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That is awesome, and something we have been looking into…software that will relist as new to eBay without lots of time to “freshen” the listings. We are just about at the place where the time saved to manually relist the items one at a time would be worth the monthly fee for listing software. Plus the ability to multichannel, so less time listing, more time selling.
What software are you using and what is your monthly cost? What would you say are the biggest gains / losses from the software you are using?
Thanks. That is good to consider. We usually hit the relisting when we can and make sure it doesn’t stack up on us. When you relist, do you freshen the listings one by one? Or Mass Relist? We stopped the Mass Relist because we would see our items have 0-5 views during the next month. Not sure if that was due to lack of changing things or something Cassini did. Like Cassini said “you really didn’t work hard at these items, so I’m not going to show them to anyone! 🙂
50% STR! That is great! Are these more commodity type items that you sell?
We average 20%-25% STR, with clothing being the higher STR to bring up the lower collectible STR.
We come down on the side of eCommerce411 on the 30-Day vs GTC debate. We do 30-Day listing, with Best Offer, with a “floor” (what we call the auto reject below $x) to avoid lowball offers. When we did free shipping on clothing items, we also did a “ceiling” (what we call the auto-accept above $x). We are actually thinking of setting that back up on clothing items that would ship First Class or Padded Flat Rate. Having the pricing on “auto-pilot” speeds up sales and gets the buyers increasing pricing and then auto-accepting while they are on the item, speeds up the transaction, and speeds up the payment. They don’t have to wait for us to accept an offer and then go back in a second time to pay.
Yes, there is some time invested by relisting, no question, but we feel that it is time well spent to get an item sold. For us, refreshing a listing is 2 minutes at the most per listing, and we feel it is worth it to increase sales. We like having a larger sized inventory, but not at the expense of lower sell thru rate (STR). We do analyze how much to “freshen up” the listing. The lower the views on the item, the more we will work to rearrange photos, change title, look at pricing, look at item specifics, etc. We would rather freshen these items and get them sold, than have bad listings that stay out there for a long time and not sell. We know that eBay considers your listing “stale” after 60 days, so we try to keep ours fresh at all times. I can tell you that I see this a lot when relisting, that the first month an item is on it has more views than the second month, and if I don’t freshen it up, it has very low views the third time around.
We went from 30-Day to GTC a few years ago, and we saw our STR plunge for a few months, we manually ended our items and went back to 30-Day, and our STR came back up.
Sure, you can GTC if you have a process to analyze old listings, but to me, that is what the 30-Day does for us regularly. When we want to implement a change (like when I went from Free Shipping to Flat Rate shipping), within 30 days, little by little as things fell off, I implemented the change. This also helped us clear out the “active content” that we had in our listings, and when I made some changes to the Item Description for Mobile, I just had to go through the Unsold for 30 days, and the change was implemented.
eCommerce411: Are you saying to avoid listing on Wednesdays, as those would end on Fridays if using 30-Day listing? Also, on the Days of the week, historically, our best three days for sales are Thurs, Sat, & Sun, and our worst are Tues & Wed. For some reason in 2017, our best are like yours – Tues-Thurs.
I have had similar thoughts in the past of prepackaging, but I ended up agreeing with MDC in our process. The only items that are somewhat prepackaged are shirts and ties. They are easier to store when already folded in clear polybags, and shipping is simple by putting in a tuff mailer / Priority packing and out.
We found that other non-clothing items are more efficient to store outside of packaging, are easier to pick and ship, and easier to get more data when customers ask (measurements, quality, photos, etc.)
Your specialty items MAY be worth it, since you would know your dimensions already…but you will not be happy taking it all apart to answer a question. Buyers always come up with something we had not thought of!
05/09/2017 at 2:57 pm in reply to: Insurance – The total Amount minus What we already Recieve?? #17674When we pay for the extra insurance, it is the full amount of the sale. So if the sale is $150, we put in $150.
With that said, we rarely pay extra for insurance. If an item is $120, I will put the value for insurance at $100, not pay for the extra, and we are done. If the item is broken or lost, I will get $100 back. I lost out on $20, but I saved the $2 extra insurance charge (guessing here how much that is, it has been a while) on this item, as well as every other item in that same range, so we are ahead in the long run.
I look at it in an actuarial way. Taking your example, is $3.93 worth it to recover the extra $75 if the item is damaged or lost? Based on the potential that the item may be broken or lost, I make my decision. In this example, if I could ship this item 18 times without it being broken or lost, I would break even if it broke on the 19th trip and I have to eat the extra $75. $75 / $3.93 = 19.1 — The number of times that you can ship the item without it being broken/lost, not pay for insurance, but break even if it breaks once.
Hope that makes sense.
My wife and I are thinking about going this year. I can let you all know when that is confirmed. Having a Scavenger Life meet-up would be fun!
05/09/2017 at 6:57 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 309: Scrapping and Parting – Interview w/ Eric in Ottawa Canada #17655Very nice. We have done the same with cords, missing volume of a set, etc. With Google, YouTube, eBay, and Amazon, there is so much knowledge and power that we have at our fingertips.
That is funny! Glad it could help.
05/08/2017 at 8:47 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 309: Scrapping and Parting – Interview w/ Eric in Ottawa Canada #17644Week of 4/30-5/7
Total Items in Store: 1,481
Items Sold: 86
Number of Items Listed This Week: 50
Total Sales: $2,378.95
Cost of Items Sold: $505.92
Highest Item Sold: $100 – Vintage Pyrex Pink Gooseberry Refrigerator Dish Set (Veronica wins this week expanding her lead for the year 10-7).Sales increased over last week, but we are seeing a much rockier ride, with larger swings day to day.
We also had another situation today like last week with the bulk shipping, with eBay timing out when generating the labels. 8 of the 14 labels were eventually sent to eBay/PayPal, no SCAN sheet. So again, manually reprinting the labels and had to take them to our FedEx office (our office will take USPS, and we already had 4 FedEx packages, so one trip only). eBay said they would have a technical person get with us in the next few days. REALLY hoping that we get this corrected…
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This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by
T-Satt.
You can send a message to the folks that run the EAT to see if you can import the listed not sold. For me, I was already keeping Inventory in a spreadsheet before we moved to the EAT, so I moved that over to the Inventory Tab of the EAT as my starting point.
We use the Inventory tab for everything purchased. When it is listed, we highlight the cell in green. With the link via the SKU, when an item sells, it moves from inventory to sold on the Inventory tab. The total at the top of the Inventory tab shows the total dollars in inventory not yet sold.
Jay, I agree. You hit the three key metrics for any item to sell:
1) low cost
2) high selling price
3) quick sell thru95% of the time, you get 2 of 3.
3 out of 3 is called a Unicorn… 🙂
Amen. But it does matter on what you buy. I’m willing to sit on the right items if the profit is there. We sold a $600 Bogner Ski suit last year, and we had to have the patience to wait for almost a year to get that profit. But when selling certain shirts, holding out for $5 more dollars doesn’t always make sense.
I look at this business as trying to feed both halves of the brain. The right side says “this is cool and will sell!”, the left side says “let’s prove that, and how long to wait for that profit “? Being an accountant, the left side of me is much stronger, which is why Veronica does the collectible stuff… 🙂
I agree. That is what we do now that we learned from you guys. Before, we would put the store on vacation and message the buyer on when we would return. Now we just change handling and message the buyer.
When you put your store on vacation, you have the option to hide your listings from view. If so, buyers can’t find your listings. If you leave your listings visible, your buyers see your listings with a message stating you are gone and when you will return.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by
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