So looking at the site today with an eye toward what the over-all sales picture looks like I decided to sample 3 items from 3 quite far apart categories. All searches were done with a single keyword and not pared down at all so results were pulled from all categories. The only thing I did was filter out China, restricting results to North America only. Time frame is whatever the default ebay uses when you search so I was looking at number of items listed oand then sold items over the default time frame which I believe is 90 days however every time I tried to actually go back 90 days either a page or a time or jumping multiples the database had a stroke and deliuvered errors or blank pages, lol. It did appear to be a 90 day period however.
Keyword 1: Vase
20% positive sell through rate
89% sold $100 or less
75% sold $50 or less
60% sold $30 or less
Of the solds 14% offered free shipping and 10% offered both free shipping and returns of some sort.
Keyword 2: Necklace
19% positive sell through rate
91% sold $100 or less
82% sold $50 or less
68% sold $25 or less
Of the solds 41% offered free shipping and 34% offered both free shipping and returns of some type
Keyword 3: Shoes
20% positive sell through rate
83% sold $100 or less
63% sold $50 or less
40% sold $25 or less
Of the solds 33% offered free shipping and 25% offered both free shipping and returns of some type.
I wanted to also factor in how many of the solds were to sellers that had stores however advanced search refused to comply and kept spitting out results with sellers that didn't have stores.
So 3 pretty widely apart categories but I think the numbers tell a pretty clear tale. I don't think that there is any argument to be made that free shipping or offering returns are of any significant benefit on their own and would be outweighed by other factors likely price most importantly.
Given the majority % of sales that are sub $100 it doesn't speak very well of anyone that wants to sell higher end items, not even higher I suppose but mid range items. When you think about what a decent pair of shoes costs these days or the fact that I did not exclude necklaces containing precious metals, the picture looks even more bleak, IMHO.
Anyway, I'm not going to go on ad nauseam, as there is no need to when the numbers clearly speak for themselves.
Cheers
