Should I delete my listings and relist them if they don’t sell, keep it going for years.
I’ve only been on eBay for about a year and a half. I love what I do but I’m worried some of the items won’t sell. I have some views and maybe a few watchers on the year old listings I have up, but most of them don’t sell. Some of them sold but very little. Curious on what the veteran ebayers have to say about this.
69 comments
oldwestgold
·10 months agoNever allow an item to autorelist for more than 90 days. After that time, manually end the listing before relisting. ALWAYS make a change to the title and price, even if it's just to add or remove a period. Change the price. Change photos, or at least change the order they show. This is what the bots look for in determining where your listings will appear in search results. I have learned this over the 26 years of being here from other sellers and find it works. You can verify this by reviewing your traffic summary before and after the change. I normally have 250-350 listings at any given time. Periodically, I will end 6-20 old ones and perform the above steps. I hope this helps.
quinns_marketplace
OP10 months agoThank you guys for all the support. The community is great. To start, I dropped my prices having the best price about 2 days ago with roughly 15 listings and already made a sale off of it today. I don’t think I have much competition in what I do, but I should definitely go back and reprice my listings.
leaderco_97
·10 months agoHi there,
That’s a totally normal concern every seller goes through that stage. Even experienced eBayers have listings that sit for months (sometimes years!) before they move. Having views and watchers is a good sign it means your items are being seen, but something small might be keeping buyers from clicking “Buy It Now.â€
A few things that often help:
Review your pricing – Check sold listings for similar items and see if yours might be priced a bit high. Even a small adjustment can make a big difference.
Update your titles & keywords – Use all 80 characters and include specific search terms buyers might use.
Refresh older listings – End and relist them, or tweak photos and descriptions to bump visibility.
Offer promotions – Try sending offers to watchers or using volume discounts if you have multiple similar items.
Be patient – Some categories are slow sellers. Sometimes it just takes the right buyer at the right time.
You’re doing great by caring enough to ask and learn that’s how most “veterans†became successful. Keep experimenting, and don’t get discouraged by slow sales. It’s all part of the eBay rhythm!
mr_lincoln
·10 months ago@leaderco_97
Good post and good advice ... I would add one thing to that list:
6. Accept the fact that some things you list nobody will be interested in and it will never sell regardless of what you do.
reallynicestamps
·10 months agoMy entire stock is four bookshelves in a closet in a spare room.
Some of my items have been up (off and on) for nearly a decade.
It's easier when everything is catalogued and the buyer probably has a copy of the catalogue.
But I do occasionally take down listings that are stale, tweak them and relist.
Relisted items often sell within days of relisting.
Or not.
2010byandsel100
·10 months agoVery interesting topic so a quick question:
Can you end/SS in bulk (say 20 listings at a time)?
estate_echoes
·10 months agoYes, seller hub... manage active listings.... show max 200 listings... and you can end/ss 200 listings at once.
Select all....actions.... end listings
listings...unsold....select all....sell similar
(Check listing count before you start...verify it's the same after you sell similar. Delete listings in unsold.)
mam98031
·10 months agoYes, from your Active listings in the seller hub. You can Bulk Edit listings.
christworks
·10 months ago@gurlcat I think even eBay has gone back and forth on whether they actually want sellers ending listings and relisting them. I imagine it makes it harder for their them when sellers practice this. They lose data, which makes it harder for their algorithm to know what to push to the front/top. At the same time, they will gladly take the fees from the sales you get by doing it.
I don't advocate that it has to be done every day or that each listing should be ended and started again every month. I think if you are limited on the number of free listings you have, then it makes sense to do it more frequent since eBay's auto relist will reduce your number of free listings and you don't get any benefit from it.
christworks
·10 months agoYou have to test to see what works for you.
About 3 AM today I ended 200 listings and relisted them using Sell Similar. I had 4 sales within the next 9 hours. Two of those were newer listings, and the other two were items that had been sitting for 6+ months. Could those sales have happened anyway? Sure, maybe. But I pay attention to consistency, not one-offs.
In my experience, for roughly every 50 items I end and relist, I can almost always expect about one sale within 12–18 hours. It’s not magic — it’s just refreshing listing data and getting the items back in front of active buyers. We know that when you follow this process the listings are assigned a new item number and are treated as new in the algorithm. It makes sense that it would trick the algorithm into thinking it really is a new listing.
I get way more sales following this process than I do when sending out offers. I can send out 100 offers and only convert 1 buyer, and sometimes not even 1. Make of it what you will.
As far as Google search, there isn’t a fixed timeframe for how fast a “Sell Similar†listing gets indexed. When the data is clean, I typically see my listings show up in Google Shopping within a few days, and I can usually find them in regular Google search within a week. The “Google takes 2 months†idea comes from sellers using generic, duplicate titles. Strong, specific titles can index as fast as 24–72 hours and rank shortly after.
The description matters too, but only the first one or two sentences. Google ignores long, fluffy filler. All of those fluffy AI descriptions that don't tell you what the product is hurt you in Google search. If the opening sentence clearly states what the item is, indexing is faster and ranking is stronger. If it starts with decor-style fluff like “This lovely piece will brighten your home,†Google basically skips the description and relies only on the title, which weakens ranking. For my description sections, I copy/paste the title first, then the condition under it.
estate_echoes
·10 months agoThe 'it takes google 2 months' is more likely the results of confirmation bias and relying heavily on AI without understanding the limitations...
It's funny.... those against end/ss are those who have never done it. Those for it are the ones who have done it. I try to do batches of 200, 4 times a month. Every time it's done listing views go up... and of course sales.
gurlcat
·10 months agoBINGO! It couldn't be any clearer. Now granted, those who've never done it may be perfectly happy with their sales velocity, and that's FINE. But they have no business trying to dissuade someone who ISN'T happy with theirs, and is seeking input on whether this strategy works. -Or any strategy by the way. If someone asked whether ..... say, cross-listing, sharing their store on social media .... anything I myself have never tried, I wouldn't think of replying! Even something like pay-per-click promotion, which I've seen nothing but negative reports on, I wouldn't try to dissuade someone because I've not tried it, and for all I know it could work GREAT for some items.
estate_echoes
·10 months agoGeneral Post:
I didn't do what you didn't say I did.
gurlcat
·10 months agoI see what you did there. 😉
gloryglorygifts
·10 months agoI rarely stop them and sell similar and it works for me. I have some seasonal items mixed in and they sell year round so I keep all of the listings up. As a matter of fact, I sold two items yesterday that have been up since July and November of last year. One of them sold because I sent a coupon to a watcher. Do you ever do that? Sometimes it helps. I've had 5 or 6 sales from watchers in the last two weeks, so if you don't do that try it! It isn't always a competitor watching your items.
Good luck!
christworks
·10 months ago@gloryglorygifts
How do you send a coupon to watchers?
gloryglorygifts
·10 months agoI refer to offers as coupons because that is what they are. Savings.
There is also an option to send "coupons" for purchases under offers.
chapeau-noir
·10 months ago@estate_echoes What you posted accords with everything I know about search. It's why eBay implemented the 30-day GTC cycle - broken URLs with short cycles, but 30 days was deemed long enough for all but the absolute outliers to be crawled.
Web sites are another story, and they can take months to index, but that's another, more complex, issue, including verification, back-links, content evaluation, etc.
And yes, recency plays a role.
12345jamesstamps
·10 months agoPut 'Free Shipping' in the title.
mam98031
·10 months agoThat is a waste of valuable space. There are filters on in the left rail if a buyer wants to look at only Free Shipping listings.
meme6253
·10 months agoSome items can sit for prolonged periods of time, You need to sell similar & Change your title, Maybe change Photos or brighten them up, change the price, Believe it or not sometimes raising the price actually helps, Not all way's lowering it,Run some sales, Offer coupons, You can play around with all that & see what works best for you, Good Luck.
tobaccocardyahoo
·10 months agoI seem to be the only one who thinks you need to focus on the product and whether it is hurting your sales.
Here is an example of one of your listings
MOEN YB5103BG VOSS Double Robe Hook Brushed Gold
You are offering quantity 3 of this open box product.
You are stating they have scratches and are only showing the scratches on one of the three which are available. So the buyer has no clue what the one they buy will look like in terms of defects.
You are offering this for about half of what an new product costs.
This is an item which if purchased for a home may remain for decades. A renter might be influenced by the price and not care about the defects, but a home owner will think twice about whether to buy it, and might pass rather than take a crap shoot on how scratched it is.
I have known retailers who sell b-goods. Some of it eventually makes it to the dumpster, or Goodwill or the scrap yard.
albertabrightalberta
·10 months agoYup, everyone needs to do what works (or seems to work) for them.
chapeau-noir
·10 months agoThis is starting to sound like the packing slip argument:
"I don't include a packing slip and anyone who does is a fool and believes in myths."
"I include a packing slip and anyone who doesn't is a fool and believes in myths."
Some of us have come to our separate conclusions from experience. So, experiment around - do what works for your market(s).
gurlcat
·10 months agoI feel pretty ignorant right now. -Wait, let me start over: My name is gurlcat and I am a non-packing-slip-includer. Now I say that because I don't include any kind of slip in my packing, but to be clear, are you talking about an invoice? And what are the (ostensible) "myths" about including/not including them? I buy here pretty often and when I see one of those I don't even read it, just immediately throw it away. Are there also myths about whether buyers should or shouldn't want them?
chapeau-noir
·10 months agoProbably better to just search on 'packing slips' - this crazy argument comes up on a one- or two-year cycle - I even participated in it a bit, probably because I was in a period of my employment when I was working on yet more incredibly boring jobs (like I am now). It's really a non-argument.
albertabrightalberta
·10 months agoFor my own listings, I let them run for ~2 months before ending and selling similar.
I end them on night 59 and do "sell similar" the next day when they would have auto-renewed.
Last night, I had 8 listings that were due to auto-renew today (Nov. 1). I ended 4 listings that had begun on Sept. 1 and left the 4 Oct. 1 listings to be ended on December 1.
mam98031
·10 months ago@albertabrightalberta
Just FYI, ending them so soon will take you out of the Google searches. They take a little time to show up in the internet searches. It can be 30-60 days.
susanb1872
·10 months agoJust a couple of photo tips. Some pictures are a little dark so lightening up will help. You have some "long" items like grab bars. If I have those type of items, I photograph them on the diagonal because you have more space that way. Try to get close up as best as possible to highlight the item and show less background.
bashort
·10 months agomore reasons why I list and forget.
Every item is tagged with the title, storage location and ebay #.
When you are selling many very similar items having the ebay# on the item is very important to prevent mistakes in shipping. Retagging is just not feasible for me.
Also on several occasions I have ben looking for a part to purchase for my own use and discover that I actually have the item, now I actually list some items just because I may want it myself in the future but if it sells that's even better.
dhbookds
·10 months agoMy opinion............because of the type of items you sell.......is not to end/relist. Checking a couple of your items, you just don't have the competition on the exact titles of the items to need to get a higher search placement, which is usually the reason for relists. If someone want that item......listing will be found. I would do some price checking to see if yours compete on that basis.
One thing I would suggest for on new lists is, if the item is a "showy part"......i.e. a faucet.....show it prominently in the gallery picture, rather than laid against a paper/box. Do some searches and look at what the competition is doing. i.e. you need to attract people who are not necessarily shopping by an item #....but rather the looks of the item. For instance, this item:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/205818451534?itmmeta=01K8ZQ00HV3G8C2SA1ABJ90GEE&hash=item2febbc564e:g:QxYAAeSwQWppBO76
mam98031
·10 months ago@quinns_marketplace
You will likely receive a variety of advice. Some sellers find one method works better for them over another. You will just need to read them all and then test what you think might work the best for you.
I personally do NOT recommend ending your listings, revising them and then reposting them. I say that because of a couple things. If they had sales on the original listing, you lose that history that helps to boost you in search returns on Ebay. But likely the bigger problem is the affect it will have on the Google Returns.
Close to half of the views we get come from a Search Engine like Google. It takes Google a couple months to pick up a listing on Ebay. So by ending and listing again, you disrupt that process and your listing is not likely to be seen on a Google search return for a period of time.
What I do is I use the Bulk Editor and I play with my Handling time. About every 30 days I will change my handling time, I will bounce back and forth between 1 day or 2 days. 3 days would be fine too.
Another thing you can do to increase sales is run a Discount Sale. That can be very helpful and increase your sales of those older listings. I wish you the best.
estate_echoes
·10 months ago@mam98031 Source? Senior Director of Search at eBay, Pete Dainty said "From my experience, it takes Google about 3 days to get about 90% of our inventory." So its a bit confusing that you say 2 months.
He also states that recency of a listing is a factor in search results.
A quick check of OP's makes me think they don't have quantities of items...
With that in mind.... would you support end/sell similar for OP?
mr_lincoln
·10 months ago@estate_echoes
I think that Myth chart is directed more at BIN GTC listings ... I don't think search functions the same on Auction style listings that have either a 1, 3, 5, 7 or 10 listing cycle. The Auto-relisting feature for auctions included 8 automatic relisting cycles before the item moves to the Unsold file. Despite my sales being off by quite a bit on the year here are the percentages of Auction and BIN sales as of this writing:
50.7% Auction sales
49.0% BIN sales
0.3% Send offers eligible sales
estate_echoes
·10 months ago@mr_lincolnYeah, auctions would be a different beast. On a different account years ago I used run greater than 75%. You were one of the few people who understood the reason for doing auctions, and I always loved your posts on the topic.
Have you noticed a change? With saturation and promoted auction listings? I keep trying to get back into it, but unless it's a really sought after item, I get no views. Almost like recency/ending soonest bumps, and increased traffic aren't what they used to be? But then again your half of sales being auction is intriguing.
Never knew an auto relisting feature was added....
mr_lincoln
·10 months ago@estate_echoes
First and foremost, thank you for the compliment and kind words ... that was VERY unexpected! You get a giant emoji for that for sure LOL!
Auto-relist was prevalent on the phone app for newer Sellers when they rolled it out.
Auctions in my categories still do well and last year they accounted for 67.1% of my total sales.
At present the oldest items I have on Auction are from May this year, 4 items if memory serves and all in the same category. Most Auctions need to be Relisted numerous times before they sell.
If you are thinking about getting back in to auctions we can take that part of the conversation to Private Messaging, I would love to share some insights with you.
mam98031
·10 months ago@mr_lincoln
You are correct, we were discussing GTC listings.
mam98031
·10 months agoThank you what I said was incorrect. Per Google it is about 48 hours.
In your Reality portion of the pic you posted reaffirms what I said earlier.
Each seller just needs to find what method works best for them and then go with that. We don't all have to do things one way.
Per Google AI:
estate_echoes
·10 months ago@mam98031 Yes... it reaffirms what you said earlier... about multi/quantity listings... assuming there is engagement. If one reads OP's OP, they don't have much engagement on year old listings and if one looks at OP's listings there aren't multi listings.
While I understand your advice works for you and your listings and would be helpful to others, I don't see why it would be offered to OP as it doesn't apply. And I certainly don't see why you would specifically not recommend endling a listing to improve and refresh it.
With the new information you learned would you support end/sell similar for OP ? It can be proven that this tactic increases views on old listings.
gurlcat
·10 months ago@mr_lincoln @christworks
I remember seeing that graphic a while back (btw @estate_echoes if you have a moment could you provide the original link to it?).
I have what (I'm sure) some would call a very cynical view on Mr. Dainty's assertions there. -Not all of them; he mixed in some solid pieces of advice, but the main idea that his goal was to dispel a "myth" to help sellers -that deserves some serious side-eye. And no, I'm not one of those sellers with that beyond-cynical view that eBay wants to harm sellers, prevent us from selling, because obviously sales are where eBay's revenue comes from.
And a sale gotten 'this' way is no different from one gotten 'that' way, right?
Well, no, actually. eBay has a VERY strong preference for us getting our sales via promotion, although Mr. Dainty did show enough restraint not to include that in the Recommended list, because he probably realized that could just make it more obvious why he doesn't want to admit that end/sell similar can actually be a very effective way to increase visibility and get more sales ... for free.
Oh but note he didn't even call it end/sell similar; he just said relisting, which is indeed less effective than end/SS. But that's far from the only bit of misconstruing he did there. Let's look at those 'Reality' points one-by-one:
Ending and relisting hurts your long-term seller performance. -Huhhh?? What is that even supposed to mean? What kind of "hurt"? How long is "long-term"? What kind of performance?
Frequent ending and relisting:
Resets valuable performance data, watchers, and cart adds. -By "performance data" I can't think of anything other than Views ..... which ... so what? If the listing is old, then so are most of the views. Watchers and cart adds: It's easy to find out if any of those are actually interested buyers, by sending an offer. Chances are most of them are 'old' and/or never were legit interested buyers in the first place.
Breaks offsite search connections (e.g. Google). -Which will get reset for the new listing. That's IF the listing can even be shown there in the first place; there are so many factors that can prevent it, but that's another whole thread.
Reduces organic and paid impressions over time. That's just a flat out lie. OLD listings are what get reduced impressions over time! Why he is even trying to make such a backwards assertion, I cannot imagine.
Leads to fewer buyer views, and ultimately, fewer sales. -Another lie basically just branching off the previous one about impressions. Really it looks like he was just trying to "pad" the list length, and I guess figured lies were fine! 😆
Reduces trust in saved searches. -As a pretty frequent buyer myself, who uses saved searches, I can kiiiinda imagine that, like I have had (a few, rare) instances where I sorted a saved search by 'newly listed' and saw listings that I remembered seeing long enough before, that they were probably end/SS'ed. But it's not a big deal ..... and even if it was, that would be MY problem, and maybe by extension EBAY'S problem, not the sellers' problem, LOL! Why should THEY care if this or that random buyer might "lose trust in saved searches" when this or that other buyer can see the listing for the first time, and BUY it? The sooner it sells, the sooner it would stop (theoretically) annoying the (hypothetical) buyer with a stick up their bum.
As for the list of Recommended's, he claims they are listed in order of ranking, and that recency is the least important of those factors. Now, we know it's not true if the buyer sorts by Newest, then recency is literally #1. -That doesn't mean it would make the buyer more likely to buy the item, because those other factors matter too, a lot. But he is (purposely) trying to twist the reader's mind into thinking visibility and sellability aren't mutually exclusive -but they ARE.
In other words, if you already do those other things to maximize your item's sellability, then the only question left is whether recency can increase the VISIBILITY ... of your very sellable item. And yes, it CAN. And he knows that. But he wants you to think the only choice left is to add or increase promotion.
But this I find even more interesting: since he did not clarify whether that ranked list applied to any buyer-selected sorting, then we can only assume the list pertained to the DEFAULT sorting view, which is Best Match. And isn't that somethin'? -He's admitting that recency is even part of THAT algorithm. As for whether it's really the "least" important factor .... could be true, could be untrue, might well "depend" on this or that .... but why would we just automatically take anything an eBay executive claims about their algorithmic programming at face value anyway?
Look how much misconstruing and outright lying he did about "Reality."
estate_echoes
·10 months ago@gurlcat
The “End & Relist†Myth? eBay Says This Popular Seller Shortcut May Hurt More Than It Helps
Of course always many thanks to @valueaddedresource.
Its important to note Dainty made the point of saying storing all the reiterations of the listings causes ebay trouble... (like we as sellers care). I took it more as he was trying to make his job easier.
mr_lincoln
·10 months ago@estate_echoes
The reality here is that server systems do not have an infinite amount of storage space and expanding them and managing the data costs time and money. eBay is not the only platform with that challenge.
I've watched something similar happen in my regular job over 25 years doing AutoCAD layout work for customers. From the days of dial up networks, file size attachments have been limited by service providers.
The computer aided drawing software industry has advanced by leaps and bounds with products that allow design work to go from 2D to 3D which in and of itself is great. However, the file size for those 3D drawings has bogged down the ability to share them across normal communication methods (like sending them as an attachment on an email, service provider limits reject them). Some of the drawings produced by those systems are still so large that even trying to send them in a zipped file is not feasible.
I was surprised when I learned eBay allows listing images to be a max size of 7 MB. I would have thought that a tech company would know better than to allow something that in time could have a potential negative impact on server storage space. In college (back in the dark ages) I took a class in Fortran and then one in Cobol ... after those experiences I decided I would be a computer user and not a computer programmer LOL!
mr_lincoln
·10 months ago@gurlcat
Wow, that's a lot to digest but I applaud you for the time you have invested in this.
gurlcat
·10 months agoThat's what's so insidious about corporate fake news. They can say the lies in so few words, but unraveling them takes a lot more, and most people don't enjoy reading. So the lies often stick.
gurlcat
·10 months ago@quinns_marketplace Is that you in your store's profile pic? My goodness you look barely old enough to sell here, but your response to that negative is more mature than most 70-year-olds write. Keep handling problems like that and you'll do just fine here.
relicpeddler
·10 months agoRun a sale event, mark the older stuff 25% to 30% off. Trust me it helps a lot.
mr_lincoln
·10 months agoHi @quinns_marketplace
No:
-Do not End and Relist
-Do not End and Sell Similar
-The current advice is to Edit listings so you don't lose historical Search data
gurlcat
·10 months agoAre you talking about external, like on Google? You may have a point there; I think it depends on item category. I have always done aggressive end/SS but what really convinced me was when I convinced my buddy fbusoni to try it on just a portion of his listings (about 1/3 of them if I recall) and he got such immediate results in sales, he flipped the rest of his store and has continued to flip it periodically since then.
mr_lincoln
·10 months agoThanks for the reply and questions @gurlcat ! Comments in red:
gurlcat
·10 months agoActually after I replied I racked my brain for what factor makes Google visibility most relevant (that I've seen cited here and other discussion forums). Category saturation and other factors do matter, but the #1 thing is whether you have multi-quantity inventory or "one-offs." If you have multi's, then it makes sense to have established history of views on Google, then its algorithm keeps showing your listing because it recognizes you as a continuing source of that item, which you want, to keep selling more of that item.
But this OP^ appears to have one-offs. They are new unused items in original packaging, but I don't see any quantities available on the many listings I checked.
estate_echoes
·10 months agoThe “End & Relist†Myth? eBay Says This Popular Seller Shortcut May Hurt More Than It Helps
Yup... it's not good for multis, and if you read between the lines eBay admits end/SS helps one offs... like OP has.
eBay says its a myth that it is "the only way to get visibility"... lol... sure it's not the only way but thanks for admitting it is a way!
Next way to game the system is to reverse engineer the promoted halo/attribution.... once you understand why they did this.... you know what to do. 🤔
mr_lincoln
·10 months ago@gurlcat
I am more in that "one off" scenario ... one thing I have learned is that search changes and will continue to change so some practices may stop being effective sooner rather than later. And of course the other aspect is who is really looking for what a Seller has to sell? Some stuff may just not be of any interest to many (if any people) ...
inhawaii
·10 months agoI never end listings and re-list them "just because".
But that's just me.
I'm weird.
tobaccocardyahoo
·10 months agoOr you are reality bound and do not believe the seller folklore which cannot be proved or disproved.
You are not the only one. This is not evidence of your weirdness, though you have yet to share any that make you seem weird.
gurlcat
·10 months agoIt absolutely can be proven that a listing's age effects its visibility. All you would have to do is keep a record of the number of views per day for a listing, watch that rate decrease over time ..... then end/SS that listing and start tallying again. I've never explicitly done it with hard numbers and screenshots to share, but maybe I will someday. I just know from doing it all the time that it's a pretty predictable pattern.
Of course, if you're one of the people here who think views have nothing to do with sales, then I guess nothing would convince you.
estate_echoes
·10 months ago@tobaccocardyahoo Does this count?🤣
tobaccocardyahoo
·10 months agoIt might count
gurlcat
·10 months agoYou will definitely get results from end/sell similar. Do it as much as you can for as many *free times as you can. I don't let my listings get much older than 30 days, so I have a freaky high sell through rate.
But note how small my store is. -That is why I can do it so much without even thinking about insertion fees. That's not true for everybody.
christworks
·10 months ago@quinns_marketplace I looked at some of your listings. You have some nice things. I pick up similar things when I can get them cheap. You do have to wait until someone needs them. They are not going to go flying out the door.
I have a couple of thoughts. First, don't worry about whether something will sell or not. It will drive you crazy. Views and watchers really mean nothing for something that has been listed a year. In fact, I'd argue views and watchers mean very little if your goal is to make money. Views and watchers are shoppers, not buyers. People watch and view far more often than they buy. Most of your sales will be intentional, meaning the person sits down on their phone or computer and comes to eBay with the intent to buy what they are looking for right then. These are the people you want anyway because they are committed. Lookie-lous are not committed and, if they do buy, they already have one foot out the return door.
@kibble-net referenced ending and selling similar. This is something I practice. I don't do it religiously like some do, but I do it on days when I'm not listing anything for the first time or when an item has been listed for about six weeks. It is difficult to prove that this process has a direct coloration on sales, but I can attest that it certainly seems to. At a minimum this process shows you are engaging with your store, and it makes sense that eBay would like their sellers to be engaged. After all, engagement shows you want to make money and that is certainly a goal eBay shares. It also makes sense practically. Sellers who are engaged are more likely to respond to buyers and ship on-time. To me it makes total sense eBay would give a boost to those sellers. If it does not help those specific items, it does seem to give an overall boost to your store.
When I end/sell similar, I do use that as a chance to look at my listings that are the oldest listed. I make sure my pictures are good. Does the main picture show a close-up view of the item? I check the keywords in my title, and ensure I am using 75–80 characters. I may keep the same keywords but reorder them. AI is horrible for item descriptions, but is a valuable tool for other things, such as titles. I can copy/paste my current title into ChatGPT and have it write a new title for me in just a second or two. I will also look at comps to see how my price shakes up. Oftentimes I need to lower it. I'll also check the shipping policy to ensure it is set correctly. Just tonight I found a listing where I'm offering 4 of an item and it is priced for 4. I first listed it 10 months ago and should have already sold. Tonight I realized that I never put in the title that the buyer gets 4. This means when they see my listing, they scroll by because they see me charging $50 and they think it is for one.
Speaking of overpriced, some (not all) of your items are overpriced. Go back and look at the current comps for those older items.
I am not a fan of ending listings that I've worked hard on unless I've determined that item isn't going to sell, or will take longer than I want and I want to repurpose the space to things that will sell faster. I do that twice a year (January and July).
quinns_marketplace
OP10 months agoYou are right. There are some items where there is a better price. I think I’m going to have a system where every month I track back everything I listed one day every month and just redo the price to make mine the cheapest. So everything I listed in January 2025 I would come back in January 2026 and reevaluate my prices for everything that didn’t sell that month. It definitely raises your anxiety stressing about those things. I shouldn’t be mainly focused on this.
tobaccocardyahoo
·10 months agoYou know more about what you sell than I do.
You appear to be selling open box plumbing.
When selling b-goods it helps to know why they are b-goods. Have you explored the reasons why some of these products which are slow moving are likely to have been returned.
Some products are returned because they do not perform well. Some are returned for reasons of fit and finish.
Many buyers will read reviews of the product on sites which sell the NEW product and avoid buying products which have reviews that believably identified flawed product,
Some of the products may be discontinued and the replacement is nice, better or cheaper than the product you own.
Many of us decide that we can wait to sell a product which has only poor demand running against it, but inferior products may never sell.
No amount of listing tinkering other than a huge price decrease might move a product with a bad rep, and a huge price decrease might not do it either.
quinns_marketplace
OP10 months agoI like what you had to say. Made me think about it from a different perspective. Very helpful. Thank you.
wheredidiputthatremote
·10 months agoHi. I've been a set it and forget it seller for years. Have accumulated an inventory. Honestly it hasn't been a problem until fall of 2023 when every body and their mother started selling the same thing, sales dropped significantly, and my 12 year run started drying up. Day jobs been busy so I managed. This summer sucked. For the first time in the longest I went a few days without any sales. So in August I cleaned up all my shipping policies (as somehow over the years I generated dozens), then I ended about 120 items a day, brightened up and cropped some of the photos, and chose sell similar. It took me a month and a half to do this to all my listings. Last month sucked too. Starting the first week of October I've had a steady stream of sales. Don't get me wrong - it's not like the days of yore, but October was my best month since at least last January. Some may point out that 4Q started in October, but let me tell you 75% of the items I sold this month as I ended my 120 items a day and chose sell similar were "new listings". And my views have climbed. It's been fun watching the views graph. I am not messing around anymore and am evaluating if my adventures here are still worth it on a daily basis. I am optimistic and believe my rut will blow over maybe when a realistic economy blossoms one day again. As for these boards, take them with a grain of salt.
kibble-net
·10 months agoSupposedly, relisting using 'sell similar' works better as the item is assigned a new ID internally. I can't confirm this but it's something I see a lot of youtubers recommending. YMMV. But you still want to revise, reprice, and add photos if needed. Basically giving your unsold items a touch-up occasionally.
For me, if an item doesn't sell after 90 days I'll re-assess the price and see if anything in the listing looks wrong, then end/relist.
bashort
·10 months agoI have had many items that took 10 years to sell, you just never know.
the covid supply chain problems caused many of my old listings to sell.
Also inflation over many years is like a automatic price reduction.
For the most part I list a item, put it in storage and forget it.
susanb1872
·10 months agoI noticed you had 2 listings in the wrong category (Health & Beauty and Antique) but otherwise they look OK. I don't know if your prices are in line so have you compared prices to other ebay sellers? Compare to Home Depot? I sell mostly collectible so I leave mine up for a long time. There is no perfect answer to your question. The real question is: can you sell these items some place else if you end them on ebay?
chapeau-noir
·10 months agoI never leave listings up past 60 days without tweaking and relisting. I'm in clothing selling seasonally so that does make a difference, but items that just sit gathering dust tend to sink further and further in search unless one is in a really tight niche.
simba6
·10 months agoIf your not running out of free listings, let them stay. Just have to wait until someone needs that item. If your short on free listings you can rotate the hard selling items.
gurlcat
·10 months agoSorry but that's backwards. Relisting or sell-similar creates a NEW listing, so the less free ones you have available, the less you can do this without incurring insertion fees.