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In case it’s helpful for anyone else, with that photoscanning site provided by Ryanne, do a Fast Scan. It will summarize how many listings have only one photo. Then scroll down to the report section and run a report using the “tab” and “csv photo count” as options. It will produce a report you can copy and paste into google sheets or Excel with links directly to your listings that need more photos. (I still have 89 with only 1 photo).
Thanks for the link Ryanne. That looks very useful. I’m running a scan right now.
Btw, I’ve had reasonable success using direct messages through the eBay for Business facebook group. They agreed to give me a second month store credit so I should end up with about $150 in credits (2 x $59 store fees + about $30 in insertion fee credits). I’d rather have all my photos but this is better than nothing.
I definitely encourage you to try and grab your photos as soon as you can from whatever source you have available eg: Google cache. The longer you wait, the less-likely they are to exist.
> Do you do free shipping on top of competitive pricing and discounts?
Nope. I charge for shipping.
My regular pricing is actually on the high side. (I know yours is higher.) I’ve spent a lot of time playing with my pricing so I think I have a pretty good idea where the market is at.
I could put all my hats at $24.95 but my sales would fall off a cliff and that additional $5 per sale wouldn’t come close to making up for all the lost sales. I think hat sales are much more sensitive on price than say art or mid-century decor.
Hi Jay,
>>Did the DVD/VHS combo have a tv too? Those also sell well. The big issue is shipping.
Nope. This one was one of those regular-looking VHS players with a slot for single VHS tape and a tray for a single DVD.
>> On your hats, can you remind me how much you buy and sell them for?
I think hat prices have come down (just like all clothing) due to all the new sellers. My cost averages around $1.5 per hat. My average hat sale for this year is $18.36 (665 hat sales this year). Last year my average hat sale was $18.72.
When I list, I start at $19.79 for anything that has a reasonably large potential pool of buyers and $14.95 for anything that just has a very small number of potential buyers (eg: Joe’s neighborhood paint shop) or anything that has lots of identical competition. Once in a great while I’ll find something very special and I put a higher price but that’s rare.
After being listed for about 4 months I’ll add hats to the pool of hats that I include in 15%-off markdown sales. I start dropping prices dramatically around the 2-year mark.
On ebay, I think the average used hat probably sells around $12. Maybe less.
Keep in mind that you can buy many types of brand new hats from retail stores for around $15 so to command a premium price it generally has to be something vintage or unusual.
Hi R&J — Thanks for the podcast!
Congratulations on your big scavenge of the week – a new building! That’s hard to beat.Here are my numbers for the week…
Total Items in Store: 2419
Items Sold: 33
Total Sales: $910
Cost of Items Sold: $69
Average Price Sold: $27.57
Average Cost of Item: $2.11
Highest Price Item Sold: $165 Toshiba DVR-620 Combination DVD / VHS (paid about $5 at an estate sale)
Number of items listed this week: 61
YTD Sales: $23984
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +19%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 321
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 119
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 49
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.36%
# of Hats Sold: 20 (60% of sales)It was a another solid week for me. My summer garage sale finds seem to be doing pretty well and keeping my numbers good. My biggest sale was a DVD/VHS combo. All the YouTube Ebay people have been talking about them so I think the price is probably falling but this unit was pretty recent unit which got me a good price.
Regarding the caller (Mark) that wanted to sell postcards without tracking, I set up a separate account to do that so that I wouldn’t lose my top-rated seller status. (You get lower shipping costs for being a top-rate seller so it’s probably worth keeping).
Regarding the missing-photo bug, I sent a message to the eBay For Business Facebook group and exchanged a couple messages with an eBay person (Customer Support?). They said they would refund my store fees and the insertion fees for the impacted items. It doesn’t get anywhere near compensating me for the amount of hassle but it’s better than nothing.
It’s interesting that the video on Wednesday said that they were still actively working on that missing photo issue because at 11:00am on Wednesday I got this direct message from an eBay employee on the the eBay for Business Facebook group:
We’ve restored everything that we were able, but it does mean that there’s going to be some leg work required on your end. I’ll do all that I can to help with that. The first thing that I’ve done is credit your last month’s store subscription as a courtesy. The next thing that I have done is credited your insertion fees for all of the affected items. The next thing is that I have a list of all possibly affected items that I’ll provide to you after this post so that you will have a starting point to double check the listings. I apologize for any inconvenience, but we will definitely be here for you if you need any additional help, Simon. ~Brady
Hi R&J – Thanks for the podcast!
My numbers for this week:
Total Items in Store: 2391
Items Sold: 36
Total Sales: $1206
Cost of Items Sold: $138
Average Price Sold: $33.49
Average Cost of Item: $3.85
Highest Price Item Sold: $249.95 APOGEE MQ-100 Light Meter (paid $30 at a garage sale)
Number of items listed this week: 39
YTD Sales: $23074
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +21%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 322
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 141
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 55
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.51%
# of Hats Sold: 26 (72% of sales)I had a very good week. I sold several high-value items. My highest was the light meter mentioned above. I also sold a $125 slide rule. My favorite sale was an $85 LED watch from the 1970s that I got for free at an estate sale.
Regarding the “Create a Copy” feature on the drafts page, I’ve been using that for at least a couple of months. It’s just like a Sell Similar for active listings. I find it useful when I’m create new listings for similar items but I don’t want to make them active yet. eg: I was creating listings for several similar games yesterday. I created one draft and then used the Create a Copy to create 2 duplicate rafts so that I could take photos of all the games at once.
I think I heard you guys say that you wish eBay would have templates. They do. There’s a link on the left side of the listings page under Settings (above Automation preferences). I have a template for hats for example. (It’s not really a fill-in-the-blanks template though. It’s more like a draft that doesn’t go away).
One more thing that I discovered recently. It’s always annoyed me that my sales in disappears off the ebay website after 60 days . I sometimes find similar items after months or years and would like to be able to do a sell-similar from an old listing. Anyway, I noticed that if I go back to my email and click the item link to the email from the “your item sold” (or whatever the title of that email is), I can see the old listing. Often the photos are missing but I can see the rest of the details and I can do a sell-similar from there.
Hope everyone has a good bug-free ebay week.
Here’s the link to the reversal announcement that @jamie mentioned above: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Markdown-Manager-Update/m-p/28694630#M1243130
In the 2018 Summer Seller Update, we announced new changes to requirements for creating a markdown sale event that went into effect on June 25, 2018. We listened to your feedback and have made a change to these markdown sale requirements. Sellers can now add items to a markdown sale event even if the listing was previously in another sale event within the past 14 days as long as the listing price has not been changed.
If anyone else still doesn’t have their photos back, here’s a video from Kathy Terrill that shows a technique I used to recover photos from most of my impacted listings. (I had 160 listings without photos):
This link will take you to the place in the video where she shows how to use the Google cache to find cached listings. Sometimes you’ll find the listing on one of ebay’s sites. Equally as often you’ll find your listing on a 3rd-party site.
Once you find a cached listing, click on one of the photos so that it opens in full size (rather than with the little magnifying glass feature) then right click and save the photo.
I’m with you T-Satt. This is the most underwhelming response ever. It’s been 2 weeks since they lost millions of photos and impacted untold numbers of sellers and their customer support still can’t tell you whether they are actively working on restoring them or not. It’s not the bug that annoys me. It’s eBay’s lack of transparency.
Thanks @ChristineR. Yes, that was the site I was using. It worked out pretty well. I was able to determine the main model fairly easily though the sub-variations (eg: different colors, accessories etc) can get tricky as they dont have photos for everything. I’ll put up a bunch of listings this week and see how they go and I’ll do the rest of them another time.
For anyone that’s not sure how to identify a Breyer horse, look on the inside rear leg. There’s normally a mark there of some kind. eg: a circular copyright or “USA” or both. That was all I needed to see to buy the tub that I have.
Hi R&J
Thanks for the podcast….Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 2388
Items Sold: 40
Total Sales: $837
Cost of Items Sold: $95
Average Price Sold: $20.93
Average Cost of Item: $2.38
Highest Price Item Sold: $79.95 TP-LINK Portable Battery Powered 3G/4G Wireless N Router
Number of items listed this week: 69
YTD Sales: $21869
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +19%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 323
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 219
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 127
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.68%
# of Hats Sold: 35 (87% of sales)This week I bought a whole tub of vintage Breyer horses for $30. It’s something that’s well outside my normal area but I enjoy researching collections and collectibles so I spent severalhours on the weekend reading up on Breyer horse identification and matching up my horses with what I could find online. (I didn’t find any hundred dollar horses but I should easily make multiples of my investment).
Just an observation, it was a pretty anti-ebay show today. I hope eBay is getting the message from various channels at the moment. They need to switch the focus back to sellers. Between the intentional changes and the bugs, we’ve being beaten up recently.
Speaking of which, has anyone heard anything official from eBay to say that they are not going to restore our lost photos? I’d like to know if I’m supposed to be rephotographing those items.
Hope everyone has a good week!
I’m very late to the party this week but I had a good week last week so that makes me more inclined to pop in and post my numbers.
Total Items in Store: 2359
Items Sold: 48
Total Sales: $1132
Cost of Items Sold: $225
Average Price Sold: $23.59
Average Cost of Item: $4.7
Highest Price Item Sold: $149.95 Zoom H4N Digital Recorder (paid $40 at a yard sale)
Number of items listed this week: 68
YTD Sales: $21032
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +18%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 318
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 178
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 75
Sell-through rate (for the week): 2.03%
# of Hats Sold: 32 (66% of sales)My sales total was buoyed by some lucky electronics find at a yard sale the weekend before and a pretty solid demand for my other items. My sales total was about $500 higher than the weekend before and the number of sales was up about 50% over the week before. I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand the unpredictability of retail sales.
I’m annoyed at eBay for that photo issue. I’m not annoyed that the photos disappeared. (S*** happens). But I am annoyed at their lack of transparency in terms of giving us information about whether they are actively working on fixing it and when we might see it fixed. Their status page is useless. The tech company I work for will update their website and tweet about website issues within minutes of having an issue that affects customers and updates will be made every hour until the issue is resolved even if it takes days to fix. (Ebay is one of our customers as it happens. We need to teach them about incident management.).
Another response from a different Ebay user confirmed that the issue (with renewing listings) appears to have been fixed around 4pm EST Saturday: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Pictures-deleted-from-newly-re-listed-items-Whats-going-on/td-p/28640070/page/2
I really hope they fix the relisted listings from the previous 45 hours. It’s going to be miserable to have to re-shoot those items if they don’t.
Hi R&J. Thanks for the podcast and Happy Birthday Ryanne!
My numbers for this week:
Total Items in Store: 2348
Items Sold: 30
Total Sales: $603
Cost of Items Sold: $76
Average Price Sold: $20.09
Average Cost of Item: $2.56
Highest Price Item Sold: $49.5 Focus Enhancements FireStore Direct Edit DTE Recorder (for parts)
Number of items listed this week: 63
YTD Sales: $19899
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +15%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 309
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 157
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 90
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.28%
# of Hats Sold: 21 (70% of sales)Nothing special going on with my store this week. I’ve had a few weeks in a row where my total sales are lower than this time last year. Not sure why that is.
Have you heard about the new eBay Easy Pricing feature. If not, you’re going to hate the idea of this one…. https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2018/6/1528724531.html
“Starting 10 days after listing, we’ll lower the price (5% every 5 days) until your item sells or gets to $xx.xx. We’ll notify buyers who showed interest each time the price drops. Turn it off anytime by going to your listing.”Have a great week everyone.
