@hiddentreasures1133 wrote:
Unfortunately, most of my listings are "GUC" and in my spare time I'm slowly ending and relisting them as 30 day with 8 relistings. The way to go or no? TY!
@hiddentreasures1133, unless you are selling the kind of things that you have in quantity that you have had a long and successful selling track record with, generally listing items on a GTC basis very likely will work against you. I took a look at your current listings, and it appears most all of your items are one-of-a-kind vintage items and books, not the kinds of things that benefit from being listed as GTC listings.
Here's why: There's a billion items listed on eBay on any given day. All of them in any category or according to a shopper's search terms, can't possibly be displayed first, so eBay has to decide which items have better chances of selling. They do so using a complicated formula which has to do with "engagement."
Engagement can be everything from someone clicks on your listing, someone favorites your listing after clicking, someone purchases your item, etc. The more time prospective buyers engage with one of your listings, the higher it will rank in search which increases the chances prospective buyers will see and purchase it. eBay tracks this engagement activity on each listing over time.
If you list an item on a GTC basis, every time it auto-renews, its engagement history stays with the listing and if it hasn't sold, gotten a lot of looks or likes, etc. all it does is drop farther down in search results because its "engagement score" continues to get worse which means the chances anyone will ever see it gets less and less every time the listing rolls over.
The same thing will happen if you list an item for 30 days and manually "relist" it once it expires. That's because when you "relist" the item's past engagement history stays with it and is carried forward just like it does with GTC listings.
The only way you can "detach" that old engagement history which is damaging your item's placement in search is to relist it using "Sell Similar" once the item has expired. Relisting an item using "Sell Similar" is really no more work than using a straight "Relist" and will give at least a temporary boost to your item's placement because it's not being dragged down by its prior history of poor engagement. Make sense?
The other reason GTC listings can be problematic is that not long ago eBay began purging listings from the site that had been listed for a long time and had not sold. Sellers could do nothing about it -- their listings were just gone.
More recently, eBay has mentioned they have rolled out a new feature which is supposed to be optional though some sellers have reported the feature was enabled on their listings without their knowledge/permission. The feature goes in and automatically marks stale/non-selling listings down 5% after so many days, and continues to do so every so many days if the item hasn't sold, until the price has been lowered to 60% of the original. It appears that this feature is being enabled on GTC listings. The best way to not to have to worry about that happening is to not use GTC listings for long-tail items like yours.
Long story short IMO, yes you are doing the right thing not continuing to use GTC on your listings and listing them on a 30-day basis instead. However, if I were you, I would not use "Relist" to put them back up when they expire every 30 days. I would use "Sell Similar" instead to increase the chance they'll show up higher in search results.
Hope this helps.
