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I guess at least my negligent buyer wasn’t sending back dishes. That’s crazy. What were they thinking?
I’m still trying to determine what is the root cause for the low traffic/sales.
Zebra works fine for me with Windows and eBay shipping (as well as Pirate Ship). I picked up an older model on eBay for about $100 a few years back and print directly to 4×6. About the only maintenance it’s needed is an occasional cleaning to the print heads.
I haven’t used Vendoo, but I use SixBit and cross-list to Shopify, which has integration to my Facebook Shop (which I have set up to also post on Facebook Marketplace).
The integration between SixBit and Shopify has been pretty easy, but so far Facebook Marketplace has been a total bust. I had a few sales in the first week and 400+ clicks on my listings per day for a few days, but now it seems my listings are not even visible on Marketplace.
Literally, I can type in the exact name of one of my items that is showing as active on Marketplace and it will not show up in Marketplace search results. No sales in almost 2 months. I only average maybe 4 clicks per day (which might be coming from my Facebook Store instead of Marketplace).
I contacted Meta support, but it is an outsourced company that seems worthless. It’s been a month and they still haven’t given me any reason for why the items don’t show in Marketplace search.
Anyway, maybe you’ll have better luck with Vendoo, but my experience cross-listing to Facebook via Shopify has been a waste of time and money so far.
I also cross-list to Etsy using SixBit. I’ve had good luck with Etsy. It accounted for about 20% of my profit last year. That platform is friendly to vintage goods.
I’d price it at least $100. This one of a kind lamp will likely be a long tail regardless of price, so you might as well mark it high so it is worth your time to store, pack, and ship it.
Yeah, I could see it being a bit confusing, but the dropdown selection when purchasing clears that up. I think you handled it well. Low-value items aren’t worth protracted arguments with customers.
When you are selling something like Monster’s University party plates, this is probably a parent trying to give his/her small child a special birthday party. Some parents can get really mean and nasty when things like that don’t go as they envisioned.
If you have a store, you might want to create your own custom Store Categories. I assume this data would show up in the CSV files as well, but I don’t have it in front of me to confirm.
Managing your eBay Store | eBay
As for Excel, it can do amazing things, but you need to learn formulas. As Debitendcredits pointed out, Google will be your friend. Here’s a formula I came up with to classify whether your items are Madras Bottoms or Not Madras Bottoms. Obviously, you would need to do additional work for other categories. This formula assumes the title of the ebay item is in column A.
=IF(AND(COUNTIF(A2,”*madras*”)=1,OR(COUNTIF(A2,”*short*”)=1,COUNTIF(A2,”*pant*”)=1)),”Madras Bottoms”,”Not Madras Bottoms”)
In English, here’s the simple translation. If your title (in cell A2) has the word “madras” AND it has either the word “short” or “pant” in the title, then it will show “Madras Bottoms.” If the title doesn’t meet that criteria, it will show “Not Madras Bottoms.”
Thanks for checking for me. The hat is still for sale, so clearly it is not showing up in Marketplace search. I’ve been going back and forth with Facebook Business Support. There is definitely a language barrier, so they so far they don’t seem to even grasp the problem I’m having. I keep getting canned answers to my questions that really don’t relate to the issue. Very frustrating.
Unlike eBay, Facebook doesn’t have any listing fees. They have waived their selling fees until the end of this year. After that, it will be 5% of the total or 40 cents for any shipment $8.00 or less.
Well, I decided to take the plunge and try it out. I upgraded my Sixbit plan, signed up for Shopify (with the free trial, then took the special offer of 50% off for a full year), and created a Facebook Shop, which launched on June 19.
Holy cow, setting all this up was not easy.
1. The shipping settings on Shopify are very lacking. You can put in each individual item’s weight, but it doesn’t have any way to provide the dimensions (you just set a standard size for all your packages). You set up default shipping options for the customer (ie USPS First Class, Priority Mail, FedEx Ground, etc.). Essentially, I decided to exclude all my oversize packages from Shopify so I don’t lose big money shipping them. I think they have paid apps that allow you to put in the full dimensions for shipping estimates, but I don’t really want to spend money on that.
2. You also have to pick a design template and customize your Shopify store, as well as set terms and conditions, return policy, etc. You also need to input your payment settings, link to your bank, PayPal, and some other numerous settings before you can go live.
3. I already had set up a Facebook Business Page for my company (which is required before you link any of this), but creating a Facebook Shop (and enabling Facebook Marketplace) and linking it to Shopify (through a Shopify App) took me watching an hour-long video on YouTube with step by step directions (which took me much longer due to the weird steps and also a technical snafu that I had to troubleshoot during the process).
4. Once the link was established, Meta Commerce Manager immediately started showing errors in my listings. Apparently, Shopify listings do not automatically have all the fields that Facebook shows, such as “Condition.” To my horror, Facebook had automatically set my entire store inventory as “new”, even though I primarily sell used items). Facebook also automatically classifies your listings into google product categories unless you set them on your own. To fix all this, I had to manually go to the Facebook App page on Shopify and go through each of my 1700+ listings and change the fields to either new/used and pick a product category. This took me probably 10 hours. There is no means that I could find to do this in bulk using a spreadsheet upload.
5. The Shopify API must be fairly limited, so SixBit can only automate so much. It sends the pictures to Shopify, the item description, item weight, the price, and a couple other fields that are more minor. It can’t send item condition (new, used) or set the google product category. It syncs my inventory to my other sales channels so when items sell on one, they are removed (or quantity adjusted) on the other channels.
6. On Facebook, I learned that for items that are in the clothing category, you have to provide a “Size” field. Again, Shopify does not have this field by default. I had to contact Shopify Support, who instructed me to create a “variation” on those clothing items, even if I had only 1 size of it. I don’t sell tons of clothing, but manually creating those variations in Shopify (so they would feed to my Facebook Shop) took a couple hours. On the plus side, Shopify support staff on the chat seemed very impressive. They know their product well.
7. Facebook has some restrictions on selling certain items, much like eBay’s VERO program. They wouldn’t let me list items with certain name brands (such as Hugo Boss and, oddly, Magnavox). They also don’t allow things like pocket knives. They also flagged some weird stuff, like a circuit board for a security system I’m selling, which the AI somehow decided is a device to allow pirating software. You are allowed to contest the rulings, but I only had limited success. In any case, I only had 8 items rejected out of 1700+ I put up for sale, so not a huge deal.
Anyway, I launched my store on June 19. I sold 3 items on Facebook Marketplace in the first week for about $125. I haven’t had a sale since then. Facebook provides some analytics and the curve of views for my items is really depressing. On June 20, I had 433 views. On June 21, I had 498 views. Then, views go tumbling down a cliff to 401, 286, 149. Now, it seems to have settled in for the moment between 30 and 60 views each day, and 10 of those views seems to be only for 1 item, so they are not even scattered across my large inventory. When I search Facebook Marketplace, I cannot even find my items. I literally can type in the exact terms of my item titles, and they don’t show up in the Marketplace search.
Here’s an item I know I will be the only person with one listed: “Hilltop Tavern Eldorado, Kansas Red Mesh Vintage Snapback Trucker Hat.” It shows up with no results when I search it. If you guys can help me out, please search Facebook Marketplace for it and let me know if you see it.
My next step is getting set up Shopify with Google Shopping integration. I tried to get that running, but ran into some issues I need to spend some time fixing. I also need to set up Instagram Shopping. Unfortunately, I never used Instagram before this and when I created an account for it and switched it to a business account, Instagram immediately locked me out (even though it was linked to a long-time Facebook account).
It’s too early to decide if this was a good plan or not. I guess I’m glad I at least have a few sales. I’ll see how it goes, especially when the holiday shopping season starts. Hope this is helpful to anyone else thinking of doing the same thing I just did.
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.
