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Week of 5/14-5/20
Total Items in Store: 1,486
Items Sold: 57
Number of Items Listed This Week: 58
Total Sales: $1,468.75
Cost of Items Sold: $237.13
Highest Item Sold: $80 – Cake by Petunia Pickle Bottom Society Pink & Brown Diaper Bag
Competition: Highest Priced Items: Veronica wins this week expanding her lead for the year 12-7.
Competition: Highest Total Sales: Troy leads the year $16k to $12.4kSales slumped again last week, but started to pick up on Saturday, continuing into Monday. As the “Feed the Beast” process goes, again it was true: Starting on Friday 5/12, we did very little eBay work, as we were getting our garden at the house prepped and planted, and we took over two garden plots at our Community Garden site (since when my parents moved to Montana, we lost our large garden area at their house). We spent 5/12 – 5/16 with no new listings. Add to that, I was working on a contract job from 5/2-5/11. So for basically 2 weeks, we had very little listing activity. Last week was a very slow week, and the first time we had seen consecutive days where sales were less than $200 since early February. We started listing seriously again on 5/17…and we started getting sales coming in again on Saturday. We have consistently seen that when we stop listing new items, we see a drop in sales. When we list every day, we get consistent sales. This happens more on the clothing side, so I’m sure that the best match from Cassini sees when we are listing and selling, and so our items are shown more often.
Just have to always “Feed the Beast”!
We agree with the lifestyle conversation. I gave up the $120k/year career for this lifestyle, and I can’t go back. The money was great, but I hated the life. Even when I do the contract jobs and I have to go into the office for 2-3 days straight…I realize I couldn’t live that life again…
Paul, you may be onto something. A few months ago, I had moved some older clothing items to auctions. Some sold, most didn’t, but we did see more activity (though we were also listing more, so that could have been it as well). I think I will try this and see how it works for a lot of my stale clothing items.
I do best offer on all listings. For items that are lower value, that is exactly what I do…putting the ceiling and floor at the same price. I don’t have any concerns with this, especially if I do free shipping.
Click on Listings, and they are at the bottom of the left hand menu.
So if I am understanding this correctly, we are already using “structured policies” in the listing, so I would think we are meeting what eBay is looking for…structured data for shipping, payment, and returns. We just are not using grouped customized “business policies”.
Also, am I reading all the info on the eBay site to mean that we set policies separately for each section? So we could have one business policy for returns, one for payment, and 10 for shipping?
eComm: We have not started using Business Policies, but we use the same data listing by listing in each section (not the Item Description) under “Selling Details” for “Payment Options”, “Return Options” and the “Shipping Details”.
How do business policies differ, and what are the advantages? We use “Sell Similar” for every listing, so we know that these areas are already good every time, and we don’t even check on them anymore, except to change the shipping options and weight for each listing as needed.
I agree. For lower end items like clothing, I have to accept offers to stay competitive, but there is a limit to that as well, and since I need high volume, I have to automate. And I notice that by them getting automatic feedback, they are willing to offer again, rather than have to wait…where they may buy from someone else.
In that case, I would agree with a floor and no ceiling. The range is too high to have an auto accept (unless you auto accept at say $550).
So you can auto reject below the floor, auto accept above a certain ceiling, and haggle in the middle.
Funny thing. I just started turning the auto accept on today during relisting…and one just purchased and paid via the auto-accept. Shirt was $25, floor of $15, ceiling of $20. Offered $20, auto-accepted and paid all at once. I didn’t have to get involved at all.
For us, we have had buyers that had offers lower than what we would expect (usually 40% of asking price or less) that will contact us via messages to ask for our lowest accepted offer. When we had the floor turned off, we would get lots of low offers, and the time to respond and counter was not worth it. I see that during relisting too, where offers that were 50% or more off were auto rejected. Plus, we see many times where we “walked them up” to a price we would accept. Meaning they tried the 50% off offer, were automatically declined, then they made a reasonable offer we would expect.
It all depends on where the auto-decline is set. I would agree, that if I was offering say 20% off for clothing and it was auto-declined, that is getting too tight for that category.
Got it. We use Best Offer with Auto-Decline (floor) on just about everything. Listing price is based on the best we think we can get for it, with a floor that would be the lowest we would want at this point, so similar to you.
I’m going to go back to the Auto-Accept (ceiling) as well. I notice that we get a quicker payment and turnaround if the buyer gets the auto-acceptance notification while they are on the listing, so that they can pay right then. Sometimes the floor and ceiling are the same if we are getting into low priced items. For items that have a wider range I might go $49 list, $35 ceiling, $25 floor.
eComm: So you don’t use the auto-accept, just the auto-decline? Then if you get an offer, you wait 48 hours before you accept to see if you get higher offers?
So in ssmantua’s example, you would have a $45 listing price, with a $39 auto-decline?
Mike, this is HUGE for us. Solves our issues for inventory management and relisting in one package, and if the pricing is that low, it is totally worth it. The time saved in relisting (and knowing that the relisted items are shown as new listings to eBay to get that boost) will pay for the monthly fee.
Thanks a ton. This is a big help!
Thanks a lot Mike. This sounds like something worth looking into, and the cost is not prohibitive.
One last question. When you end and relist your times through WonderLister, do you know if eBay sees those as “new” listings? Or does eBay see those as relisted items? I would guess that they would be seen as new, since they are coming from a third party site.
Thanks again, I’m going to look into WonderLister!
It is very infrequent that we get an offer asking for Free Shipping. If it happens, it would accept, but the payment amount would still include the shipping. Ebay does not auto reject based on terms, but you could contact the buyer and explain to them that the Free Shipping in terms was not seen. eBay would back you on this.
I agree, and thanks for the info. That is some we have thought of as well…more control…but much more work as well.
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