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Love that Federal Glass bowl, Doublythumbs. I have sold a couple of other Frigidaire (The F with the crown on the side of the bowl was their logo and at the time they were actually owned by General Motors) promotional items but I have never come across a bowl. Great find.
theMezz,
Here’s what I received in an eBay message on one account (the others did not have this message):
We’re writing again to inform you that some of your listings are still missing a valid product identifier. eBay now requires all new and manufacturer refurbished item listings in most categories to include a valid brand, manufacturer part number (MPN), and global trade item number (GTIN).
Starting this week, you will no longer be able to relist non-Good ‘Til Cancelled items without including valid product identifiers. And, starting the week of September 18, 2017, your Good ‘Till Cancelled listings won’t automatically renew until valid product identifiers are provided.
Why use product identifiers?
The right product identifiers are key to having your listings show up in search for interested buyers—both on and off eBay. That’s more visibility and more conversion for you. Update your listings now to avoid any interruption to selling.What is funny is that we never received a message before this one.
whiskey
Beverly, that could be your problem. When you list with multiples for sale, you set the shipping amount on the first item. For me, Ebay defaults and puts the second one (and each consective one) to “0.00.” I have to manually change that or I would ship all units for the price of one.
Beverly, did you accidently enter “0.00” for each additional item on “each additional” in the shipping setting? That will cause that to happen.
Jay, if you found a way to get paid for bodily functions you’ve hit the gold mine!
;o)
Agreed. The marketing and quantity seem to be the key. In addition, I think those folks that care to track trends and manage to create a design quickly ahead of a trend seem to sell well. Hopefully Blackcat or someone else can jump in and tell us there is a shortcut.
Jay,
It’s a separate Amazon account that you have to apply for separately. You can sell custom designed items that are print on demand. Tee shirts are the main thing sold there I believe.
It takes time to learn the process but once you sell a shirt it will stay up presumably indefinitely and you get the royalties on every sale.
We sell on merch as well, but just got accepted and only have 10 designs up. We’ve sold a couple, but you really have to promote the shirt off of Amazon to drive traffic. We haven’t started trying to do that yet.
A kind of simple question without looking behind the numbers or checking sources, but the 40 listings per seller is an average and not a “per” seller number, correct?
Careful here. This is a major problem with Amazon. They even reiterated their policy for helping us on not received claims in the first ever seller’s news letter. However, they are only siding with sellers if signature confirmation was part of the process. Simply buying postage through them without signature confirmation is a mine field with the A-Z claims going eiher way routinely.
Our approach is to just eat it unless we have something more to prove it. It’s relatively rare, but the claims still trickle in. Our metrics can withstand multiple claims and bad feedback, but we pick our battles given AZ inconsistency. The problem is that small volume sellers can get hammered on their metrics with just one A-Z claim or negative feedback.
You can roll the dice, but you have to decide if you can weather the storm if it goes against you. And it can.
whiskey
Flim,
We are basically the same– but in those manilla envelopes by month. However, we’ve noticed a problem because most are thermal– they fade to nothing after about a year. We talked to our accountant and we are now scanning them. He told us we can toss the originals once we do that. We haven’t had the confidence to just toss them, but that is where we are at. Obviously check with your accountant but ours tells us the scanned images will be acceptable in an audit.
whiskey
Okay, I’m going to play devil’s advocate to what seems to be becoming a bright line thinking process.
I think it depends on where you are in your business cycle?
It’s so easy to overvalue our time early on. I walked away from over six figures and the recognition of my peers to do this. I get valuing what I do. But I also value freedom.
With that background, here’s my two cents, which is probably worth less than that:
Early on (we are about three and a half years in to it), I will simply take your money. Five dollars profit on an instruction manual I write a quick description, take a couple pictures, and have to slide in an envelope? Thank you for your Lincoln. I like finding five dollar bills. Tupperware lids that I grab out of the free box, photograph front and back, and slip in a mylar sleeve? Thank your for your Lincoln. We reinvest every penny. We have a pool of cash that we can buy our third rental property. Sure, we have plenty of big sales. But we won’t walk away from an easy Lincoln or Hamilton. I get the mentality that our time is valuable. We are transitioning to that. But right now we are willing, no, thankful, to work morning, noon, and night, to grab the free cash that is out there. We also understand most folks don’t want to be shipping at 1030 at night because they were listing kitchen utensils til 10, but that’s life.
whiskey
PS I stopped buying shot glasses a couple of years ago– that was dumb, no margins, and took too much work to ship
PPS I get a lot of folks are better at this, but we do well with what we have. We don’t have a lot of places where we can grab awesome antique stuff.
PPS Don’t get me started on Amazon.
PPPS is there such a thing as too many PPPS’s?
