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37 of the 55 were removed. The 18 that remain were all due to items not being scanned upon acceptance by USPS. 1 item was shipped less than 60 miles away and did not get an acceptance scan until 7 days after the carrier picked it up. And this is with a daily scan form.
Even with all the defects, current seller status is still TR, so they are less of a concern for me than all the requests for refunds. They are coming in nearly every day.
I have 55 items on that link currently. Think it would make sense to only dispute the ones that have been delivered? Still plenty in limbo…and now the returns are rolling in because items were not received in time for Christmas, or they used the item for the holidays and wanted a free rental.
A lot of times a seller with a new account will sell at a loss to guarantee fast positive feedback and help boost their seller limits. I don’t think it’s good for the platform, but it happens.
I thought the week was slow, but still grossed 2k with shipping. There were several VERY low days and it just felt dead, but held together by a few larger sales.
Shipping is mostly a non issue for me. I like charging for it so I don’t have to refund it on returns, but I also think it hurts me in sales to certain people. If items are low cost multi item listings, I do free shipping so they can’t try to talk me way down due to “combined shipping.” Still, 90% of our items charge for shipping, but I am probably going free on all items going forward. Free shipping is now my default policy because it makes some people feel better because they cannot think it through. Never overestimate consumer intelligence!
Feedback is important to me as a buyer. I had an issue purchasing cell phones a few months back which took me more than a month to recover $1000. These were sellers with 96-97% feedback. 2 purchases in a row were completely useless buys that would not work with my carrier. The 99.7% sellers delivered better than what I expected. Item was listed as not perfect, but it looked brand new, came quickly, and worked. I have had several other less than perfect purchases since then as well and I understand why buyers prefer to purchase on AMZ in many cases. You would think 95% is a good rating, but those sellers generally suck and do a major disservice to those of us who try hard.
IMO, sellers with 96% feedback make frequent mistakes or misrepresentations and are often trash. They are likely to have inflated feedback due to ebay seller protections. The sellers with 99.6% are victims of bad buyers mostly IMO. I purchase as much as I can on the platform I sell with, so I have experienced good and bad sellers. The feedback is key when I am making a purchase and several sellers have items I want. For commodity items, I absolutely will spend an extra few bucksr to buy from someone with high feedback. I know they will deliver the expected product within the shipping window.Low feedback is a result of poor business practices in general that could make me unhappy with the transaction for a variety of reasons. I do not worry about negatives anymore. I am at 99.9% and have had a neg and a few neutrals. I dont think people look too far into a 99.9% rating, but I bet they would at a 90%.
* Total Items in Store: 2805
* Items Sold: 90 ebay, 2 Posh, 3 FB, 3 Mercari
* Cost of Items Sold: $23.85 + $12.91 Commission
* Total Sales: $2082 eBay, $57 Posh, $108 FB, $54 Mercari
* Highest Price Sold: $220 Coach purse
* Average price: $23.48
* Selling costs: $706
* Returns: 1 for $45
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $75 women’s clothing from FB
* Number of items listed this week: 40Goodwill opened here last week, but the local thrifts are closed. I do see an estate auction scheduled for May 30th, but the normal auctions I attend are still closed.
I’ve started auditing my oldest inventory totes and purging items not worth selling. I also found several that aren’t listed, so that is how I plan to source this week. I only went through 4 of the 40 older totes. I know anything newer is pretty accurate(since my wife started helping)
I’ve been saying for years now that I am unemployable. I’ve been running my own business now for most of my adult life and cannot imagine having to deal with a boss ever again. Ebay is something that my wife Erika has fun with and it does not cause us any stress compared to employees and contractors. The few issues we have pale in comparison to anything we have experienced over the last 15 years. I am able to be a lot more picky about accepting other jobs, so we are not making more money, just enjoying the work we do a lot more. I think that’s what got me hooked on your podcast and these forums. We only get 1 life. Why waste it grinding at something you don’t enjoy? Using ebay to fund other investments and keep life fresh is what it’s all about for us. That being said, we do treat ebay like a job for the most part…on our time, when we want to. It is easy to self motivate for me after years of scrambling to maintain contract standings in our other world.
Yikes, sorry to hear about that. Stay safe! Have you been able to assess the damage yet?
Our river is up almost 7 feet as of Monday and has gone over the boardwalk and into the businesses on the riverfront. I pray their insurance covers the flooding. We had 6″ of rain in 1 day, and we got 3 days straight like that. I would assume MI was hit with the same storms? Homes and businesses being pumped out by the fire department. I had a submersible pump in the basement for about 12 hours…we had about 8″ down there. The beaches are gone in the state park and huge stones were being thrown over the beach and onto the roadways. It’s pretty crazy right now in Wisconsin as well. What a time to be alive!
Totally with Jay on this one. I just don’t think that our SSN is that secure. I’ve given it out so many times and there have been so many breeches. This is another good reason to make all purchases with credit cards instead of debit.
Mike- I wasn’t going to jump back on this thread, but I realized I took so long to click submit that I completely missed the post about Susan’s good news. I am sure that is a huge relief. Hopefully life can return more normal for the both of you soon. Ebay is such an afterthought compared to all of that. Reminds me why many of us choose this lifestyle–to spend as much time as we can with those we love.
I personally have not taken any of the courses, but I also don’t see anything wrong with paying to learn from someone else’s experience. I never even heard of those youtubers before this post! I’ve looked around, but all I ever seem to come across is very basic info or haul videos which are generally a waste of time IMO. I would love to have another podcast type that was worth listening to, but I have yet to find anyone besides Jay and Ryanne that has not felt like a total waste of time. I like to listen while driving, I cannot see myself sitting down at a computer watching hours of pointless videos.
Onto the topic of P&L: I know this is not completely ideal, but you could certainly go into the to Performance Metrics > Selling costs and copy/paste right onto a spreadsheet. That would get you shipping/ebay fees. You can list 200 items per page, so for most of us that would be 1-2 pages per month. Again, not ideal but a possible solution that would not take a ton of effort like manually entering each item.
I go to ebay for business facebook. They’ve been good including removing a negative within about an hour of sending the info. No sitting on phone is a huge plus
It is honestly the reason I decline to answer if the item sold when removing from FB. Figured it was a matter of time before the fees and power increase.
Total Items In Store: 2876
Items Sold: 93
Total Sales: $2472
Selling costs: $812
Highest Price Sold: $115 Hemmingray insulators
Average Price Sold: $ 26.58
Money Spent on New Inventory: $1170
Number of items listed: 99I’m looking forward to managed payments due to the number of 0 feedback buyers I get. I think this will make ebay less of a barrier for google search purchases. Also really want to get every penny on CC for the rewards as you mentioned. I cannot for the life of me find my EIN and the IRS is closed…so I cannot get a separate checking account set up right now. That’s really the only reason I haven’t already made the switch.
Struggling to source used inventory. Bought designer purse overstock for $1170. Recouped half the investment in 4 days. Decided to try List Perfectly for myself. Got 100 items cross posted to Mercari and about 150 to Poshmark. Made 3 sales the same day. Discovered extreme low balling is rampant there and decided I have to list higher than eBay pricing.
Sold nothing this week with free FB shipping labels, but also cross posted the Poshmark inventory there. Had several flagged and deleted for violating policies..I think it is due to keyword spam in the ebay titles I am copying so I toned that down.
I like the idea of buying a coffee shop so I have a fun place to sit that won’t kick me out for loiterring!
I applied for PUA about 2 weeks ago and had to fax in my full 2019 taxes. Our state says 30 days to process. I have not been employed in more than 18 months, so was able to skip the normal unemployment and go straight to PUA. I applied based on my other work, but listed reselling as additional income that is also impacted by the inability to source at auctions.
We shall see
The strangest thing to me was that the fax cover sheet had to have my name and SSN on it…which was not a comfortable thing to send to a random fax number for me.
I got the exact same Timo. I really figured this would be a lost cause after the PPP money was spent twice over. The EIDL is a separate, and I believe less advertised option. $1000 was deposited without any notice on 4/28…I actually did not even see it until reading your post. Nothing is being deposited into that account currently, so I had no reason to log in.
Sounds like they are dispersing that amount immediately upon processing of the application. They will review to see how much of a grant you are eligible for up to $10,000 and a very low interest rate operations loan.Items in Store 2868
Items Sold 89
Total Sales+shipping $1898
Shipping and Fees $673
Net before COGS $1225
COGS: I dont know…too many junk auction purchases. $100-200
Average sales price $21.32 shipped
Highest sale: $138.30 2 Pabst bar mirrors
New Listings 50
Spent on new items: $495Gut: Week felt extremely slow. Tues-Thurs is pretty stagnant, but weekends were crazy. I’m running a 10% sale and sending 5% offers every couple days. Clearing out a lot of old junk inventory. Many, many items sold under $10. ASP increased by only a couple items.
Issues of the week: Accepted offer on a Victorian clock for $265 shipped. Buyer had great feeedback and asked to wait until Monday to pay, sent me reassuring messages, etc. Of course the biggest sale of the week was a non-pay and is relisted. Got a negative and neutral feedback, but eBay removed the Neg. Not worrying about the neutral.
USPS issues: slow or no tracking on 1st class items. I had 8 items at 1 point without tracking. 1 item shipped within the state took 8 days.
Sourcing: I’ve been looking more into lower profit items that are easy to source. Bought some bulk lip gloss for cheap that has almost 0 sales on eBay. I’ll be the only one selling it if it ever does start to sell. Definitely a long term high risk gamble. Auctions are still closed here and I REALLY want to be listing 200 items/week right now while sales are going so frequently.
