Question
Greetings:
I just sold a pre-Feb 18 store item and was pleased to note that when the final value fees were calculated they were indeed charged at the pre-Feb 18 rate.
It was advertised to happen that way but since it seems like a feat for them to get billing correct I was very skeptical. I hope it continues.....since I make my own items for sale and can control quantities I placed 300+ items in my store at on Feb 17!
Hope you all did the same if you could. Staving off fee increases like that will be a good chunck of money over the next few months -- I placed an additional column in my Xcel worksheet to track the savings of those 120 day items. When they are gone it will be time to re-evaluate the store.
Dee
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It was such a time consuming pain to end all my store items and relist for 120 days that I got less than 1/3 of my 600+ items changed. I shouldn't have waited until the last day to do it. But I sold two of the relisted ones today, and was charged the old final value fee on both.
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another smart thing ebay did was to have nickel day when they did
some of us flipped things into auction instead of flipping it to 120 days....not that I would have, but a few would have and it all adds up.
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Gabs....I have finally gotten really, really serious about selling my products. Probably sounds lame to most of you but for the last couple of years I've been very laisse faire about the business -- in real life change mode -- bought a house, gotten rid of ex-boyfriend that I would not have ever married, did marry a man that have been friends with for nine years, had a really high incidence of illness in the last six months.
I've focused on making ends meet and not on how profitable I could be. Procrastinated about ebay and the website. Then oddly enough I was watching a program called Take This Job where they paralell two jobs and show how they are similar. The day I watched they had a Mary Kay sales women in Atlanta and a car sales man in Vegas. The Mary Kay sales woman's mother had sold Mary Kay before her and now her sister is selling the stuff. Well, this woman grosses $100,000 a year now and drives her pink cadillac and watching that just got to me -- I know they are a comission pyramid scheme like AmWay but still.
It made me realized that I had been setting my very loose goals way too low and only barely achieving them. The one thing that I know is that I could be doing three or four times the business I do today so I made up my mind to get moving. The fee structure and all the unrest on ebay motivated me too. Yes, you can set up a website and link yourself as best you can and cross your fingers. Eventaully you will sell things. Well, with ebay I've had almost 2000 hits so far this week from unique individuals. As far as I can see ebay is go down hill and not up. It became apparent that I needed to maximize ebay now before it becomes and even bigger mess and hope that I have not waited too late. In the Ebay Store and Website Study group it became apparent that my website, auctions, and auction site listings should all have the same look and feel and that my website name and auction listing name and store names should be the same so that is done.
I normally run between 10-15 items a week. At one time I had 50-60 items in my store. For the 5 cent sale I listed 150 and have done very well. On the 17th I put a little over 330 items in the store for 120 days. Just before the five cent sale I signed up for MyStoreCredit and that has spurred sales too.
As for my items.....I know what my items are worth and what I am willing to take for them so I have not done auctions in a long time. I've been doing fixed price at about 70% of my website price and store items between 70 and 85 percent of the website prices. I've decided that I should change that now. I'm going to try leaving the 300+ items in the store for the next 120 days and starting about 10 auctions a week at .99. The other change is to make my ebay store prices equal to my website prices. My items seem to be popular and I believe even in the ebay climate of today I can do well in this format. If that doens't product the results that I'm looking for I'll likely lower the amount of auction items and raise the starting prices.
By the way, after another couple of weeks I'm going to dredge that thread back up and report that I'll be keeping it; however, before I do that I'm sending a poll out to everyone who did buy from me in that time period and asking them to tell me how much that offer played a part in their purchase -- I've already had two additional purchases where the buyer has purchased and then purchased again to use their credit. Maybe they would have just bought the two items at once before. Who knows? So I'm going to ask.
I suppose the bottom line to all of this is that I am trying to feel like I "use" ebay and not that they use me.
Stepping down off the very early AM soap box......
Dee