loosecannon
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posted on August 24, 2001 04:43:05 PM
Before some of you laugh, I know the amount of auctions I list is a pittance compared to many, which leaves me in awe of the ones that have hundreds or even 100 listed all at the same time. How do they do that?
I used to do pretty well by listing around 100 auctions per month--a mixture of high dollar and not-so-high dollar. Lately, we have been listing close to double that, close to 200 per month. Mostly lower dollar items. A lot of $8 to $30 auctions with some auctions going quite a bit higher. It seems like all we're doing lately is packing and shipping!
I like the old way better. As someone here said before in so many words "volume is not where it's at".
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dman3
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posted on August 24, 2001 05:15:36 PM
Well My bet is that volume is where its at the problem is in order to get the kind of volume that really counts would be to run like 300 or 400 dutch auction each with 300 or 400 items avalable daily.
Volume isnt where its at untill you start selling in the range of 50 or 100 thousand low and high cost items weekly.
And with that volume you wouldn't have the burden of listing all your self or shipping all because you would need help to run at this level.
But you would be looking at over a million in sales monthly on volume..
The way that people who list 300 to 500 items weekly or daily have going for them on ebay is that there auction become more visable as the chances of many of there items being found and bought goes up..
its kind of like playing the lottery if there are 4 million items listed on ebay today and you only have one item listed you have a 1 in 4 million chance that it will be found or bid on till the last few hours when your item makes it to the top of the search and go now list.
if you list 500 or 5000 items a week your chances are that much better to sell..
Then again this is only one factor there are many more things that factor in to this
http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
Email [email protected]
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loosecannon
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posted on August 24, 2001 05:38:52 PM
"Then again this is only one factor there are many more things that factor in to this "
Yeah there is.
Did you say 50,000 or 100,000 weekly?
The thing is, you can't get much bidder interest in ho-hum items. You have to try and list quality things, no matter what they may be. For one person, or even a husband and wife team, it's not that easy to find tons of quality items, unless you are selling new catalog items.
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Microbes
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posted on August 24, 2001 06:03:54 PM
There is more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.
One item that nets you $400 is much less work than 100 items that net you 4 bucks a peice.
But 10,000 items a month that net you 4 bucks a peice would be a nice chunk of change. (more than I ever see in a month  )
But to do 10,000 items a month, I think LC is right, you have to be dealing in new items.
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quickdraw29
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posted on August 24, 2001 06:11:47 PM
"...you only have one item listed you have a 1 in 4 million chance that it will be found or bid on till the last few hours when your item makes it to the top of the search and go now list."
Dman, I think you are referring to Bidville. Ebay is more like 8 in 10 chance of having it viewed before the final 4 hours, and 20% chance of receiving a bid before that.
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outoftheblue
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posted on August 24, 2001 06:21:53 PM
>>"its kind of like playing the lottery if there are 4 million items listed on ebay today and you only have one item listed you have a 1 in 4 million chance that it will be found or bid on till the last few hours when your item makes it to the top of the search and go now list."<<
I don't agree with that. When a bidder comes to Ebay they don't just cruze 4 million listings. They look at a specific category they are interested in. I've never seen a category with 4 million listings
So Your odds of being seen are far better than you are saying.
Also, people use the search engine to search for specific items so that narrows it down even further.
People with the best items, prices and customer base are the ones who make the most sales. I've seen sellers with hundreds of listings that have very few bids.
[ edited by outoftheblue on Aug 24, 2001 06:23 PM ]
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dman3
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posted on August 24, 2001 06:24:46 PM
yeah that could be quickdraw but the point still valid incress your visablity and incress your sales..
http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
Email [email protected]
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dman3
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posted on August 24, 2001 06:40:05 PM
you may be right that people use search or shop categories.
Thing about this is Items are list by time left in reverse order most categories have hundereds of pages.
when people use search of category to shop they will surf at best 2 to 6 pages of A FEW hundered pages if you only list auction once weekly you are only in the top 6 pages the last day or two of each week.
I list 4 to 10 item every other day every day I have 4 to 10 of my items in the top 6 pages of category and search every day of the week this gives my Items and auctions alot more visabilty then even a person who list 300 auctions on only say sunday night.
listing your auction on ebay is no different then listing your website with a search engine the key is to get your items or sites in the top 10 the more places and time you show up in the top 10 the better your chance of selling.
think of every auction listing as a temporary web page in the auction community.
your auctions only make the top 10 for about 18 to 24 hours of its life each of your temporary pages link to the others the more pages you have in the top ten daily the more all your pages are viewed each view a possiable bid or sale.
Useing this method of listing I have many many time had Items I list be BINed in under 30 mins of listing and shipped to the buyer in less then 12 to 14 hours after I purchased the inventory to sell on ebay.
ONECENTCD on ebay is a good exsample of how haveing more Items listed in the top 10 on the list each day incresses bidding and sales they list 400 new listing every night 7 days a week all listings are for .01 they have pretty much a 95% sell thur rate and very few listing end with 1 bid.
http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
Email [email protected]
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outoftheblue
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posted on August 24, 2001 06:45:33 PM
dman,
You do have a point there. I list 4 days per week rather than 1. I think it makes a big difference.
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loosecannon
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posted on August 24, 2001 06:47:46 PM
"I've seen sellers with hundreds of listings that have very few bids."
You've got that right.
One seller who I have bought from before? I check on her auctions from time to time. She had something like 400 auctions that were closed but still showed up on seller search. Out of those 400 items she managed to sell less than 18%, no kidding. Any profit she might make on the items that did sell was surely eaten up in listing fees on items that did not. She needs to have a look at her methods, in my opinion.
I went through an amazing (to me) stretch recently, where I sold 90 out of 93 auctions. There is where the profit gets so much better. By not wasting those listing fees and your time.
Spelling
[ edited by loosecannon on Aug 24, 2001 06:53 PM ]
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dman3
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posted on August 24, 2001 06:50:46 PM
loosecannon
I agree now if we could only Know when that one or two buyers you know are out there that will want the items will be online we all could make profit we all love
http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
Email [email protected]
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bemused
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posted on August 24, 2001 06:52:07 PM
Sellers who list tons of stuff aren't necessarily dealing in new items. A local dealer in antiques and collectibles in my town has 3000+ unique listings going on eBay at any given time. I also have seen several sellers in the clothing category that are selling preowned goods that list a quite a bit, and clothing is a grind to list. Some people just have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.
Forgot to mention it helps if you load your items into an automated inventory/posting system.
[ edited by bemused on Aug 24, 2001 06:53 PM ]
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loosecannon
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posted on August 24, 2001 07:04:17 PM
If a seller can do the volume and give a high level of customer service, they are superhuman.
But more often than not, the high volume people have a lot of negs and neutrals. Maybe that's the price they pay--not being able to please everyone, making more mistakes in descriptions, shipping foul-ups, slow shipping.
Another seller I check up on--just to see how many negs and neutrals they got this month  has over 6000 positives, but 176 neutrals and 179 negs. OK, that's only around 5% bad marks, you say. But it sure looks ugly. And I would never bid on someone's auctions that had that many bad marks.
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MAH645
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posted on August 24, 2001 07:06:47 PM
I could list everything in the house for sale on E-Bay,but that don't mean I'll sell good just because I listed four or five hundred auctions.I list what I think will sell the best,I list about 300 auctions a month and most do well,but I am selective of what I list.For example just because I have 300 new videos on the self doesn't mean I'm going to list them all on E-Bay.Alot of them wouldn't sell that well,but they sell at the flea market.I have several hundred new T-Shirts,but they may or may not sell on E-Bay.So I'm not going to just list them for the fun of it.
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outoftheblue
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posted on August 24, 2001 07:12:24 PM
loosecannon
>>"more often than not, the high volume people have a lot of negs and neutrals."<<
You've got that right! I know of a seller that has a rating of 9978. They currently have 1632 negatives and 1332 neutrals.
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loosecannon
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posted on August 24, 2001 07:19:10 PM
outoftheblue
That's an amazing amount of negs and neutrals. I wonder how they get bids?
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outoftheblue
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posted on August 24, 2001 07:24:11 PM
They sell new items and have a sell through of [it seems] almost 100%. Most of their complaints are for shipping mixups and canned responses to emails. They have an automated system and expect customers to contact through a FAQ page.
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Microbes
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posted on August 24, 2001 07:45:12 PM
Ebay is more like 8 in 10 chance of having it viewed before the final 4 hours, and 20% chance of receiving a bid before that.
If those stats are right, I'm way ahead of the game. Almost everything I put up will have at least 8 or 10 page hits the day after I put it up. (I think some of my buyers have me bookmarked ) I've had items get over 100 page hits the first 24 hours.
Half my stuff normally has some kind of bid(s) before the last 24 hours.
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dman3
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posted on August 24, 2001 07:55:36 PM
Feed back is a funny thing the more you list or more to the point the more items and people you sell too the harder it is to please everyone.
Frist someone with 9000 feedback probably has sold two to three times that many items on ebay as not every sale will result in feed back.
For the small seller one in 100 or 150 sales might result in a neg, but then again it took the small seller more then like 1 or two years to make that many sales.
biger seller might have 100 or 200 sales every day or two resulting in two neg or neutrals..
http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
Email [email protected]
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quickdraw29
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posted on August 24, 2001 08:04:31 PM
I'd love to be able to do big volume continuously but I research what's selling good and only list those items. It increases profits and sell through.
dman, good points. It's an excellent strategy to mix up end times when listing within one category. That's my disadvantage of having a variety of items, very hard to gather a nice following.
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outoftheblue
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posted on August 24, 2001 08:17:45 PM
>>"That's my disadvantage of having a variety of items, very hard to gather a nice following."<<
I've noticed that. Even though we have a solid reputation 1560+ rating with 2 negs. When we attempt to sell in a new category it takes a while before we start getting similar prices as sellers that are established in that category.
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dman3
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posted on August 24, 2001 08:20:08 PM
Yeah but there is also an advantage to selling a mix of items as well in that your auction always look different and new.
Down fall its more dificult to gain a fallowing.
Either way the key is visablity if your listing are lower in the pile more often then on top you will alway come out on the short end.
when selling a mix of items featureing might be the better way to get on top.
http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
Email [email protected]
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MrsSantaClaus
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posted on August 24, 2001 08:28:00 PM
I recently started listing some items every day or so. Funny but I, too, noticed a greater sell thru rate.
Now, how can we get people to bid at the beginning of the auction and not waiting till the last few seconds?
BECKY
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hwahwahwahwa
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posted on August 24, 2001 08:43:07 PM
one ebay seller has 1364 items in 30 days and only 16 bids,think of the money spent on listing fee.
he has 5 children and he needs money as deposit for his wife's prenatal care as another child in on its way.
i think someone said it right,you have to have good quality items with low starting bid and they have to be scarce.
hard to find items which fit all three criteria.
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dman3
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posted on August 24, 2001 08:44:00 PM
You got me I use BIN on nearly all my auction though on some I get better turn over time many times buyers willstill wait till the last day or hour to buy it now.
I think the key is more when the buyer is on line Ebay is no different then B&M in this there store may hold more cutomers and they are world wide but still they arent all there at the same time.
I find there is a patern to selling most of the year holiday season the exseption, if you have 5 to 7 good days of selling and bidding it will be fallowed by 2 to 4 days of near no bids.
Then again keep in mind I mainly sell in one genral category or area.
The other patern I have noticed over time and I always watch for this now when there are people here posting about poor sales , I am usually getting lots of bids and sales at that time, so when I start to see is any one else haveing a bad week I incress my listings never fails.
http://www.Dman-N-Company.com
Email [email protected]
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packer
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posted on August 24, 2001 10:03:16 PM
With the wide range of things I sell(sizes and shapes), I don't like to have more then 50 items on at one time.
And usually I try to be pretty selective about what I put on.
I tried the listing 10 a day but that meant I had to do packing EVERYDAY. For me it is a major pain. Because I don't have a special area set up just for packing. I have to drag it out then put it all away again. I can't pack them ahead of time either(tried that)because often I have mulipal sales, so stuff needs to be combined.
I like to list about 3 times a week always trying to keep something on.
This summer though has been a bust for me. Just been listing piddlely stuff till the real buying season starts.
As far as high volume sales, I'm a one person production team...me, myself and I. No way could I keep up and keep the buyers happy.
Besides, when I look at another sellers "other auctions" and I see 10-20-30 pages of stuff, I back out because there is no way to find what I may be interested in. Now if we could do a search of just the sellers stuff that would certainly help.
packer
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twinsoft
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posted on August 24, 2001 10:10:28 PM
One thing affecting low-price, volume sellers is the never-ending postal increases. Buyers don't want to spend $5 to ship a $5 item. Most of the stuff is available at K-Mart anyway. Sellers try to make up for lower bids by increasing handling fees. Like that's gonna work.
Eighteen percent sell through sounds about right to me. I list 3-day auctions three times a day. That way, one of my auctions is always in the Ending Soon listing. Lots of the stuff gets no bids.
(But what's killing me right now are the deadbeats. Half the bidders didn't send payment this month. eBay may be tightening the noose but this is the worst month for deadbeats ever.)
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outoftheblue
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posted on August 24, 2001 10:25:59 PM
twinsoft,
>>"Eighteen percent sell through sounds about right to me."<<
I don't see how anyone could make it with an 18% sell trough. If we had that low of a sell through we would be out of business. We usually have about 60% with bids one day prior to the end of our auctions. We usually end up with about a 70+% sell through. I'm never satisfied with less than 100% but that doesn't happen too often.
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twinsoft
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posted on August 25, 2001 12:57:10 AM
I list the same items over and over again (using Mr. Lister). I always have 10 Dutch auctions running at one time. I've sold thousands of copies of each of my programs. It's not reasonable to expect all or even most of the auctions to receive bids.
Let's assume 20% sell through rate: $1.75 in listing and FVF fees to sell a $5 program. The item is a software program downloaded from the web so there's no shipping involved, just an email. That's approximately $60 bucks per month per item. I sell four of that type of item. So it's an easy $250 per month for very little work.
I also sell other types of items which have a much higher sell-through rate. But if you were to look at my listings, you'd see plenty of auctions with no bids.
It is true that sales are slower now than ever. In fact, this week, after 4+ years selling full-time online, I got a real 9-5 job. eBay will be only part-time for me from now on.
Another interesting statistic: Over 30 non-paying bidders during the recent 3-week period, totalling $800. That comes to about one rent payment projected over a month. AFAIC, eBay is history. At least with a 9-5 job, they actually PAY you for working!
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keziak
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posted on August 25, 2001 05:33:01 AM
Fascinating thread! It reminds me yet again that there is no one road to success [however you define success]. For example, there is a bookseller who used to be on this board who doesn't list very many items at one time, but she gets tremendous prices for all her books. Presumably her recipe for success is to spend her time on creating her ads, not on shipping hundreds of books each week. She also probably gets a lot of repeat business.
For those of us lacking that level of savvy, listing more items is necessary, but it's darn hard to keep up with the work when you are a solo operation. I am also frustrated right now with the amount of non-payments.
Sell-through is tricky to determine because of re-listing. Some folks have a strategy of asking higher prices and re-listing when they don't sell immediately. This is based on the principle that your buyer might not show up in the one week you list, but might show up next week. This also may work for some.
keziak
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