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I always wondered if people would buy my obscure items even without promoting them. I turned off promoted listings last month (I was only promoting at 1% previously) and my sales completely tanked. I went days without sales and overall numbers were significantly down. Maybe it was just the summer slowdown, but it freaked me out, so after about 3 weeks, I finally turned promoted listings back on. My sales increased back to normal right away.
Frankly, it’s depressing eBay has decided to go this direction. It used to be that those with the best title/photos/reputation would get the sale. Now, it’s whoever is willing to give eBay the biggest cut. It’s even worse with “Promoted Listings Advanced.” Are these paid ads really giving the buyer the best experience?
Also, I wonder how many people are using the “recommended” rate for each category? Some of those rates are ridiculously high and it’s in eBay’s best interest to increase those “recommended” rates as much as possible.
Yep, that’s what I’m doing.
I switched to Wave Accounting. I’m importing the data from my bank accounts and credit cards automatically. For each payout that goes into my account from eBay and Etsy, I’m labeling that amount as my sales. Then, I’m classifying any expenses that happen outside eBay/Etsy.
Basically, I’m ignoring the detailed breakdown of sales and fee types that eBay provides and just recording the net income from eBay for tax purposes. I’m not sure the additional data is worth the headache/expense of importing it. I talked to my tax accountant and he thought this solution would be fine.
The person I bought it from said it was a high school painting made by her friend after a bad breakup. The face in the girl’s mouth was supposed to be the ex-boyfriend.
Goth. That’s a great descriptive word. Thanks. Maybe someone will find it with that word in the tile.
Unless the artist is at least somewhat well-known, it is really tough to sell. I usually don’t even pick up unsigned work (usually, the artist didn’t sign it for a reason). You have to be willing to wait a long time (often years) to find the one buyer who 1) likes the painting 2) finds the painting online among thousands of others 3) has the funds to purchase it 4) has a place to put it.
Can you believe no one has picked up this unsigned gem I found, even after 5 years?
Scary Outsider Art Painting of Demonic Girl -31.5 x 25.5″ | eBay
It’s official:
eBay Sellers Desperate after GoDaddy Bookkeeping Ends Support (ecommercebytes.com)
And now users only have 30 days to find an alternative, as it is shutting down completely on June 18.
I recently switched to the free Wave Accounting. I used Excel to organize all my exported GDBK data and imported it into Wave. It doesn’t natively sync with eBay, but I have Wave connected to my bank account. I’m now recording my payouts from eBay as my sales. Obviously, I won’t have all the detailed data on each individual sale and fees, but it is a heck of a lot easier to manage and the end result is the same. I also connected Wave to my other bank and credit card accounts to record expenses that occur outside the eBay system. Wave is a true double-entry accounting system, so it has a bit more of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it is not that hard to use. It automates a lot of the work.
Really, I’m surprised GDBK stayed around as long as it did. The service never seemed like a good fit for GoDaddy and I’m not sure why they even purchased it in the first place. It was barely promoted and a lot of its website still referred to it as Outright (the original name). I had been using the service since 2014 and the interface was never updated. Most of the user base must have abandoned it after years of neglect. Otherwise, I assume GoDaddy could have sold GDBK to some other company.
I don’t think anyone has actually come up with a use case for NFTs that can’t be done just as well or better using other methods (like a SQL database). And that’s not even taking into account the negative impact blockchain technology has on the environment. Its only viable use is as a Ponzi scheme.
“Owning” a copy of a jpeg is a ridiculous idea. It’s not like you even own the copyright to the image. The NFT just is basically a ledger entry saying you own this particular “signed” copy of the image, which can later be sold to someone else. The image itself isn’t even stored on the blockchain, so it could disappear if the server hosting it is shut down.
The idea is to try and create scarcity among something that can be infinitely copied and shared (a jpeg image). It’s pretty asinine.
An NFT has zero intrinsic value, so the only reason to buy one is because you think some other sucker will later buy it from you for more money than you paid. And so on. Eventually, you run out of new speculators to drive up the price, people start selling, and the market collapses.
I was going through my old posts on here and decided I would provide an update on this one.
Further research indicated these were Valentino glasses (as suggested here).
After about 4 months, they sold for $500 to a well-known actor (the most famous person to whom I’ve ever sold anything).
Move out to the Kansas City area. We have tons of suburbs and rural areas within driving distance of the city. Home prices have skyrocketed, just like everywhere else, but most are in that $200K – $350K range.
The suburbs have loads of garage sales in the summer, estate sales in the winter, online auction companies with local pickup, live auctions, etc. Plenty of stuff to scavenge.
The free shipping supplies are a good form of advertising for eBay that probably doesn’t cost them much since it’s factored into our subscription costs. I doubt they discontinue it.
That’s a really cool jacket. I would get a picture of the tag that says “Made in USA.” You might put USA in the title as well. I think that’s a major selling point. Personally, I avoid using language like “very good condition,” since that is pretty subjective. Seems like whenever I did something like that, someone would open a return on me for it. I always say every used clothing item has “normal wear from use and comes as pictured.”
If this jacket is really from the 80s, the sizing might be different from today (XXL might be more like Large today). I would at least grab a yardstick and snap a couple photos showing armpit to armpit and sleeve length.
Well, I thought I had replied here, but looks like it disappeared, so I will briefly recap.
SixBit uses the relist option that keeps the same item. Each item is on its own separate 30 day relist timer.
I downloaded data into Excel and analyzed every sale since I started doing the 30 day relist thing (almost 600 sales).
38% of items sold in the first 30 days of listing (so they were never relisted). These sales took on average 3 days with a median if 0 days.
I looked at the other 62% of sales and found that it took on average (and median) 14 days to sell from the last day they were ended and relisted. Basically, items were selling equally at all times in that 30 day cycle.
I have SixBit and it allows you to auto end and relist each item. I have it set for 30 days. I’ve been using this feature for all of 2021, but did not have SixBit in prior years and thus rarely used end and relist (maybe once a year on some items).
I was checking my numbers year to date to see if it made a difference. I compared my year to date eBay numbers from 2018 and 2019 to this year (2020 was an anomaly for sales so I’m not using it for comparisons).
My eBay sales are down 18% from 2019 and down about 5% from 2018. My store is as big or bigger than it was in those years. Obviously, many factors could be at play here, but at minimum I would say that “end and relist” did not magically double my sales numbers. Those expecting a panacea should temper their expectations.
