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Amen. I talked with Steve in the last month and he checked, no dice on the cloud solution. Probably at some point, but not now.
Mike: Nope! My templates in SixBit make the listing faster from the desktop.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy…
SixBit will not work in the cloud. I already asked.
If you go down the SixBit road, I can help with questions. And their group is great with customer service.
For our store, yes, that would be a reasonable assumption. If we use a $15/item profit per item, and use an extra 10 sales for Day 1 boost and 8-10 for Day 30 boost, then $200-$300 a month would seem reasonable.
Will that work for you? Maybe. But if I were to consult with you on this experiment, here would be my advice:
Look at your active listings that have more competition. Looking at your store, I would take clothing, shoes, kitchen items, games, purses, etc. Look for items that will have more competition from other sellers. From that list, look for listings that you have had out there for a long time, say more than 4 months. That would be the list of items that I would use for the experiment.
For those items, you would then put them on 30-Day Listings going forward. If you are going to manually relist these items through eBay (since you don’t have a WonderLister or SixBit to do this for you), I would suggest to relist them one at a time (not it batch, I had bad luck with that).
But that then becomes the rub. It starts taking time to do this manually one by one. And when you have a lot of listings, it takes too much time. And you have to do this on a regular basis to see the benefit. You can’t do this for a month or two and see the benefit immediately. And you especially can’t do this at this time of year (during the summer slowdown) to see if it is working or not.
This is what led us to SixBit. The program does it for us, saves us the time, and still gives us the benefit. No muss no fuss.
I would always give advice person by person. No blanket statement that one process works for all. For a seller with a smaller store (say less than 1000 items) that sells items with lots of competition (clothes, shoes, etc.), I would have them use 30 Day listings and manually relist. At some point, if they are serious, then I would recommend upgrading to a SixBit or WonderLister to handle that for them, as the benefit of more new listings (by saving time from manually relisting and using that time for new listings) will offset the cost of the program. This was us when we were at 1,500 listings last summer and couldn’t make up ground due to too much time on manually relisting.
For someone like you with a larger store, mostly made up of unique collectibles that may not have a lot of competition, the work may not be worth it (unless you only do the high turnover items). Or I would tell a large store to get SB or WL. Or they could list GTC, but have a process where once per month, they look a their oldest listings, end them and relist.
This entire process, and the data that I showed that started all of this, is what is working for us, why we do it, and why we list the way we do. Will it work for others? Maybe. Maybe not.
Again, other factors are in play, and this entire discussion is on the margins. 95% of the business is the fundamentals that we discussed earlier. Using this data to our advantage is only providing a small bottom line boost. But it is a boost that I can take, with little investment of time or money. Whether it will work, and is worth it, for others is something everyone will have to decide for themselves.
To paraphrase someone earlier: Don’t worry so much about the Silver Bullet that you forget to focus on your aim…
Mike: You could also contact the buyer first, let them know you found it, offer to honor the original sales price if he wants it, and you can relist it at that time and he can purchase. If he doesn’t want it, you can let him know that since you found it, you will relist the item.
Let him drive your decision point.
Agree Jay, the item isn’t not showing at all. It isn’t like it disappears. But it does fall in search, and it may fall so low that buyers aren’t really seeing it unless they look for exactly the item you listed. Again, for very unique items, this doesn’t matter. Only specific searches by buyers will have your item be returned in search to begin with. For items that have a lot of searches by buyers and a lot of sellers, then being on the high end of search results matters.
I think for me the key is that there is a pattern that I see from Day 2 through Day 29. The sales slow down as time progresses. If I project that slow down beyond day 29 (ignoring the Day 30 spike), our sales would slow down more and more. This correlates to what we saw when we went to GTC. But by using 30 Day listings and relisting, the Day 30 and Day 1 boost was in our favor, and sales returned.
Mike, I would relist the item, then contact the buyer saying that you found it. See if he is interested and maybe you can negotiate the negative away. But if not, just move on. 1 negative isn’t a huge issue on your score.
Again, this isn’t a boost on the first day of the month. It is the first day that a listing is active. So every day of the month, a new listing is starting, so that boost is happening every day.
Listing #1 starts on April 1, so it has a 6.67% chance of selling on April 1.
Listing #2 starts on April 2, so it has a 6.67% chance of selling on April 2.
Listing #3 starts on April 3, so it has a 6.67% chance of selling on April 3.$15 is a good average to use for our store.
For us, when we tried GTC a few years back, that sales degradation that the chart showed just continued to slide. We kept listing and listing, and sales got slower and slower. I finally ended the listings and relisted as 30 Day listings, and our sales rate came back.
So to me it isn’t just a boost of 10 sales on Day 1, it is the combined boost of sales rates on Day 1 and Day 30 over the low sales rate an item would have if it continues to slide down the scale to the dreaded day 61, when it is now “stale” and not showing in search at all.
I would love to have the data on our store if we put things on GTC and let them ride, just to see what the sales rate would be. But I really don’t want to sacrifice sales to do that for a year. I really feel that you have to have several months worth of data to compare.
So, to translate it to your thinking…
Lets put the dataset of 3088 sales as a 10 month period. Then yes, we would expect 20 sales (206/10) to take place on the first day it is listed, 11 on the second day it is listed, etc, and 14 (147/10) on Day 30.
In total, 3088 sales for the 10 months is 308 sales per month (with 20 on Day 1, 11 on Day 2, etc.) That makes sense for our volume in that timeframe. Below are our actual sales by month:
Jul 2017 – 210
Aug 2017 – 296
Sep 2017 – 302
Oct 2017 – 311
Nov 2017 – 356
Dec 2017 – 349
Jan 2018 – 281
Feb 2018 – 243
Mar 2018 – 321Welcome Lori!
That medical cost per month is high, but ours was going in that direction in Colorado as well. We were on our third provider in three years (as each one kept folding) and were at $850 per month when we went to Samaritan Ministries. Now we are at $500 per month for our family and we love it.
It isn’t for everyone, but it was a great option for us.
For us, we usr Samaritan Ministries to cover our Health Care Costs. Much cheaper and was a great option for us.
And like Jay said, we budget for it like any other cost.
I think the translation is a little mixed here.
It is not that I can expect to sell 22 items on a given day, or 16 on another. It is more about the distribution of likelihood of sale given the lifespan of a listing.
For any 30 day listing, an even distribution would say that there is a 3.33% likelihood of sale on any given day (1/30). So this is similar to when rolling a dice, you have a 16.67% chance of rolling a 6 (1/6) on any given roll.
What I wanted to see is how our sales are actually distributed over the 30 Day lifespan.
With 206 sales on Day 1 out of 3088 total sales, 6.67% of all sales take place in the first day, over twice the expected rate of 3.33%. This is like expecting to roll a 6 twice as much normal…like a loaded dice.
After Day 1, the percentages float around the 3.3% mark, though they are in the mid 3% until Day 16, then they are in the 2% range after. This is the sales degradation you see in the chart. Of all sales, there are less and less sales that take place the longer the listing is out there…until Day 30.
There were 147 sales that took place on Day 30, the last day of the listing, for 4.76% of all sales. Again, a spike in sales both compared to the previous days trend and over the expected rate of sales of 3.33%.
So, it isn’t that you can expect sales to take place on a given day of the month, but you can expect more sales to take place on the first and last day that a 30 Day listing is active.
And again, all given that it is a GOOD listing to start. Meaning good title, good description, sharp photos, something people want, and at a good price. That is where the meat is and always will be.
But there is some sizzle in the fact that there is a higher likelihood of sale on Day 1 and Day 30 for 30-Day listings…in our store at least. Others results may vary.
Time period is from July 7, 2017 through April 27, 2018. So, about 9+ months of sales, over 3000 sales transactions.
So, to break down the original chart of all sales, there were 3088 total sales transactions. Of all sales that took place, 206 of those sales took place on Day 1 (the first day it is listed). This always seems to be the biggest sales day, showing the boost that newly listed items have, either through search or through watches that people have for certain items.
Of all our sales, 77 took place on Day 29, and then 147 took place on Day 30. For Clothes & Shoes, 58 Sales were on Day 29, and 103 on Day 30. For Hard Goods, 19 sales took place on Day 29, and 43 on Day 30.
So we actually seem to sell almost twice as many items on the last day of the listing (Day 30) than we do on the Day 29. And when looking at the “normal” level of sales for each item (sales that took place from Day 2 through Day 29), there is a definite spike in sales on Day 30.
Jay, I agree with part of what you are saying. The basis of our business, and yours, is that we purchase good items at a good price and resell them for profit. Plain and simple. If you don’t have that, you don’t have a business. That is 90% of all our businesses, and that is where 90% of the focus should lie.
Beyond that however, all of us have different business models. You guys have the 10x return model, with a 4% monthly Sell Through Rate (so you sell about 1% of your inventory per week), which requires a large inventory to provide you with the return you need on a weekly basis. With your property situation, you have the ability to do that with no warehousing cost (I would consider your warehouse you built as a property improvement, as you will recoup that cost at some point should you choose to sell your property).
For Veronica and I, we have the 5x return model, with a 15% Monthly Sell Through Rate, which requires less inventory as the Velocity of our sales is much higher. We don’t have the ability to have as high of an inventory, and we would rather have the higher sales rate, as it is easier to store cash than inventory.
Not saying that either is better, we just have different situations and run different businesses. So we don’t build our business on “tweaks”, we build our business on solid fundamentals, and use “tweaks” to improve our business. Does it take us any time to do this? Nope. We have learned how to do this without it taking any more time. But when we have data that works in our favor, we use that data to make us better. Like the 60 Day “stale” rule that eBay notified you about. We used that information to say “if we DO use GTC, after 60 days, it is “stale” based on eBay’s standards. If it is really unique, that probably doesn’t matter. But if it is something that has competition, then we need to relist.”
Because in my mind, if it is listed, but nobody is seeing it, is it really listed?
I had to do some Excel work, but I have the splits:
So in both cases, there is about a 40%+ sales spike from Day 29 to Day 30. Granted, Hard Goods also has some interesting spikes on Day 23 and Day 25, but still, for Hard Goods, the best sales days are Day 1 and Day 30.
So all I want to share with the community is that based on our data for our store, we can show that 30 Day listings have a benefit of the “Newly Listed” and “Ending Soon” boosts in search for all sales types. We will use that boost to our advantage. Others may find this interesting. Maybe they don’t. Maybe it will work for their stores. Maybe it won’t.
Is it the basis for our store? Nope. Will we use it to our advantage? All day long. It would be silly not too…
