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Yes, full time now in Jacksonville for good since my wife finally retired from the Navy. Since retirement she’s been actively self-employed with a couple things professionally so can’t really put in much time to help with eBay. She’s supportive of it, though. What’s not to like about a husband’s retirement hobby that makes money instead of just spending it?
Total Items in Store: 279
Items Sold: 4
Gross Sales: $193.49 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $154.00 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
— “>1,000% vs prior time period” says eBay – sorry, still pitiful
Cost of Items Sold: $41 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $112 (Czech rifle bayonet)
Average Price Sold: $48.37
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 12Things are picking up as I’m trying to list more regularly. Hey we missed you too! Sorry to hear you had to deal with outgoing plumbing. Not fun.
Sorry, just realized I misread your post, Sharyn. I take it that eBay labels would NOT print the FedEx label. I went off on my rant prematurely on kind of a different issue. I do know that sellers still complain that a buyer will be allowed to purchase a FedEx or UPS label for a post office box which then cannot be purchased of course.
I reported that glitch last year in label feedback and with a CSR by phone but not Facebook. Maybe Griff will do something about it. IIRC it was when managed payments was rolled out that eBay labels stopped generating a proper APO/FPO label. Not only will it allow you to print a FedEx label, which is pretty stupid because as Sharyn found out you can’t buy an APO/FPO label from Fedex; but even if you select USPS on eBay, it will not generate the customs form. Fortunately, PirateShip will do it effortlessly and the price is the same or slightly less than eBay labels. With my challenge coins I regularly get APO/FPO buyers and even the occasional DPO, which is Diplomatic.
Some good insights here. My random old stuff is taking much longer to sell now. My monthly sell through rate has been about 3% since early in the year, which is lower than it has ever been since I started on eBay. If I stay at 3% but grow my store, then I make more money. But I’ll also get on board with eBay’s new game. VintageTreasures is on to something. I do have items in a couple collectibles categories that I know have some of those coveted enthusiast buyers out there. Those have really slowed down for me too, but there is a lot of competition. I plan on trying to focus my sourcing on those categories and use eBay features such as coupons to get some of those enthusiast buyers to come back to my store. And try and list a little every day.
“I wonder then why eBay seems to be pushing somewhat this metric of repeat customers if many stores are like mine?”
That’s a good question. It doesn’t seem to make much sense for traditional eBay scavenger sellers who list whatever they find across many categories. I believe it stems from the current eBay focus on certain categories that attract obsessive collectors and expensive items. An eBay announcement in May said that “sustained investment in focus categories continues to pay off, as we double down on trust and authenticity, innovation, and engaging enthusiast communities.” If you look at the recent marketing efforts and new site features, they are all aimed at getting deep-pocket collectors to buy more – and to buy more expensive items – in those categories. Which seems to be working for eBay, in that their “enthusiast buyers” buy “71% of all goods sold on eBay – spending an average of $3,000 each year and shopping 30 times a year.” I think it’s really interesting and although it doesn’t seem to be helping my sales at all, it’s actually a lot better than when eBay was trying to compete with Amazon several years back.
One problem is the narrow category focus seems to be leading to progressive declines in the raw numbers of buyers on the site on a daily basis. EBay brushes off those losses as being “low-value” buyers. Unfortunately, those are our buyers of long tail used items that aren’t in hot categories.
This has been discussed now and again over the years here in depth but it is a topic probably due for a resurrection, since it seems to be a different eBay, post pandemic. I added a second store several years ago to sell postcards and other small ephemera in part to have a branding focus for that market. I used Easy Auctions Tracker to keep track of the bookkeeping for both stores pretty easily but it turned out to be not worth the trouble so I’ve wound it down. I think it’s pretty hard to build repeat customers and multiple item sales unless you have a large store in a hot niche for collectors’ items. I’m thinking sports cards, for example, but I know nothing about clothes. In your case I think you’d have to ask yourself whether an individual person would buy a lot of the specific clothing niche you’re thinking of spinning off to get those repeat buyers and multiple sales. Are there many people out there building a closet full of X who’ll buy more X from you? There are several strong niche store sellers here that’ll hopefully chime in.
The first time it turned out I would get a refund like that was the last time I asked for an extension to file. 🙂 Still, congratulations on the bittersweet windfall!
Dump body: Sold for $185.50 Sold Date Nov 22, 2016. Refuse body: Sold for $127.50 Sold Date Sep 06, 2013.
Nice trucks. Those prices are ancient by eBay standards but I guess it gives you a ballpark.
“Your Crystal Palace postcard”
Thanks, I’ll add that to the description. It is priced a bit high but I’m taking offers on it, it gives me room to put it on sale, etc. It’s one of the few things in my store that has any views so someone is finding it interesting. The $2.62 is what it costs me in stamps to send it to the UK in a semi-rigid envelope. There’s no tracking, but I don’t sell enough to get Top Rated Seller status in foreign markets anyway and my TRS for the US market is unaffected by shipping that way so I don’t worry about it. Royal Mail have been reliable – knock on wood I’ve never had to refund. Of course, they have been delivering mail for significantly longer than the US has been a country so one would hope they’re good at it by now.
Thanks! Very helpful. You touched on some interesting things. Re the Virginia Practice books, the “Handford” is me. I continue to update it every year (Waddell has retired) and each year they send me 10 author’s copies and I’ve just hated to recycle them. I’m not actively practicing law so I have no one to give them out to. That one sale you saw was mine. You’re right about virtually no market for older ones but they could be used for a specific case to establish what the law was in a specific year or for historical research. The current version sells for $650 from the publisher. I have my 10 copies of 2022 but I’m not allowed to compete with them of course.
I like your suggestions for the Leakey monograph. That’s a family item. The estate I mention in the listing was that of my father-in-law, a geologist who spent most of his career on the African continent. We have old photos of him taken in the Saudi Arabian desert while he was out gathering ground data for creating US Geological Survey topographic maps there in the ’50’s and ’60’s. An interesting guy who unfortunately I never met.
Great tips and observations Retro, thanks! I don’t focus on STR for items; I should do so. $250 a week was my annual average year after year, then it jumped up in 2020 and 2021 but crashed way below that this year. I’ve always priced the individual challenge coins aggressively and they still sold well but I think with the slow down this year, others are dropping their prices so that’s probably part of what’s hurting me. The game does change all the time.
Thanks ChristineR! Yes, my buyers skew older, like JasonK’s train collectors. I really do gotta get listing. Maybe joining Amatino’s Challenge will whip me into shape.
“Depends on where you get your doom/gloom information from”
Yeah, I try to avoid pure pessimism and I fully agree about taking responsibility for moving forward in the face of things you can’t do anything about. I don’t like the other platforms at all (except Craigslist for certain things but it seems to be totally dead now, in my area). EBay has been my place since 1997 and I don’t see leaving. It’s just frustrating. That global buyers on eBay are down this year is a fact, as well as that platform sales are down (eBay’s “performance” is up because it’s making more money through charging us more), and that management is concentrating their marketing and development efforts on the Focus Categories Craig Rex mentions above, which are watches, sneakers, handbags, eBay Motors Parts & Accessories, Refurbished, and trading cards. No hard feelings; it is what it is; gotta deal with it.
This year I’ve been cutting prices, sending out coupons, sending out offers to watchers (not often, because I typically only have one or two eligible listings a day to send them out on), ending and selling similar, and occasional markdown sales. I’ll confess that I am not listing consistently, but that is not a change from previous years. Last year in July and August with store numbers in the low 300’s I had three different time away periods for about 25 days total and my July and August sales were 61 items for a gross of $2,350 (not including shipping or taxes) with no price cuts, no coupons, no markdown sales. (OK, now that I’m looking at it, those two months were a little slower than the rest of the year.)
This year, I’m in the mid-200’s for active items and my July and August sales are 27 items for $603. Total sales to date for the year are less than half of what they were last year at this time. (Well, there is a week to go before August is over but I’m not expecting for lightning to strike.) With end and sell similar, all items are less than a year, with about half older stuff and half items listed for the first time in 2022.
Here’s my store – I’d be happy for you to look at it:
https://www.ebay.com/str/thephillyb1rd
Some things I need to do definitely: List more; get stuff up. Put my death piles aside and pull out and get listed some higher dollar items that I’ve got to get a higher average selling price. I’m surely heavy on the challenge coins but they’ve always sold like hotcakes until this year, and it remains a hot category. Just not for me, at the moment.
What else?
It’s encouraging to see everyone’s sales numbers. Mine have been atrocious for a while so I’ve been wondering if there is something to all the doom and gloom about eBay this year, losing so many buyers. Instead, I guess my bad luck is just the ebb and flow. I usually don’t have a summer slowdown, and then I usually don’t get much of a boost through the holidays either. Maybe it’ll be different this year. I sold 1 item last week, for $11. I’ll spare you the details.
