Competitors specify free shipping but require minimum purchase

[mathman87vw4]

I have some posts that in very crowded, low margin, high volume space.  Some of my competitors offer free shipping but they specify in the description fields that they require a minimum quantity or else they will refund the purchase.  I charge flat shipping so I don't lose money on low quantity purchases as I understand requiring a minimum quantity is not allowed and cancelling orders for that reason results in defects.  However this results in my listings to appear lower in search results than my competitors who follow the aforementioned free ship + minimum quantity practice.

Am I doomed to lower search results, or do I have to leave myself open to a loss on low quantity orders?

[lamber9347]

@mathman87vw4 Every listing can be reported. Since those sellers aren't following policy you can report them but that's about all you can do. I'm sorry for your issue and wish there was a better remedy for you. Best of luck to you....

[rosachs]

First, if the competition is cheating, report it to eBay.  Let them rebalance the playing field.

Second - if possible, add "No Min Qty" to your title.  Once a shopper sees they have to make a minimum purchase with your competition, your title will let them know that you don't require that troublesome restriction.

Third - if you have an eBay Store, consider adding a link to your listings directing the customer to those specific listings or store category.  I've used this quite successfully for a number of clients - and links that stay within the eBay site, specifically those that link to a Store page, are permitted.  The html code is pretty easy to put together, whether you are using a Search URL for specific keywords or linking just to a Store category in general.

Since I use SixBit, I can cheat a bit.  🙂  I create a snippet (text to insert into a listing) that includes this specific html for the specific group I'm pointing too.  For example, the snippet "Suncare Link" would contain html code to display "Check out our other suncare products!" and make it an active link to a categor within our store.  When I'm creating the Item record (which contains all info needed to post a listing), I simply add "[[Suncare Link]]" (without the quotes) to the Description.  When SB posts a listing from this Item, it will replace the link reference with the actual link text I saved.  This makes it super easy to add these links to existing inventory and to ensure they are added to any new inventory.  If it's simple, easy, and quick, it's more likely to get done.  Complicated, error-prone, and tedious are things that are more quickly put off "for later".

I eventually created a Suncare template that included all these kinds of enhancements so that creating a new suncare product Item record was even easier.  Features like this are why I'm still a satisfied SB seller (DM me if you want more details).

You may never be able to get rid of every 'minimum' seller or listing, but making eBay aware of the problem is a step in the right direction.  Perhaps it will concern them enough that they will add screening to the listing process to look for key words or phrases, like they do for certain types of inventory (Nazi items, Confederate flag items, etc) and stem the flow that way.  Never can tell - sometimes they do make the site a bit more friendly to buyer and seller alike!

-Bob.

[reallynicestamps]

they specify in the description fields that they require a minimum quantity or else they will refund the purchase.

And every time they do that, they would get a Defect.

Defects can mean higher fees, restrictions on the number and value of listings, or even a closed selling account.

And the unhappy buyers can still leave feedback.

Congratulations on having such dumb competitors.

[onefootflipper]

Ok, here is your thing.

You are selling LOW END cards. You cannot actually make money competing on price in this space as there will always be people who value their time at zero or larger sellers who are bad at math or who just see it as all part of their larger business who will undercut you.

You will have competitors who sell the card for 99 cents shipped, in a top loader and lose money on every single order. 

Maybe you have different customers than I do, but I have found that even with every promotion in the world encouraging buying multiple cards that 90 percent of my card customers buy ONE CARD. I can even have buy 1 get 1 free on $1.99 cards and most customers will still just order 1 card.

When I worked at the hobby store I had come in with extensive non-card ebay experience and looked at what they were doing on mail order cards, immediately said "We are losing money on this".  So we timed it, our fastest guy could not pull and ship orders fast enough to to pay his $10 an hour salary on 99 cent cards (that 99 cents is 57 cents after fees and an envelope, 37 cents if you use a top loader, which they did). That wasn't even taking into account listing them.  We stopped listing cards under $1.99 online after that.

When life changes forced me into full time ebay I never listed a single card under $1.99.

Reporting them is an endless time sink that still won't make your cards sell. Comc is probably ebay's largest card seller and MOST of their listings are in violation of current policy on not allowing condition variation listings in cards.

[mathman87vw4]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm starting to put that at the end of my titles, and I'm starting to cross-post in descriptions wherever I can.

[mathman87vw4]

Not just low-end, but low-end base cards!

I appreciate the honest and fair feedback.  The majority of my sales are for 1 card, or 1 pack.  Occasionally I can a sale of 2-3 and I got ecstatic when I got an 8 and 16 card purchase.  I'm aware I can be easily undercut in the low-end space, there's also the turbo-posters who post one listing per card as opposed which can shutout many sellers quite easily.

(Offtopic warning) However what I find particularly frustrating is that there is a small handful of sellers that consistently are at the top of every single search despite my better prices on shipping.  I've seen them move 2k+ units of low-end stuff in the span of 6 weeks and those sales are often for double-digit purchases.  Okay, that's not entirely true.  I initially charged $1.38 for shipping to cover myself against the one-card case, but I recently dropped my base shipping for $0.48 in Canada.  It's still not free, but it's still better than most of the top sellers (except for 2 I think) and it has not made a difference at all.  Promoted ads?  Still no difference.  I'm trying whatever I can to get more visibility and it's not working.

I haven't even thought of reporting those sellers.  We agree that it won't make any difference because it won't help my search ranking.

[a_c_green]

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@mathman87vw4 wrote:

Am I doomed to lower search results, or do I have to leave myself open to a loss on low quantity orders?

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You can offer "Free Shipping Minimum Purchase Required" yourself, but you have to do it in terms of charging the Shipping on each item, with a promise to refund the Shipping costs if the buyer gets whatever your minimum quantity is for each order. That way you're not cancelling on smaller orders; you're rewarding larger ones.

[mathman87vw4]

Thank you for that feedback.  I guess the next step for me is ranking higher in search.  Despite offering lower base shipping than most of my competitors, I'm still low in the search rankings than those who have sold over 2k low-end items in 6 weeks with some double-digit purchases.  I really hope I don't have to provide individual pictures for 200 variants.

[onefootflipper]

It doesn't matter what you do in this space. It doesn't work out financially. You cannot list, pull and pack the cards fast enough to make minimum wage. You are competing against hobby sellers who value their time at zero and sleepy card shops using employee time that would otherwise just be idle 90 percent of the time.

Get 100 orders in one day sometime, and then realize you just spent 5 hours packing cards to net $30 after expenses. 

[gamersbaystore]

Actually, you can use ebay's sales promos to offer free shipping with a minimum purchase, ebay does allow this. Just click on promotions, then select shipping discount from the list, its really that easy.

But I don't understand how you expect to turn a profit on such low value items. I just don't see what profit there is to be had on a $1.49 sale.

I sell media related items like movies, and will list a few really cheap titles for $2 or $3 just to draw more traffic. But there's no real money to be made with such low priced items either. I would find a product you can sell for closer to the $8 or $10+ mark.

[gamersbaystore]

Well, you list a lot of low dollar cards yourself. But unlike the OP, you have a lot of higher dollar listings right alongside them. Its good to have some bargains, but there is no profit to be had when every listing is practically a $1.

[janet9988]

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@mathman87vw4 wrote:

Thanks for the feedback. I'm starting to put that at the end of my titles, and I'm starting to cross-post in descriptions wherever I can.

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Also do not waste your time reporting the sellers..I  have reported a few  listings 6 months ago that requires the buyer pay them through Paypal only (buyer needs to verify this with the seller  before buying) and also requires a minimum purchase amount for the already sated free shipping) AND the item is a PROHIBITED item but the seller lists in a different category to get around this.

[onefootflipper]

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@gamersbaystore wrote:

Well, you list a lot of low dollar cards yourself. But unlike the OP, you have a lot of higher dollar listings right alongside them. Its good to have some bargains, but there is no profit to be had when every listing is practically a $1.

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The difference between $1.99 (my minimum price) and 99 cents is absolutely insane.  I clear $1.47 on a card order after all fees and expenses. If that same card was 99 cents I would clear 61 cents. Except that most sports card sellers ship in a hard plastic top loader that costs 20 cents, which turns that into 43 cents. 

I can list, pick and ship cards at $1.50 profit per card and make $20 an hour doing it. If I was doing what most 99 cent sports cards sellers were doing I would make $5.75 an hour. 

I also, came to realize that low end cards were very limited in how much I could earn and I stopped buying them a long time ago. I actually used to have a lot more higher end cards as well, I sold through them all and haven't even bought any of those in months because most cards are in a bear market right now and cards don't sell well in bear markets. Going forward I will likely only restock non-sports trading cards and avoid sports and TCG cards completely.

Also, the other thing is that the more you ramp up in low dollar cards the longer it takes to fulfill the orders as your card boxes take up more and more room and thus your average time to get to each card takes longer. This is particularly evident in large orders as those 20 cards might be in 20 separate boxes, bins or locations.

[rosachs]

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@mathman87vw4 wrote:

Thanks for the feedback. I'm starting to put that at the end of my titles, and I'm starting to cross-post in descriptions wherever I can.

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"cross posting", as eBay defines it, means in exchange for placing an ad for your listing on your competitors listing (when it's being viewed), you are allowing your competitors to do the same on your listing.  eBay limits how many ads appear on any listing, but you're still accepting other ads on your listing.

The other problem with cross-posting, as it's done by eBay, is that many ad-blockers will quite efficiently block those ads, so your potential customers won't even see them, but eBay will (correctly) claim to have shown them.  This works the same for your competitors... which makes me wonder why eBay hasn't fixed the issue... unless cross-posting is a panacea for sellers who complained about eBay placing other site ads on their listings.  So they came up with a way to allow sellers to place ads.... but forgot to mention that ad-blockers render these ads moot.

Adding your own link to your own listings or store category is far more effective, and easy to do.  eBay used to have a tool that would create the html for you, and it worked well, but I haven't done any Store enhancement work in a few years so I'm not sure it still exists.  But once you know how to do it, you'll wonder why you waited so long.

-Bob.