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If you get a label sent as a .jpg file, make sure you walk the packag into Fedex or USPS or UPS and confirm that it scans correctly while you’re at the counter. By the time it’s been converted from PDF to JPG it could get distorted and the scanners might find it’s unreadable. (I’ve had this happen to me).
I’ve pre-packed a few very large things (like speakers, a typewriter and large pre-built model planes) to get accurate dimensions and weight and also so that I can avoid 2-hour packing horrors on a weeknight after a long day at my day job. I do what everyone else does for average items:- guesstimate based on past experience.
I hit the same restriction on a first class package recently. I was shipping a poster in a poster tube that was 36″ wide. I hit the same limit with international First Class shipping also. (I thought the limit was 24″ on that occasion).
I don’t know if this is a real restriction from the USPS or just something that ebay has mis-interpretted. For the domestic shipment, I shipped first class anyway and I wasn’t dinged by USPS (yet).
Having the location outside of the listing itself definitely has some benefits. For example, I can easily find all the items that are supposed to be in particular tub and I can easily consolidate tubs without touching the listings. Also, since I have dozens of similar-sized tubs that only contain hats I have a page in my spreadsheet that shows the number of items in each tub so I can quickly identify which tubs have space for new items.
Every inventory system has pluses and minuses so I guess we all just have to figure out what works best for ourselves. The main things is to have some kind of system.
Thanks for the show this week. I thnk the moral of this week’s show is that when you start to sell on eBay it’s helpful to have some kind of inventory management system from the beginning.
Here are my numbers for this week:
Total Items in Store: 3305
Items Sold: 46
Total Sales: $1029.39
Cost of Items Sold: $142
Average Price Sold: $22.38
Average Cost of Item: $3.09
Highest Price Item Sold: $84.95 Microsoft Zune HD Platinum 32 GB
Number of items listed this week: 52 worth $1089
YTD Sales: $40515
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +9%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 424
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 260
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 114
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.39%
Hats sold this week: 28 (60% of sales) worth $461.28 (44% of sales $)I have a very simple inventory system:
– newly listed items sit in a specific area for a little while until they are put away
– every couple of weeks I copy text off ebay’s active items page (for newly listed items) into notepad/wordpad and I strip out everything except listing titles.
– I paste this list of new item titles into my inventory spreadsheet (along with the date-listed)
– as I put each item away I add a location into my spreadsheet alongside the item title
– when something sells I do a “find” on my spreadsheet of the item title and that’s how I find the locationI don’t have to worry about skus/custom fields etc and I don’t have to update the listing itself with location info. Once in a blue moon I end up with 2 items with the exact same title but I can use the date listed to distinguish between the two.
One other thing I do that might be helpful for some people. I have thousands of hats that are stored in tubs. I organize the hats within those tubs roughly by color so if a red hat in TUB75 sells, I just pull the red hats out of that tub to find the one I’m looking for. (I don’t put different color hats in different tubs, I’m just talking about organization within the tub).
Sell trash. Be free!
I have no idea how many other employees did the same. There wasn’t open discussion about it.
My decision was really based on thinking about my future rather than a reflection of the company’s future. It’s a nice decision to have but it was also pretty stressful.
Ultimately the way I made my decision was to consider the reverse :- if someone gave me a large chunk of money would I choose to invest in that single company’s stock? The answer of course was no.
I was also at home sick last week but I just sat like a vegetable watching TV and couldn’t even get enough energy to list on eBay and I skipped the Garage Sales which is how my wife knew I really wasn’t feeling well.
Sales were unremarkable but on par with this time last year:
Total Items in Store: 3299
Items Sold: 36
Total Sales: $767.53
Cost of Items Sold: $79
Average Price Sold: $21.32
Average Cost of Item: $2.21
Highest Price Item Sold: $59.95 Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional
Number of items listed this week: 59
YTD Sales: $39485
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +8%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 416
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 322
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 287
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.09%
Hats sold this week: 24 (66% of sales) worth $424.52 (55% of sales $)The most interesting thing that happened in my life last week was the end of the IPO lock-out period for my company’s stock. I unloaded the equivalent of a years salary which helps solidify my plans of retiring from my day job mid next year.
Sell trash. Be free.
Yep. Your wacky inventory management system was the reason I thought it might make an interesting topic for next week. Also, shipping is bit of an art form in itself so I’m sure it must be interesting explaining all the packing and shipping options.
Thanks for the podcast! I enjoyed the intro. That was a good summary for new folk in particular. The line in your manifesto about building a 500-item store was one of the biggest revelations I ever got from your shows. Up to that point I assumed that people would only ever post a handful of items at a time. Doing eBay at scale was an entirely new concept for me.
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3276
Items Sold: 44
Total Sales: $1069.67
Cost of Items Sold: $153
Average Price Sold: $24.31
Average Cost of Item: $3.5
Highest Price Item Sold: $195.95 Horikawa SPACE ATTACKER 9.5″ ROBOT Space Toy 1969
Number of items listed this week: 45
YTD Sales: $38718
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +8%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 413
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 259
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 227
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.34%
Hats sold this week: 30 (68% of sales) worth $531.98 (49% of sales $)My big sale of the week was a lucky purchase at a garage sale ($25). It went to Europe (direct, not GSP) so fingers-crossed that it arrives successfully.
I’d be interested to hear more about how it goes having someone doing your shipping for you. You mentioned it in passing. Maybe that would be a good topic for next week. Also, I bet a bunch of us would be interested in a brief update on your storefront building.
Hope everyone sells lots of trash this week.
No. I’m currently in project management rather than being a engineer. (I used to be an engineer but it’s been a while.). I see there’s a whole dedicated thread on the P.L topic so I’ll just stay out of that other than to say that I thought that I had assumed that once the recently-announced changes went into affect, eBay would always show a P.L over an organic search but doing some of my own tests has not shown that to be true. When I do a very specific search which only returns a single listing … my listing. I don’t see it appearing as a sponsored listing which is good.
Thanks for the podcast R&J.
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3248
Items Sold: 41
Total Sales: $871.92
Cost of Items Sold: $116
Average Price Sold: $21.27
Average Cost of Item: $2.84
Highest Price Item Sold: $104.95 Traktor Kontrol F1 – DJ Remix Controller
Number of items listed this week: 43
YTD Sales: $36672
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +9%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 412
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 242
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 157
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.26%
Hats sold this week: 28 (68% of sales) worth $481.59 (55% of sales $)A pretty unremarkable week. Sales were solid but I sold a lot of hats so my total sales figure was pretty typical for this time of year.
Ryan from Ralli Roots (YouTube) got to do a Q&A session with someone from eBay about the changes to Promoted Listings. It was pretty informative. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_F1dYoDU9I ) The main takeaway is that if your item appears as a promoted listing, it wont appear lower on the page. So previously your listing might appear twice. Now it will only appear once. That was a concern for many people. (Especially when people started freaking out about ad-blockers blocking promoted listings). You an check your impressions dashboard in the seller hub to see if there is any substantial change for your store.
Hope everyone sells lots of trash this week.
I’ve heard that even when you hide your listings, watchers can still see them so they can still make offers. If they can make offers maybe they could even buy them. No idea why eBay couldn’t hide listings completely.
That might be a bit mean but we did convert my daughter’s room into eBay storage when she moved out. There is still a bed in my daughters room but it’s completely surrounded by storage totes so if she shows up unexpectedly for a weekend she has to navigate my hat storage.
That’s a good question Jay. My main storage area is getting tight I checked my numbers and see that our inventory has grown from 2700 listings to 3200 listings in 12 months. Most of those additional listings are probably hats and I can get about 60 hats to a tub so that makes it easier. We currently use a bedroom and some of my garage. I can probably find more room for storage if I try hard. We have a 4-bedroom house and my youngest is about to move to school at U.C Santa Cruz so maybe I should turn his room into the next eBay storage area :).
I haven’t listened to the show yet, but I’ll post my numbers while I have a spare minute:
Total Items in Store: 3246
Items Sold: 54
Total Sales: $1359.80
Cost of Items Sold: $165
Average Price Sold: $25.18
Average Cost of Item: $3.06
Highest Price Item Sold: $289.95 Bowers & Wilkins 685 Series 1 Bookshelf Speakers (paid $60 at an estate sale)
Number of items listed this week: 50
YTD Sales: $35,800
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +10%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 424
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 257
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 178
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.66%
Hats sold this week: 42 (77% of sales) worth $686.72 (50% of sales $)I’ve been missing for a couple of weeks as I had a short vacation followed by a business trip followed by a backpacking trip. As a result I’ve done a lot less listing and had longer handling times and I had a couple of slow weeks. Things bounced back now as shown above. It was one of my best weeks of the year.
One thing I did to generate sales was bulk offers to watchers. For 3 days in a row I sent out offers to watchers on about 100 listings. Each day that generated about 10 sales which I thought was really good. I was offering 20-30% discounts depending on the age of the items.
Hope everyone has a good week!
