing masks. About 75% of people at the garage sales didn’t have masks. That’s an area where bars & nightclubs are being closed again due to an uptick in cases.
It’s funny that you mentioned Alone. I started watching that for the first time today while listing. I was OK with concentrating on my listings when a squirrel got an arrow in its ear and a mouse got pancaked with a large rock.
On the topic of draft listings. I often have more than 100 drafts. I’ve not been able to find any official info about how many drafts are allowed. (I have an anchor store). I occasionally bump into the draft decay problem where photos start to disappear off the listings. I wish ebay would fix this to allow us to keep drafts for longer. Especially for people paying considerable monthly fees.
Hope everyone has a good week.
My answer would be “I priced the based on my research of the current market for this kind of item.”. On ebay I’d take the opportunity to send an offer with a discount too. There’s no better time to send an offer than when you have a customer right in front of you. Not sure if Etsy has this feature.
I meant to say on that Videotronics caller question, I sold one of those types of units. To test it I hooked up the output from a VCR player into the input for the Videotronics unit and I hooked up the output of the Videotronics unit to my TV. When I played a movie in the VCR, I was able to manipulate the output using the dials/sliders on the Videotronics unit to see that everything worked. (The unit I had could adjust color / contrast / brightness and that kind of thing).
Hi Everyone,
Here are my numbers for this week:
Total Items in Store: 3990
Items Sold: 50
Total Sales: $846.64
Cost of Items Sold: $117
Average Price Sold: $16.93
Average Cost of Item: $2.36
Highest Price Item Sold: $32.95 Maximum Carnage Super Nintendo SNES
Number of items listed this week: 65 worth approx. $1692
YTD Sales: $27268
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +13%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 441
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 463
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 307
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.25%
Hats sold this week: 41 (82% of sales) worth $657 (77% of sales $)From my numbers above, this stat is pretty crazy : Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 463 8 of my sales were more than 1000 days old this week.
Nothing really new for me this week. Garage / estate sales haven’t really started back up much locally (which is good that it shows people are carefully about distancing, but bad for sourcing). My numbers are starting to slip compared to what I normally expect to be selling at this time of year as all my sales were low value items. On normal years I sprinkle in high value items found at garage/estate sales.
On the topic of returns, I had a return closed automatically last week (June 16). The return had been opened on April 22nd. So it took 50-something days to close.
Hope everyone has a great week!
When I get one of those questions I got through a whole range of emotions in about 30 seconds. I start off being annoyed and angry but these days I usually arrive at “tolerant” and I’ll send back an offer. As MyCottage suggested, I will often throw out an offer but I don’t always give my bottom dollar. At least it continues the discussion. Once in a great while I actually get a sale from taking the time to respond. Most of the time it doesn’t go anywhere.
The_SEAM_Store – that sounds like a nightmare. Do you recall getting a message through ebay saying that someone was having trouble paying? I’ve seen them come through in a best offer. Those messages included a fake ebay or paypal link that may have taken you through a login page (which was actually at a hackers location). That’s the method that someone else got hacked recently.
Thanks @Timo – I’m aware that using a freight forwarder can void buyer protections. If the item didn’t get back to me I wouldn’t have refunded the cost. It came back in working condition and was worth under $20 so there was no need to treat it any differently to any other return.
