So the holiday season has begun. What are your plans for the month and/or the season (thru Jan 15, 2023 per most carrier surcharge programs)? Is this a good season for you, are your products for a different season, or is you inventory season-agnostic?
What Say Ye All?
-Bob.
October has had an interesting start. Last month, I used my 250 free listings (non-Store seller) to post 250 Fixed Price listings, rather than the 5-day Auctions I used to post. Low and behold, I'm suddenly making sales again! Not blockbusters, but I've already had more sales in October (7 days) than for the entire month of September (30 days). This was an unexpected result - previous attempts at Fixed Price listings led to a nearly complete drop-off of sales.
Plans for October include continued listing of PC parts on eBay and refurbished PCs, All-in-Ones, iMac and MacBook devices, and laptops and tablets. There's a lot to list, and I need to get into the habit of posting at least one or two each evening, rather than trying to get it all done on the weekends (when I'm more likely to be found either emptying the house for sale or 'checking my eyelids for holes' in the recliner (regardless of what's on the TV).
The weekends now are filled with moving - boxes, furniture, clothing & dishware -- it's amazing the amount of stuff you collect over 40yrs time! But we've decided to sell the big house, enjoy apartment living for another year or two, and then build new somewhere not too far from Memphis, but far enough that we aren't requested to babysit the grands every weekend. 🙂 I'm just worried I won't be able to fit that last 800sq ft of 'stuff' into the 150sq ft of storage space we have left!
Oh yeah, and before I forget, I may be taking up another programming contract! I just have to be really sure about this company -- I doubt my current boss will accept me back a second time. On the other hand, it pays 3-4x what I'm making now, so I should finally be able to start saving AND paying down my credit cards... and picking up more of the current expenses for the two of us.
Great weekend in Memphis -- 72 for the high Saturday, 75/76 on Sunday. Next week gets into the low-to-mid 80's, but I work indoors so that's not as much of a problem as higher temps on the weekends. 🙂
-Bob.
@kjcoll0 wrote:With zero sales so far this weekend, any goal whatsoever seems unrealistic. And yes, we list every.single.day.
I've seen this at work (Online Sales Manager for local firm), with sales slowly sinking over the past few months. And it doesn't help when USPS fails to properly handle our shipments, leaving some lost or very late.
My personal sales seem to do better as Fixed Price than Auction, so I'm looking to expand that a bit. Altho - I have some harder-to-find (not rare, just not commonly used) PC components that should do really well at auction, based on what I'm seeing in the Solds search,
Ar your listings mostly Fixed Price? The longer a listing stays unsold, the more it sinks in Search, unless you pay eBay even more money to increase exposure. And with some Promoted Listing suggested rates exceeding 10%, you're looking a nearly doubling eBay's cut of your sale.
To fix stale listings, end and repost as new. I do this as much as possible at work and have been using auctions with my personal items (hard to get 'stale' when a listing only lasts 5 days) - it does seem to help as I've noticed the 20-25% of the listings I end/repost-as-new start selling again.
SixBit, my 3rd party eBay/ecommerce management tool, can do this for me automatically: I set the listings to post at a given date/time as Fixed Price 90 days. At the 90 day mark (or slightly before to avoid cancelling a listing just seconds old), SB will cancel the listing and if my Allocation Plan indicates, it will relist or reprice & relist. Allocation Plans can also manage multi-venue, single product inventory, but I'm not big on that, especially for rare items where buyers may be looking on several sites and purchase my listing for a single unit several times, once each on several platforms. Not Fun.
There have been a number of discussion here about refreshing listing or increasing exposure or improving sales -- check out the Board Search feature to see if any of them interest you.
-Bob.
