eBay Selling

A few weeks ago I mentioned a subscription to the sales reports as being the most useful subscription. The second most useful is probably the Traffic Reports subscription. Like the others, it’s free to subscribe. The reports are very detailed descriptions of the traffic that your listings get. It includes traffic to your store’s homepage as well as all of your listings.

The report can be further broken down by how buyers got to your listings. You can see what site brought them to your items and what search engines they used. You can even see what keywords they used to find you. This is incredibly useful if you want to make your descriptions full of more keywords. This can make more of your listings search engine friendly, leading to more traffic.

The eBay Pulse is a fun page to look at, but it can also be a valuable marketing tool. Most people have heard of the pulse area that lists the top 10 most-watched eBay listings. Those are typically one-of-a-kind listings that are either very valuable or have gained some kind of viral status throughout the site. Have a little fun and read it once in a while.

When you’re finished with that, take a look at the top of the screen. That’s where the most-searched items are. This tells sellers what the sought-after items are. This information can tell you what to look for when gathering items to sell. It also tells you the keywords that are being searched. If you can get these items, or even accessories that go with these items, you are like to sell them quickly.

Ever since the feedback changes made it impossible for sellers to leave negatives or neutrals for sellers, I have been worried that this would reflect badly on sellers. It will make it more tempting to many buyers to be more demanding and hard to please. It looks to me as if it’s happened.

I’ve done plenty of eBay shopping this summer, and I have never, in eight years of using the site, seen so many low feedback numbers. It used to be relatively rare to see a feedback percentage under 97 percent, but I’m seeing that every time I search now. I’m seeing scores in the 94 percent range pretty often.

If anyone else is seeing this phenomenon, I would love to hear about it. If this really is occurring site wide, and not just in the searches I’m conducting, I think it’s something that all sellers need to be aware of.

As of today I have kept my 100 percent, but there’s no guarantee as to how long that will last. I’m expecting that any time now it will happen to me as well. If this weren’t the slow selling season, it probably would have occurred already.

Is it possible to do this and to make a profit? Absolutely. There are a number of ways to do this properly. One of the easiest ways is simply to buy items in the summer that are going for less than they should and then reselling them in the fall and winter. The price difference is extremely noticeable on auction item, though store and fixed price items will of course be the same.

Think about the items you love to sell and the items you buy on eBay. Look around and find auctions that are getting no bids.  Unless it’s an extremely obscure item, chances are that it will do better outside of the summer lull. Once fall has begun and kids are back in school, people spend hours on eBay just searching around for something to buy. They could be buying your items.

I wrote this article last night that explains the basics of eBay books selling. What I didn’t mention is where to get the books. There are several places that I’ve found useful for buying books for resale.

Thrift stores generally have a lot of inventory at very low prices. This makes an excellent opportunity for buying them low and selling them high. The most expensive book I ever sold was from a thrift store. It cost less than a dollar and I sold it for $187. Most of them aren’t like that of course, but there is an enormous profit potential.

Estate auctions are another place to get books, but they may not be as inexpensive. They are great places to find antique books that sell for high prices, but be prepared to get book lots that only have a couple of good books in them.

A listing sale for fixed price items will take place from July 16-29. The sale is only for fixed price, though, so it will not be in effect for auctions. If you are selling media items that are under $10, the listing price is the same under the sale. For other items, it might be worth it to list a few expensive items during the sale period.

A $25 fixed price item would list for $1 normally and a $50 item would normally list for $2, so the sale is significant for anyone with a lot of items that are priced at $10 or more. If the items are not likely to sell during the summer, however, you may still lose money. If the items are unlikely to sell for the regular listing price during this time of year, they will not be any more likely to sell for the sale listing price. The only difference would be losing fewer listing fees.

If you have considered moving items to store listings this summer, as I previously mentioned, make sure to do the math first. If you sell very few items, it might not be cost effective to do so. However, from a hassle standpoint, it may be well worth it to you.

A store listing is $15.95 a month. Compare that to listing 15 non-media items a week that start at less than $10. Those listings, over the course of the month, are $15. And, you have to manually relist them each week. If you sell anything that starts at more than 9.99, you will have higher fees. Fifteen of those items a week adds up to $21. The store listings are .03 for anything under $25 and run for 30 days. And for store listings, the prices of multiple items aren’t added together.

For example: I have items that I have in quantities of about 50. Each item is under $10. That means that if I run an auction or fixed price listing, the price of each one is added together to determine the listing fee. But for a store auction, only the price of one of them is considered. To put it more simply:

One listing for 50 items for $5 each- store listing, .03

auction/fixed price listing, $3

If you’re seeing far fewer item views, bids and sales right now, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong. The problem is simply the summer slowdown, and it happens every year. With people outdoors more, going on vacations and spending time with kids home for the summer, they have far less time for online shopping.

The problem this creates for a lot of sellers is that they continue listing the same number of items they did before and go broke doing it. To live out the summer doldrums, you may need to change your listing tactics for a few months.

One way to do this is to open an eBay store if you haven’t already. If you do have a store, start shifting the slowest items into store listings and let them sit there until summer. That way, you aren’t spending money each week to relist items that just won’t sell during the summer. The store listings keep the listings from getting too old to relist, so you won’t have to make a brand new listing in the fall. And, the items are still on eBay, so it is possible that they may sell from your store.

Using pre-filled listings is fantastic when you have a lot of items that each need their own listing. Right now, books, CDs, movies and similar media items have the listing information stores in the eBay system. Simply entering the UPC number or a book’s ISBN will bring up the title, author/artist/director, and other key details. There are even stock pictures available.

But soon, there will be more categories that will allow pre-filled listings. It was just announced that home theater systems , subwoofers and home theater speakers will have pre-filled information available. While the topics seem a little random, I’m hoping that this will lead to more categories and subcategories that have this option. The main obstacle to eBay selling is the time that the listings take. With more pre-filled listings, there is a lot more money to be made.

You may have heard about LV’s recent lawsuit against eBay. There have been many companies over the years that have tried to sue eBay and lost- largely because eBay itself isn’t selling fake items- individual sellers are. But, the lawsuit, filed in France, was a victory for Louis Vuitton. The site was found liable for the many, many (many) fakes that are sold on the site. eBay was fined and must make more of an effort to get rid of the fakes sold through the site.

This is still a controversial move among eBay sellers. On one hand, the move may make the marketplace safer for buyers who are looking for the real thing. On the other, it is entirely possible that real ones will get pulled in an overzealous attempt to keep the site from any more lawsuits. Sound farfetched? It isn’t. VeRO members are notorious for doing just that and it will likely get worse now.