posted on November 12, 2007 09:16:08 AM new
Vintageads4u & Pixiamom (I'd ask Neglus too... but I hope she's still enjoying her cruise!) and anyone else that wants to chime in....
I'm trying to figure out if I should try some of my ads with the free gallery sale this month. I figure you both sell similar items (with probably similar sell-through-rates), so I thought you might be able to help me decide if it's worth while.
Ever since they jacked the prices up on stores about a year ago, I moved all my ads to my own website (and have actually been very pleased with the results). I can easily list to eBay directly from my website store manager, so every once in a while I still send some of my stuff to eBay to generate additional traffic and get rid of some clearance lots. I usually do not use gallery pictures, since an extra $0.35 gallery fee is hard to handle with an average 8-10% sell-through rate!
Anyhow... I did try my hand at the 33% listing fee sale. I had a few house projects that I could use some extra money for... so I listed 787 of my better ads (all of them would have eventually sold on my website... I just figured I could get a faster turn-around on eBay). I also researched each ad I listed and made sure that there were no other identical ads already listed on eBay. It took a LOT of work... but it did end up giving me a slightly higher sell-through rate of over 12% (total 97 sold).
If I had sold those ads directly on my website, my total profit (not counting labor costs!) would have been around $950, about $9.50 an ad. However, with the eBay fees... my total profit ended up being closer to about $8.15 per ad. Had the eBay fees been normal listing rates... that would have dropped to about $6.90 per ad.
So... my question is this... do you think it's worth my while to re-list the 700 some-odd ads that didn't sell on the previous sale (keeping in mind that they're all good ads, with no/little duplication with other listings on eBay)? And this time add a Gallery picture? I really haven't used the gallery picture before, so I don't know how much it will help with my sell through rate. With the amount of labor that goes into each ad to prepare it for sale, I'd really prefer my profit not to drop below $7.50 an ad. (I really don't get how the sellers that list ads for $1.99 think that they're making any money...). I figure I'd have to have a sell-through rate of about 20%. Do you think a Gallery picture will make that much of a difference? (my guess is no... but if you've had good experience with the gallery, I'd definitely be interested in hearing about it!). Thanks for any advice!
posted on November 12, 2007 10:23:14 AM new
Gallery does help- the promo also has a negative side for auction listings. If a search returns less than 30 core listings, up to 50 store items will show with gallery.If I list a not too rare postcard in core I usually do it as BIN. I now check every item before listing to see how many others are out there. It has improved sell-through although my pile of unlisted cards is getting bigger and bigger. Both Neglus and I have started including scans of the back, hoping it will differentiate our cards. More work, more fees, same gross sales.
[ edited by pixiamom on Nov 12, 2007 10:23 AM ]
posted on November 12, 2007 06:52:04 PM new
Pictures would help, but I think that if the items didn't sell the first time, you problably won't see much action the second time around either.
If you go with that strategy, I would try some creative promotion to encourage early bids or to get people to bid on multiple items.
posted on November 12, 2007 07:14:36 PM new
Pixi: I can tell you that scans of the postcard backs can help with sales--at least a bit. I buy cards for our museum, and often the message on the back is as important as that on the front. And the addressee and the postmark, as well. I frequently have to e-mail sellers to ask about information on the backs.
The card writers are valuable to us, because they help date when those early pioneers were here.
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posted on November 12, 2007 09:23:54 PM new
So far with the free gallery my store front traffic is down, page views are down and so are visits. So........Sales have been down also. A little concerned since this is coming into my prime time so to speak.
I start my ads at $4.99 (proven sellers and new ads) shooting for a 20% sell through and since this gallery promo that isn't happening. I have tried starting overstock ads at .99 as a price leader just to try to drive traffic to my eBay store.
What I need is a way to get more traffic to my vendio store. I looked into valueweb and I don't see much of a difference from vendio. And yes I tried to get you a referral Vintage Paper Ads I have also started using google ad sense I know little late to the party but my first run at it a couple years ago was dismal at best so I thought I would give that another try so far zip. Anybody got any suggestions.
I don't relist if they don't sell I have them go right into my eBay store when they close. It is amazing how many sell at twice the price a week later.
posted on November 13, 2007 03:45:12 AM new
Hey Greg:
I just cancelled my google ad sense campaign. Why? Little response. The key words that make sense to us: vintage ads, vintage advertising are just not searched for that much.
You have to be specific in your ad word search. I got that from key word search programs, including googles.
So, you have to be specific in the key words and then I found out if someone is searching for "sapolio soap ad" tin man...well I am going to come up anyway.
So, the real problem, as you say, is how to drive them to the vendio store.
Bill K has discovered and this in on the store board that google is not placing the vd items. VD says they are uploading to google (or crossing over, or whatever) and it is google.
All I know is that my store business has disappeared. And prominent placement goes to independent web sites not hosted ones like vendio or valueweb.
One way to get traffic back to vendio is to close the eBay store and use vendio checkout, forcing folks into the store and then using a buy one get one free or something like that. Unfortunately, the stores here offer no promotional options.
I wish someone would open the Vintage Ad Mall and I would be glad to place my stuff right out there with everyone else.
Good luck with your sale. I have a sale schedule in my eBay store now and am using Markdown Manager instead of listing for a low price. Right now firefighting ads and health and beauty ads are 35% off.
From my analysis of our competition, two groups are making the most money or moving the most inventory. It seems the two highest sales are the higher priced Period Paper who also carries 16000 items in his store; 237 who runs about 2000 auctions at any one time and concentrates on certain cars, furniture, alcohol and booking ads.
As for moving inventory, the two or three folks selling everything at 3.25 - 4.00 and carrying 4-6 thousand items. The highest one is averaging about $36,000 so far this year (number might be a little low).
So basically, I think it has boiled down to carry about 6000 store items and run about 750 auctions/wk with selected sales running in your most popular categories.
Like every year, we will run the numbers in December and try to figure out what tweaks to make in January.
Beth
posted on November 13, 2007 05:37:16 AM new
After my post last night I went back and checked my traffic reports and you can see the drop in visits when the gallery promo started. Its free. My competition is finally on the ball and using gallery. So what to do? Keep plugging away like I have for the past 8 years? I must be insane no, no I'm friggin nuts.
I think (scary) that the key is getting your customers back by building a good customer base. I am using mystorerewards.com To send % off newsletters. Its a way to keep my name in front of folks. Upside is they take care of the newsletters sending the refund the downside is the customer has to use paypal and of course there is my store rewards fees.
My VS is showing up about 5th on my google searches and my Ebay store and core have the top 1-4 spots. One problem with VS is that your only allowed 255 characters in you keywords.
The bottom line here is that I want to find a way to wean myself off the Ebay teet.
Just a few simple thoughts from a very simple mind.
posted on November 13, 2007 07:14:10 PM new
one of the big reason that sales are down on ebay is because they are not advertising any pay per click on big search engines, when we were searching on a yahoo for any thing even some nonsense word ebay was on top and was saying find the so and so on ebay. now search your keyword on yahoo and you will not see ebay coming up. also what ever hit that we get to ebay there is big add at the top and the smaller adds on the side of the ebay pages that send our customers to other web site. this is really ridicules, they razed the fees and CUT the services. ebay was number 5 at one time and now rank at number 21.
I said this to my account manger and he said that they do TV and other kind of advertising instead. I really got upset and said this is crazy something that was working so good like a targeted pay per click advertising that made ebay go to the top 5 they stopped and they go back to camel riding with TV advertising, I said we need Targeted advertising to bring a buyer from the search engine to our sites, internet advertising is much more cost affective than the old kind.
please lets get together and put some sense into there heads. talk to you account mangers about this or ebay is going down... because we are losing money here and I know many power sellers left ebay for good..
posted on November 14, 2007 06:45:44 AM new
Thank you everyone for your detailed responses. Your advice has helped me to make a decision.
It sounds like Gallery would help... but probably not enough to make this a worthwhile endeavor. If Greg's having a hard time making 20% sell-through at $4.99... I doubt that mine will fare much better (especially as sthoemke points out that this would be a lot of recent re-lists.... not that it always makes a difference with vintage ads... but still...)
It would take a lot of work to get this relisted, and I'm going to focus that energy instead on listing more to my website. Business keeps on picking up there... and my profits are much higher.
Thanks again for taking the time to help!
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posted on December 5, 2007 08:12:08 AM new
Just a follow up on my results from the 33% off listing sale...
Originally, I had posted that I sold 97 ads... well, out of those, I ended up having 10 ads not sell due to non-paying bidders (and of course, some of those were ones with the better bids), and 1 ad that was paid for with a check that bounced.
So... as a result... my profit per ad ended up being closer to $7.40 per ad... (which would have been about $6.00 per ad with regular listing fees).
Based on these final results, I'm definitely glad I didn't try listing the ads with the gallery sale. It's just not worth it. I'm doing MUCH better with my own website. There's no reason to give eBay almost 40% of my sales, when I'm doing all the work. I'm just not interested in having a silent partner that makes all the rules and takes all the money. Not to mention... what's the good of having a larger customer base if over 10% won't follow through with the sale. Maybe I'll still eBay to list lots of ads that I want to clear out to get space in my office, but I think my days of listing individual ads on eBay are over. They are much better suited for sale on my own site.
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posted on December 5, 2007 01:32:17 PM new
Fluffy,
An intriguing suggestion... I had never thought of using the paid blogging services before. In addition to increasing your rank, did you see an increase in traffic and conversions as well? If so... it sounds like something worth looking into. Which paid blogging service do you use? I've looked at payperpost.com and it seemed pretty reasonable. If you have a better suggestion, though, I'd be glad for your input. Thanks!
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posted on December 5, 2007 04:11:51 PM new
I've been using PayPerPost Direct.
I developed a few arbitrary guidelines when selecting bloggers. They have to have blogged within the last week, otherwise it is unlikely they have much of a readership.
Their Alexa rank needs to be below 1 million.
And it would be nice if there was original content in the blog and not just a bunch of reviews of sites like mine.
posted on December 5, 2007 04:22:44 PM new
Conversion is an odd concept for me since I'm not selling anything on my website. (Most of my relatives still can't wrap their minds around THAT concept.) I suppose a successful conversion would be a visitor that looks at an eBay item on eBay by using my link, then goes on to either 1) buy something on eBay or 2) register on eBay. I won't kid you, we could definitely use more of those.
I can tell you, though, that the paid blogging led to my site being picked up by a lot of the widely-read free stuff journals, like TwistedBranches and freestufftimes.
You end up getting derivative links from the sites that index blogs by keyword (jewelry) AND other sites that extract goodies from the free stuff journals and post it as their own. Turns out to be lots of inbound links.
I think I've spent $30 so far on paid blogging. Well worth it!
I have other marketing suggestions for you, but you would have to add content to your store pages to take advantage of them.
posted on December 6, 2007 08:16:36 AM new
Fluffy,
Thanks for sharing that information. If you don't mind... I do have a couple of questions you might be able to answer for me. First of all... do you anticipate any problems with the recent Google PageRank Nuke of the payperpost blogs?
Also... how did you go about selecting your posties from the payperpost directory? I've tried their filtering, but it doesn't seem to narrow down the results specifically enough... and it takes a long time to wade through all the results. Is there any way to search the entire directory for a keyword in a posties blog description? That would make it much easier to find someone with some sort of content relation to my ads...
By all means... feel free to share your other marketing ideas with me. I'm certainly not adverse to adding additional content if it helps with sales!
Thanks for all your help!
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posted on December 6, 2007 08:44:20 AM new
A recent note from PayPerPost:
Since PayPerPost initially launched advertisers have been requesting the ability to target blogs based on actual traffic and influence. In the past we have provided you with Alexa and Google PR as a means to estimate these measurements. However, as savvy marketers, we all know these rankings leave something to be desired. A site with a PR 5 can have 10,000 visitors a month or 100 visitors a month. And, Alexa's toolbar sampling method is not necessarily representative of real traffic.
Now there is a more complete solution: IZEA RealRank. As a result, participating bloggers within the PayPerPost system have installed the IZEA Toolkit (ITK) to enable RealRank on their blogs. This piece of code allows us to report back actual traffic data and use that data to rank blogs based on the following criteria:
70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day
More information here: http://community.izea.com/blog/2007/11/what-is-izea-re.html
All the blog data is fed into our system and we calculate a relative number based on the metrics above. As an advertiser you can now choose to segment based on a RealRank number of 1-10. Each number represents 10% of the active users reporting with RealRank. If you want to limit your Opportunity to the top 20% of blogs select a RealRank of 8, for top 40% select 6 and so on.
Our goal is to provide you with the best possible social media marketing tools. You will see additional information like actual pageviews, visitors and traffic demographics in SocialSpark, our next generation platform coming in January. Thank you for your continued support. Check it out now!
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I don't think RealRank has debuted yet, but it will certainly help.
I have also started using google ad sense I know little late to the party but my first run at it a couple years ago was dismal at best so I thought I would give that another try so far zip. Anybody got any suggestions.