How to increase traffic in my bookstore?

[fishzlot]

I don't think it is fair to need to promote books for extra fees just to get additional traffic.  I don't feel as though I am getting the views that I should.  Is anyone else having the same problem? Not able to generate views?  Or is book selling just generally dead, dead, dead on Ebay?  I was once able to get more sales than this but my store is struggling and I don't know why.   Could they "refresh" my store or something?   I believe my books are competitively priced.  And I have special books that no one else has.  If unique listings cannot sell it makes me wonder if any of my books can sell.  I've been dropping prices.  I really don't know what else I can do.  Any suggestions to generate more sales?  With over 550 listings, I should be able to sell more than a couple books a week.  I have NEW books and I can't seem to sell them.  I just dropped all my audio books down as low as I can possibly drop them.  Suggestions, please.  HELP!  I'M FOUNDERING!  Could there be something that Ebay did to foul my sales in some way?  Some changes to the system or something?  I'm looking at a lot of my listings and it says ZERO views.  That can't be right!   You'd think out of millions of eBayers SOMEBODY would have looked at a NEW book listing!

[onefootflipper]

If you actually want to fix your store do this.

Go through each one of your listings one by one, price check them against lowest first. If you see it selling at $6 or less, end the listing, put the book aside for lots, donation or packing paper. 

For everything else that has competition, either match or beat the cheapest book that is the same basic condition as yours. Or do what the real big boys do, and beat the lowest price regardless of condition as a lot of buyers just don't care. I tend to buy big thick books of science fiction short stories and I buy the cheapest one shipped, every time, regardless of condition. 

If there are none listed, none sold, and no history in Terapeak then you have two ways to look at it, wait for the one person in the world who just has to have it, and price at $30 or more. That person may never come. Or price it cheap enough that someone might impulse buy it, $10 or less.

I prefer to charge shipping on books. The only reason most of the big boys do free ship is because they need to have the shipping built into the price because sometimes the books will be in different warehouses or otherwise end up getting shipped as separate packages and they need to build that possibility in the price. 

I charge $4.99 shipping for the first book and adding more books does not increase the shipping price. I have never been sad that someone took advantage of that and bought a whole bunch of books. I have a similar scheme for all my under 1 pound items, and it only very rarely bites me on the shipping, and for every time that happens I have 3 or 4 people who go nuts and spend a couple hundred bucks on light items and I am happy to eat that extra shipping cost.

[fishzlot]

Apparently nothing except reducing the prices to giveaway prices is going to sell my inventory.  I dug myself a hole and there's no digging my way out.  I spent $3,000 on inventory and there's no way to get that back.  But I'm going to do my best and start reducing my prices.  Again.   And I'm getting out of the business as I originally planned on doing.  There's no just no money in this any more.  Everything I tried to do on Ebay crashed.  I sold campaign pins and political items until that crashed.  Now books have crashed as well.   Nobody makes money selling books any more.  The discount sellers killed the market.  None of them are making money either.  They cut our throats and now they're cutting their own throats by making 10 cents a book.  I can see now that this market will NEVER, EVER recover.  Many titles are free on Kindle.  I hitched myself to a sinking ship.  I didn't know it was this bad,  but it is this bad.  Now I'll just desperately tread water trying to pay off a credit card.  What a nightmare.  It wasn't supposed to be like this.  Ebay was supposed to represent opportunity.  But really I don't see any opportunity for any small sellers here any more.  The Ebay experiment is dead.

[fishzlot]

I have listened to your advice and you are correct.  I'm deeply slashing all prices in my book store to practically giveaway prices just to get rid of them.  Almost all of my higher priced books have been reduced to $15.  I'm throwing in the towel and getting out.  I have a lot more inventory to list and I'll also list that at giveaway prices.  I'm just trying to break even now and then get out.  Thank you for your advice.  It helped give me direction to bail.  And bail I am.  Going back to my original schedule of trying to get out by June.  I know when I'm beat.  And I'm beat down to the ground.  There's no money in this.  No money at all.   I'll try to group books to get rid of them as well.  Maybe people will be willing to pay $1 apiece for brand new books just released one or two years ago.  If they are in groups.

[mam98031]

Promoting your listings is an option, not a requirement.  And the seller is the one that sets what additional FVF rate they want to pay for a sale.

Instead of paying to promote your listings, why not run a sale.  Use your Markdown Manager and set up a sale for the percentage you want and the duration [up to 30 days].  You can pick and choose which items you want in the sale.  It helps to bring in more traffic and hopefully move out some inventory.

I wish you nothing but the best.

https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/growth/seller-hub-promotions/markdown-sale-events

[2013grotz]

It's not all necessarily lost.   You just have to research and see what you have on hand like I and a few of the others said.  There's zero gain things like we've seen, but there's huge demand things too and if you have one of those you'll get money out of it, often more than enough to pay for the whole bulk buy the item was in, like I have several times.  There's no easy money on Ebay (never has been), you really have to work to understand your market and find what the buyers will respond to and if you don't understand that you'll always lose.  When you do a buy, you basically are leveraging/betting on yourself in terms of that kind of knowledge, and the buy is where you win or lose on selling stuff.

That said, the biggest favor you can do for yourself right now is fix the titles on your listings, like I described.  Basically that's your SEO and how buyers even locate your stuff.  Things will be sure to pick up *some* if you can do that since people will start finding your items.  The researching of costs and things are a secondary concern to getting that done.   Post #16 is a good blue print for you to follow.  But fix those titles (and pictures), so people are going to find your books and see what you have.

And think of it this way on the inventory figure: Some money is better than no money.  Believe it or not, the "discount sellers" do make money on books at what they charge.  A dime is still a dime you didn't have before.  And if you happen to hit something that does have demand, you'll have been there to take the jackpot behind it.  If you can get your debt you mentioned down to a smaller amount, it's still a good thing, and you may even surprise yourself and make back what you put into it.  Don't give up.

[fishzlot]

There.  I've now cut my own throat and slashed almost all of my listings to giveaway prices.  If nothing sells now I'll know Ebay is a complete wasteland for books of any type.  And that only discount sellers will ever sell another book here for like a dollar apiece.  Or less.  How do publishers make any money these days if no one is willing to pay more than a dollar a book?  The publishers must be going bankrupt.  I see brand new best sellers selling on Ebay for two dollars in Like New condition.  Are books in print worth anything any more or has Kindle and the discount sellers completely killed the market?  I think they have.

[toysaver]

"How to increase traffic in my bookstore?...  I really don't know what else I can do.  Any suggestions to generate more sales?"

I recommend including the ISBN in the title.  It gets used more or less as a 'keyword' in searches.

[mam98031]

@fishzlot 

There is no need to reduce your pricing again.  Run a sale with the Markdown Manager.  Buyers love a sale.

I know you are depressed about this and understandably so.  But don't shut down your mind on ways that may help because you are so upset.  It will only cost you a few minutes to set up the sale.  You do not need to do all items, well you can't anyway, you can have a max of 500 listings in the sale.

https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/growth/seller-hub-promotions/markdown-sale-events

[mam98031]

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@toysaver wrote:

"How to increase traffic in my bookstore?...  I really don't know what else I can do.  Any suggestions to generate more sales?"

I recommend including the ISBN in the title.  It gets used more or less as a 'keyword' in searches.

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There is no need to do that as long as you have the ISBN in a ISB [item specific box].  The search engine looks at what you have in the ISBs too.  So no need to take up space in the title for that, find other keywords to use in that space.  

[2013grotz]

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@fishzlot wrote:

There.  I've now cut my own throat and slashed almost all of my listings to giveaway prices.  If nothing sells now I'll know Ebay is a complete wasteland for books of any type.  And that only discount sellers will ever sell another book here for like a dollar apiece.  Or less.  How do publishers make any money these days if no one is willing to pay more than a dollar a book?  The publishers must be going bankrupt.  I see brand new best sellers selling on Ebay for two dollars in Like New condition.  Are books in print worth anything any more or has Kindle and the discount sellers completely killed the market?  I think they have.

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I understand there's a degree of emotion behind what you're thinking and doing, but I urge you to come back and read when that's passed.  Really emotion doesn't serve you all that well in doing this. 

Like was said, fix your listing titles.  That's the biggest favor you can do for yourself right now.  Once you get that done, evaluate everything as to price and don't blindly "slash" everything.

Then, research everything to see what kind of demand is behind each of your books.   As I mentioned before, there's things that have demand that people are very willing to pay money for and if you happen to have something like that, you want to know and be able to price accordingly.   "Slashing" all your prices isn't really going to serve you all that well.

[mam98031]

@2013grotz 

What are you seeing that is a problem with the way they do their titles?  Just curious.

[2013grotz]

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@mam98031 wrote:

@2013grotz 

What are you seeing that is a problem with the way they do their titles?  Just curious.

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As I explained in Post #2, the full titles and subtitles of OPs books are slopped into the space and they run out of characters to get the important information.   The example I gave was this, which is one of OP's books:

"Anointed with Oil : How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America by Darren Doc"

Buyers are going to look for author and title as the most important SEO terms, which means this book won't come up in the search results (it may in the "with fewer words" list).  This is because the author's name has been cut off by the character limit.  The alternative I suggested was:

"Darren Dochuk Anointed With Oil"

While more of the subtitle can be added to this out to the character limit, the words here are the most important ones OP needs for buyers to find the book on here.

[mam98031]

I better understand now, thank you for taking the time to explain to me.  And I see your point.

[spark-chaser1]

I've got a dilemma... I love books, just love to read with a book in the hand. Kindles and the like don't cut it for me. 

I took a fast look at your huge inventory, and think I would like to shop your store. But, if you' re talking about  packing it in now, no point of me of going thru all those listings if you're not going to be around a few days from now.

There are sellers who know that once I latch on, I'm a loyal regular.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@spark-chaser1  I believe what he said is he has even more books to list, and will list them, and expects to close up by JUNE. Right now, he's basically lowering the prices on some of the books he has listed.

So, you've got plenty of  time to go through his listings.