Maximizing Sales Fixed Price Format

[vlade13]

Most of the books that I list in fixed-price format sell very close to the start or end periods of the listing cycle. Very few sell in-between those points in time. Before eBay stitched to the perpetual relisting run format, I would relist at lower prices when the listings automatically expired, with pretty solid success. Now, with no definitive end period, I no longer have that ability. Sales seem to have declined as a result.

Questions: (1) Has anyone else experienced this?; (2) Has eBay ever tinkered with implementing a re-listing program for fixed listings where asking prices are automatically decreased, in interval amounts chosen by a seller, after a set period of time, with the newly priced listings re-circulated to the top for more exposure?    

[bestpaperboy]

I seem to remember that conventional wisdom on the book board was when a book didn't sell your raised the price.

I have books that i have either raised the price on or lowered the price on to no avail. Then one day it finally sells and you forget how much your originally listed it for. (Just happened to me earlier this month.)

Michael 

[bugler1998]

I really dislike the new endless listings format.  I sell items that are slow movers, but when they do sell they go for a good profit.

i need to watch the listings carefully so that i can end many of the fixed price items before they automatically relist.  This saves on listing fees, and also gives me a chance to see which listings are going well.

[taylor_memorial]

I have a store here, so this may not help.

The store format comes with a number of benefits, including "Selling Manager" and  "Seller Hub".

Seller Hub is a feature that lists all your books, and you can select how to view them. And more importantly how to interact and modify them. The view is a spreadsheet looking database table. You can select the columns you want to see, move them into which order you want left to right. Most of the columns can be sorted. For example, the end date column (and start date) column can be sorted from first to last or last to first. This helps you see which listings are oldest.

Another thing eBay does here is put a note on every listing that has languished for 16 months. Not a very long tail, but useful.

eBay went to GTC for all FP listings for a reason: the search engine is optimized for recent listings and so older listings move down the stack. No problem if what you have is rare enough, but plenty problem for common stock.

So I have trained myself to go through seller hub, sort the list to "ending today". I cull those listings which have the note. I sort the table from start date.

Selling Manager allows you to create a pivot table of selected items and modify unique fields. For example if you want to switch 10 of your listings from paid shipping to free shipping, you select those ten, choose edit selected, and when the pivot table populates select them all with a check mark and edit the policies. All ten are done ina few seconds and then "Submit". You return to the table from which the privot table was pulled. If you made a pivot table from a pivot table, you select save and are returned to the base table.
 
I recently discovered that you can, from this pivot table, edit price and best offer manually for each listing. Or for a number of similar listings if you want the same prices for all of them.

Once I complete the culls and the price adjustments, I have a pile of "unsold listings" that I can do the same with.

It seems that "sell similar" does not erase the parent listing number from eBay's database. I don't know if this triggers the search engine, or doesn't. I assume that it does, and relist these stale listings through SYI singly.

It takes a while but it gets the job done. I've sold quite a few books which were idle for more than a year almost immediately after bringing them back "alive".

Hope this helps.