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Listing Process:
Troy: 1) Create draft listings in SixBit. This is everything for the listing without the photos. 30-50 per day when listing 2) Give items to photographer twice a week. 3) When items are received back with photos, drop the photos into the listing and schedule them in SixBit to list during the week.
Veronica: 1) Photo 5 items 2) List 5 items 3) Repeat About 15 per day
Veronica 2: 1) Create draft listings in eBay 2) Give items to photographer to photo 3) When items are received back, drop in photos and list About 20 per week.
PS- -For photo editing, Veronica uses GIMP Version 2.8 (this is a free software) that does even better than what we saw on Lightroom.
Veronica and I moved 8 times in our first 8 years of marriage. We had little…
We have now lived in this house for 15 years (this July). We also have a LOT of ebay inventory here. I couldn’t imagine moving…
We are starting a process each quarter to go through one room of the house. Total scrub down, clean out, and spruce up. Hoping to find more potential inventory…
I have only returned a few things on Amazon, and they were free returns. In fact, we had one pair of Darn Tough socks (love them!) that arrived with a hole, and they just sent a free replacement pair (so now we have one rogue sock…).
Looks like some things are Free Returns, and some things aren’t. My guess would be that most things FBA would be free, and since buyers get free shipping on FBA items if they are Prime, it is free shipping* and free returns…
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201532130
*kind of, after the Prime Membership
Rhianna, yes we are going to eBay Open, and if any other Scavengers would like to do a meet up, I think we should do that one night.
We went last year, and we are bringing a seller friend of ours with us this year.
Lots to talk about on this topic, so I’ll give my perspective.
From a learning perspective, if you are a newer seller, you can learn from some of the workshops. For us as more advanced and experienced sellers, we really only learned some new items from one class. So if you are going to learn from the classes, I think only newer sellers would benefit (though I haven’t seen the class schedule).
The most eye-opening part (and my focus this year) was the people that we met. We met a lot of different sellers, talked about a lot of different business models, practices, tools, software, etc. Having that new perspective of how others are doing (or not doing) is great, and a must, for growing your business. I want to talk to more people, hopefully make some new contacts so that I have people that I can directly contact for questions, advice, etc.
I also really liked meeting eBay people and SixBit people personally. We partied with the SixBit group (and have beers scheduled for this year), so now when I work with them, it is a better relationship. We were able to talk with eBay folks on the Guaranteed Delivery program, got all our questions answered, and expressed our concerns and thoughts for improvement. That face-to-face is huge (business is 95% people). The large group discussions on the new tools and vision that eBay has was illuminating as well.
And…Vegas is fun. It will cost about $1,500 total for both of us, after hotel, travel, etc…but is is also a business trip, tax deductible, and we will have a good time. For us…money well spent.
What started this was that our STR on clothing has been tanking for some reason for the past few weeks. I decided to run a sale to see if that would give us a boost, and we had three strong ($400+) days in a row, two with the sale, one after.
I won’t be able to tell if a sale is boosting search, or just better pricing, but either way, I can tell if the STR is better. It may tell me a truth that my pricing is too strong, and that the market is lower for certain items. If so, I can decide where to go from there (accept that market, or look for better waters to fish in).
Clothes are a bit of a mixed bag. No, I don’t want $5 per item (unless all I’m doing is shopping). When I shop, I find an item every 5 minutes. At $5 per item, that is $60/hr to shop. Not bad.
My focus is to look for higher end items, but I’m using the lower end items to keep the wheels greased. So I can accept lower margins but higher velocity on certain brands and types of items, as they are providing the capital to purchase and wait on the larger pops when I find them. For a full time business, I can’t find enough of just the high end items to live on, but I may move to a faster velocity model on the low end while we look at other sources. We are looking at some new areas for high end items, but the capital requirement is higher as well. I want to cash flow this move, and not try to go all in and take on too much too soon.
Not exactly. I usually try to price at around the 75% level as the starting price, but if I run more sales, I would start closer to 90%.
Week of 4/15-4/21
Total Items in Store: 2,022 (Up 40% YOY)
Number of Items Listed: 132 – New Record!
Number of Items Sold: 71 (Down 15% YOY)
(Includes 3 Etsy, 0 Bonanza, 0 TrueGether)
Weekly STR: 15% (Down 10% YOY)Total Product Sales: $1,719 (Up 2% YOY)
Cost of Items Sold: $353
Highest Item Sold: $125 – Vtg 60s Lot of National Park Brochures
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Veronica wins the week and Troy leads the year at 10-6.eBay Clothing
# Listed: 1,251
# Sold: 48
STR: 16%
ASP: $20.30eBay Shoes
# Listed: 152
# Sold: 5
STR: 14%
ASP: $27.45eBay Hard Goods
# Listed: 619
# Sold: 15
STR: 10%
ASP: $33.73Etsy Hard Goods
# Listed: 148
# Sold: 3
STR: 9%
ASP: $64.86Finally crossed the 2,000 listing level, and had our best week of listing ever…with 2 days off for travel to visit our son. The photographer is hitting on all cylinders now (he even has another eBay client) and getting us closer to the 160-200 listings per week level we want.
Our sales were feeling soft through the middle of the week, so we ran a sale on the store…and sales took off. I’m thinking of doing this more often (and pricing to match), as I want to see if running a sale either helps in Best Match or is psychologically boosting sales. I know Cyndi at Amazingtaste talks about this, and we have seen that when we run sales on Etsy, sales pick up.
That is part of the strategy that Veronica is using. Some are drafts, but the rest are scheduled with a dummy photo until we are ready to finish.
“We just got too bust to keep up with a photographer.”
Amen on that. We are feeling it!
We have the free plan on Bonanza, only paying Final Value Fees.
The sync was an issue for us, but I was able to fix it last year (don’t remember all of what I did, but it has stayed in sync.)
TrueGether is jacked for us now though…
Ouch. Wish I could help on this one.
Have you ever considered keeping the photos on the phone (and later the computer) for some time to help with situations like this? We have had similar issues happen sometimes where having the photos saved our butts on reworks.
Week of 4/08-4/14
Total Items in Store: 1,955 (Up 36% YOY)
Number of Items Listed: 116
Number of Items Sold: 62 (Down 3% YOY)
(Includes 2 Etsy, 0 Bonanza, 1 TrueGether)
Weekly STR: 14% (Down 6% YOY)Total Product Sales: $1,474 (Up 3% YOY)
Cost of Items Sold: $294
Highest Item Sold: $76 – Majestic Cooperstown Collection Tony Gwynn #19 Baseball Jersey
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Troy wins the week and Troy leads the year at 10-5.eBay Clothing
# Listed: 1,199
# Sold: 41
STR: 15%
ASP: $23.09eBay Shoes
# Listed: 134
# Sold: 2
STR: 6%
ASP: $52.42eBay Hard Goods
# Listed: 622
# Sold: 17
STR: 12%
ASP: $22.27Etsy Hard Goods
# Listed: 158
# Sold: 2
STR: 5%
ASP: $35.00Slowest week in a long time for us this week, and to add to the roller coaster, we are starting to spend more $$$ on higher end items from a couple of new sourcing outlets, so cash flow is very tight. Some weeks in this business can be a sphincter shrinker…
Had an interesting experience this week. We sold a heavy item through Global Shipping (16 lbs), but for some reason we only received $4 for the shipping (our flat rate cost for First Class). We checked the listing and for some reason, the $4 First Class Business Policy was on the ended listing. I double checked SixBit and every time it was listed, it was listed as Calc Parcel. I called eBay, they saw that it was a mistake somehow, and gave us a $16 credit on the spot to cover the shipping (our cost to ship to Kentucky was $20). Great experience…
As an update on our (my) future, I have decided to postpone my thru-hike of the Colorado Trail one year. We are just now starting to hit on all cylinders with our new photographer, and we are planning some growth for this year, so I don’t want to bail on Veronica and force her to deal with that while I’m prancing around the woods. So we will spend the next year getting our processes down and employees in place so that it is much easier for me to be gone for 5 weeks.
That means that we ARE going to eBay Open in Vegas, so if anyone else is going, let’s plan a meetup at some point.
