You sell vintage items. I do, too. There are some vintage items almost identical to yours that I've had listed in my store for 3-5 years and no one is buying them even after half a decade. Tried promoting them, creating 20-40% off sales on some items, readjusting keywords, etc. Some of my vintage items literally have not been selling for years and years and years.
This is when I realized that I'll only invest in vintage items if I can get everything for dirt cheap. Went to a yard sale and this lady literally let me walk off with 200 vintage items for a $100 price tag. Okay, fine, 50 cents per vintage item is fine. Even if it's hard to sell and will sit for a while, I can walk away knowing that I didn't invest much in it.
Likewise, I've had some garage sales where I'd buy a bulk amount of really new, hip, in demand items such as electronics, cosmetics, perfumes, video games, etc. and I'd often times have 30 things sell in one day just from those hauls alone - with or without promoted listings. In the past 30 days, I've had 160 items sell via promoted listings, which is fine by me because I give my most hard to sell items a big promotion fee of 10% and will lower everything else to a smaller fee of 5% or so. I've had 300+ items sell in the past 30+ days, so I'm well aware that about half of my sales do come from promoted listings, but seeing as I invest as little as I possibly can in anything, the profit margin is still super high for me even after all the fees. Once you figure that system out, being able to afford promoted listings becomes a great tool.
1) Start shying away from overly saturated and dated categories / items that are hard to sell and no one wants anymore
2) Ignore the advice above if you can get a boat load of hard to sell / vintage items for dirt cheap
3) Find ways to source items from various sources, once again, for super cheap.
4) Once you find various places to source items from for super cheap, figure out what sells and what doesn't sell easily on the Ebay market nowadays
5) Apply a promotional rate on the harder to sell stuff (once again, that you hopefully got for cheap so the extra fees won't hurt your profit margin)
6) (optional) Apply a smaller promotional fee, if you wish, on easier to sell stuff just to speed things along
7) I don't know how or why, but, consistently listing every day helps sales. I'll have days where I'll list some random 20-30 items and that night, some obscure item that I listed four years ago will randomly sell out of absolutely nowhere. Once listed 200 Avon products in one day that I got from a garage sale haul and had some item I listed 5 years ago randomly sell that night. I notice that on days where I list nothing, sales go down. I'll list another 10 or 20 items or so, and bam, once again, some obscure thing that's been in my store for forever will randomly sell.
Gotta keep the Ebay machine well oiled. Consistently list, price check your pre-existing items to make sure they're still well priced, run sales if you must, promoted listings if you must, etc. and that's when you just sit back and watch things fly off the shelves.
