posted on February 19, 2002 05:42:07 PM new
Here are my nearly final results (I'm pretty certain I have 5 deadbeats). I also had one special item which was very expensive and not what I usually sell so I won't count that, so as to not skew the results:
Listings: 387
Sold items: 35
Deadbeats: 5
Gross sales: $528
Deadbeat sales: $116
Net sales: $412
===================
Conclusions:
Sellthru at less than 10%
Listing fees at $.05 each item would have been $19.35. That would have been suicide however as I would have given away many items at below my cost. I started my items lower than I did last year but at a point I was willing to sell at. My average sale was $15, so my listing fee relistically would have been $.15 each item or about $60. FV fees were $8.25. So if I was paying for listing fees, I would have taken in $412 and total fees would have been $68. That's 16.5% of sales.
And that's too much. Much better would be to let me list all 2000 of my items again for free and charge me 5% FV fee, which is what I recommended before there were any fees on Yahoo.
Compare this to half.com where I can list an item one time for nothing and forget about it until it sells. When it does, half.com takes 15% but they also handle the payments. All I do is ship when and where they tell me and they pay me twice a month. And my experience is that sell-thru is better on half.com than on Yahoo Auctions.
So my experience for this last free listing day is that sales are slower than when listings were free, prices realized are lower, deadbeats are about the same, and for all this work, Yahoo gets 16.5% of my sales. Not a very good report card.
posted on February 21, 2002 07:55:21 PM new
Sales have been poor for me at Yahoo for several months now. Items that used to sell well now just sit and cost me money. Lots of deadbeats who like to play games.
This whole auction thing is not as fun as it used to be. Now I pay for listing, pay for selling, pay for sending payment to me, and now when I do sell the post office gives me bullsh*t for sending packages.
posted on February 22, 2002 08:10:55 AM new
Just like you said ... but I think Yahoo ha finally figured out how to stop most deadbeats. The credit card verification with the special 4 digit code on the back of the CC card for both buyers and sellers has cut the deadbeat ratio way down at Yahoo.
I wish eBay would go that route too. Since they are intergrating Half.com into their auction site then why not force buyers as well as sellers to provide a verified CC before they can bid on auction items as well as buy from the Half.com components?
posted on February 22, 2002 08:54:57 AM new
eBay recently announced they will not be integrating Half.com with ePay after all into the same search engine. Good idea. They can't handle eBay's auctions, let alone the 100,000,000 listings at half.dot. They will be combining the feedback of the 2, if you want. It's up to the seller as I read it.
Yet the security suggestions you mention sure seem easy to do, if they weren't trying to pad their figures of registered users. I'll tell you one thing: With Half.com handeling the payins and payouts on that site, I'll bet there the deadbeat rate there is almost non-existant. They don't do chargebacks to the seller.
However I have had a customer say a game didn't work and half.com debited me for the sale before the buyer returned the item (and I haven't got the item back yet). It's been 3 weeks and my email asking what is the next part of the procedure to Half.com, has so far been unanswered.
