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Shayward: Welcome to the “own your life club”.
The best advice I can give you is to work hard … and have patience. You need to put in all the hours that you can and want to give to this, but know that success takes time. Especially as you start, you will list a LOT of items, and sales will trickle in. But keep working and growing, KNOWING that it will pay off down the road.
As a numbers guy, here is what I can tell you that backs that up. First, our average days to sell is 120. Meaning it takes, on average, four months for items to sell. Patience.
Second, our average sales week:
2013: $579
2014: $719
2015: $1,162
2016: $1,486
2017: $1,981
2018: $2,222Growth takes time (and hard work to plant and grow the garden)
I am hoping that happens later today when I have my call with the rep.
I have three scheduled calls today…joy…
A lot will depend on what your goals are for this business.
What are you looking to get out of eBay?
It has not been them showing their best this week, that is for sure. I’m sure that this will smooth out and get better, and that they will learn from this and improve, but definitely not their best week…
Yeah, I just reread the issue with GSP. They say that you can have ONLY GSP as your international shipping option. So the only countries that we could ship to is:
Bahrain
Brazil
Canada
China
Kuwait
New Zealand
Qatar
Saudi
Arabia
Switzerland
Thailand
United Arab EmiratesWe ship a lot to Australia, Russia, Chile, Argentina, etc. I don’t want to limit our business by only shipping to this small list of countries. If and when the list of countries expands, then we will opt back in.
The frustrating part is that we were told that if we are in GSP, then if the buyer was in GSP, then the shipping options for them would be GSP. But if the buyer was in a country that is not part of GSP, then they would buy from us direct (as we have done since 2004).
So, I guess we are down to just one major gitch, the FedEx issue. We removed FedEx from all our listings, and I’m hoping it is fixed so that we can offer that to our customers again…
Week of 1/21-1/27
Total Items in Store: 1,750
Number of Items Listed: 124
Number of Items Sold: 52
(Includes 0 Etsy, 1 Bonanza, 0 TrueGether)
Weekly STR: 13%Total Product Sales: $1,285
Cost of Items Sold: $265
Highest Item Sold: $90 – NWT Banana Republic Brown Glen Plaid Overcoat
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Troy wins the week and Troy leads the year 3-1.eBay Clothing
# Listed: 1,033
# Sold: 38
STR: 16%
ASP: $26.11eBay Shoes
# Listed: 105
# Sold: 2
STR: 8%
ASP: $20.00eBay Hard Goods
# Listed: 612
# Sold: 12
STR: 8%
ASP: $21.02Etsy Hard Goods
# Listed: 118
# Sold: 0
STR: 0%
ASP: $0.00Very slow week for us, though it started to pick back up this weekend. I think the bugs that we have had to deal with are part of this.
Ryanne, you said you haven’t seen the issue with FedEx SmartPost? So you have still been using SmartPost all week, and the cost to the buyer was the same (or slightly more) that what your label cost is? For us, the cost to the buyer has been normal, but the SmartPost cost is much higher.
Of our 3 major bugs, this one is still open. We have our eBay Guaranteed Delivery bug resolved, but our Global Shipping Program is still open as well. I have a message from our UK rep that does not seem to have good news for us…meaning that we may not decide to use GSP since the eBay GSP solution is not as good as what we can do.
Julie: I’m coming to you from an ex-CPA background, so I understand your issues.
Even being a trained accountant, that does taxes myself…I still use TurboTax. Unless you have something really complicated, you could do your taxes yourself using TurboTax. If you hit on some special snag or question that you can’t figure out, let me know. I didn’t do taxes for a living, but I can usually either answer your question, direct you to the answer…or if it is above me I would tell you to talk to a tax person.
On your Quicken question, that is what I use for the business, as well as our personal side. With the Home & Business version, I can keep the two sides separate, running reports for each, but it stays in the same program.
Yes, there is more data entry with Quicken (if you choose to). I’m sure I make it worse, because I’m more OCD. I don’t use the interface with PayPal, as it will download transactions that cancel (so not needed…these are banking settlement transactions). It also will only download the net balance that impacts your account on sales, where I like to see the Product Sales (and I break out eBay vs Bonanza vs TrueGether vs Etsy) separate from the PayPal Fee separate from the Shipping Revenue.
For my money, I would either stay with the Excel (let me know if you would like help with your file, I’m pretty good with Excel), GoDaddy, or Quicken. You won’t need a QuickBooks type solution at this stage (we are full time and I can’t justify it).
Anytime I can help, let me know. You can also reach me directly at tsatterf@yahoo.com
I had to bring up that someone I know got that deal. And they said that it would only be on a case by case basis. We moved off of FedEx after that. I didn’t want to push my luck…
So, we just got burned on the FedEx SmartPost issue. Two items were charged SmartPost to the buyer at $12. Our cost on one was $20 SmartPost, $14 Home Delivery (we chose HD). The other had our cost at $18 for SmartPost, $14 for HD. Shippo had our Priority cost at $13, so we went with that.
Called Concierge, and she was told from the techies that the issue has no foreseeable timeframe for resolution. She said she was told that the workaround was to go to the FedEx.com for the dimensional cost, and put that on the listing as a flat rate…
I was not happy.
After explaining the myriad of issues wrong with that as a solution, plus the fact that this solution (which was arrived at 2 days ago and not communicated to buyers), I asked for a shipping credit to cover the extra cost. We are talking tomorrow if I don’t get it. She was good and nice, but the supervisors at eBay are really putting them in a bind when they don’t get out ahead of these issues.
So we will be removing FedEx as a shipping option on all 1700 of our listings. Thank God for SixBit…I can do that in 5 minutes…
Concierge has said that there are a lot of people that had the same error. Basically, there was some glitch at the end of December where a lot of accounts had the tracking numbers erased on eBay. But even though we added the tracking back on, the shipping metrics still show these as “late tracking” (which is really stupid since the acceptance scan is still BEFORE the “Handle By” date, even if the tracking uploaded date is past the “Handle By” date.
A ton of people are working on this issue, but no timeframe. Good news is that we are BACK on EGD, our items are up and working for EGD. He said we are the first account that has it turned back on (so YAY for us).
The other concern is that the metric was showing 8 problem shipments on a 53 shipment timeframe. That is waaaay to tight. 1 carrier forgets to scan the form and we are toast. The rep said that maybe the universe of shipments are ones using EGD. Not sure.
We have a follow up call scheduled for 7pm on Monday to find out what the universe is of shipments for this metric.
So far they have been good about solving everything except when there is a technical issue, which only the programmers can deal with. Unfortunately, that is what we are dealing with so far. Hoping this call goes well…the EGD issue really ticked me off. So much wrong on that one…
Unless you are set up as a S or C Corporation, you can’t deduct your hours. You will be a pass-thru entity and pay taxes on your net profit (without your labor).
But make sure to have your tax accountant give you all the items you can deduct-mileage, home office deduction, etc.
