No Sales

Hi I'm not getting any sales unless I sell my items for a very low price any tips from anyone would be much appreciated thanks
Message 1 of 11
latest reply
10 REPLIES 10

No Sales


@videomediahouse wrote:
Hi I'm not getting any sales unless I sell my items for a very low price any tips from anyone would be much appreciated thanks

You need to fix your shipping for one thing. The stickers / cards should be able to go either untracked via oversized lettermail ($1.94) or tracked via expedited lite (~$8).  For USA you can use Tracked Packet (~$8). You might be able to do even cheaper with a cross-border shipper if there's one available near you.

 

Things like cards / photos / postcards / stamps / even CDs and movies tend to be a numbers game. Many sellers will have thousands or even tens of thousands listed in order to get regular sales.

Message 2 of 11
latest reply

No Sales

You are a new seller in an already over-saturated market...so unless you are listing something very unique, and selling these types of items at a competive price with competive shipping this venture may be a huge challenge and may take a goodly length of time for sales to come rolling in...

 

Message 3 of 11
latest reply

No Sales

byto253
Community Member

You need to take a good look at sold listings and the range of prices they went for, including shipping.   Compare that to what your selling price is and where it lands.  If you are in the upper end expect slow sales.  I toss out high and low outliers if there are multiple sales as well.  Hoping to get the super high price one person did does not normally work out and makes for a very, very long grind. 

 

The main market is the US and you are shipping from Canada which is a total no-go for a lot of people unless there is a reason to "risk" a foreign shipment.   All things being equal I will buy from Canadian sellers and that is very common.   

 

Note that I indicated sold listings, as the dream price current listings are at is not a good indication of the market and what things actually sell for.   A lot of those listings just stay there forever while the properly priced items get sold.   

 

Best of luck. 

 

Message 4 of 11
latest reply

No Sales

i understand your concern  about little to no sales -- its has taken me years to figure out what plan i use to sell here -- what works for me now -- is i start the month out with 5/10 % off with free shipping-- the if sales are good stay with that -- if not then boost it up to 25%off for a week - the if no  again or very litte sales then  then it 30%/35% off for a week - ususally that works -- but then when the bills have to be paid visa account/locker storage fees/ebay store fees/ misc. packing expenses/ and the deadline is near i boost up to 40 % till end of month- most times it works the bills are paid - almost  nothing for me but i resolved  to accept that issue  till i get rid of all my inventory- which will still be a while -i have started using a new postage trick that saves me a little - about 1/3 of my offering of freeshipping which i find almost manditory now here at ebay - tried all othe ways to ship --for me freeshipping is the only way to get people to comitt to make a sale -- i don't use promo listings anymore  just cost to much to make  a sale - it only worked when i used 25%  and up anyways -i rather give the customer the discount than give it all to ebay-- when my cost of sale goes under 20 % currently its 26% and higher some days i might try promo again- we will see -good luck  with yoursales --- hope the new year is better for us ebay sellers -- but it is what it is --  as long as it  gets no worse - i can last i hope  

Message 5 of 11
latest reply

No Sales

You got $2 pokemon cards listed for $20 + $12 shipping. Seems like you got huge pricing issues. 

Message 6 of 11
latest reply

No Sales

Videomediahouse:

 

To be very blunt Ebay is no longer a viable marketplace for mom and pops sellers - nor does it seem to want to be. I have been here for twenty years used to have between 100- 150 listing for heavy equipment here and when my ebay monthly fees outpaced my sales on the site - I simply quite selling at the moment only 1 item listed just as a placeholder.

 

Monthly limits Global

1,879more items

 

21 listed and sold / 1,900 limit on quantity of items

C $587,823.83 more

 

C $265,529.17 listed and sold / C $853,353.00 limit

 

Page views are none virtually non existant - and you are right unless you are giving it way - no sales.

 

Ebay keeps trying to get you to pay for featured listing but want stupid percentages again for no page views??

 

11 to 12% with no guarentee of a sale??

 

Promoted Listings Standard

Only pay when an item sells through a click on your ad.
25% more clicks, on average.*
 
Anyways just my two cents worth from a seller that is now no longer wasting my time here.
Message 7 of 11
latest reply

No Sales

To be very blunt Ebay is no longer a viable marketplace for mom and pops sellers - nor does it seem to want to be. I have been here for twenty years used to have between 100- 150 listing for heavy equipment here and when my ebay monthly fees outpaced my sales on the site - I simply quite selling at the moment only 1 item listed just as a placeholder.

 

21 listed and sold / 1,900 limit on quantity of items

C $587,823.83 more

 

C $265,529.17 listed and sold / C $853,353.00 limit

 

Page views are none virtually non existant - and you are right unless you are giving it way - no sales.

 

Ebay keeps trying to get you to pay for featured listing but want stupid percentages again for no page views??

 

11 to 12% with no guarentee of a sale??

 

Only pay when an item sells through a click on your ad.

25% more clicks, on average.*
 
Anyways just my two cents worth from a seller that is now no longer wasting my time here.
Message 8 of 11
latest reply

No Sales

since all of listings  have free shipping you seem  to not understand that iam not a pokemon expert  nor want to be and have been selling these for a widow who  really wants to get these prices and that is her connection to her died husband i guess----  i do sell a few here and there which keeps her happy

(76 listings)--- my main selling is hardware items (2056 listings)which a constantly below retail  prices from any store and with my discounts are most times close to wholesale if not lower  you seem to like putting me down all the time wish  you would stop iam just trying as i get through my illness get by trying to sell off my inventory  which i realize was a mistake getting involved in a couple of years ago listening to all the u tube people tell me and many others how easy it was to make a small income doing this -- with bait and switch tactics to get me to follow their feeds -- i have learned the hard way this is not path to gold or silver or even copper - its just getting bye each month with expensives climbing and sales droping- but it is what is 

Message 9 of 11
latest reply

No Sales

1 - Your photos don't look good small. Buy a white piece of poster board. Photograph your items against that. Crop the photos so that there is no wasted space on the longest side of your item (for example, the top and bottom of the VHS). You're wasting prime real estate to market your items to people in the search by making them appear smaller and difficult to see. People often browse on cell phones or small laptop screens. You don't have to re-take all your current photos, but I would consider taking 15 minutes to revise the listings and crop the main photo around the item so that it will appear bigger in the search results. 

 

2 - You do not offer lettermail shipping. Nobody will pay $13 to have a card shipped, unless it is a very high end card where $13 represents a very small amount of the value of the card and security is important. For cards like a $10-$20 Young Guns, you need to offer cheap shipping. The only way to do that is to ship lettermail. You will not be covered by eBay's seller protection. That means you will eventually lose a card to either lost mail or a scam. Theoretically, the increase in sales and profits makes up for having to refund a package every once in a while. 

 

3 - You don't have very many items. To produce sales, you need a lot of items. Trading cards and VHS tapes do not have high sell through rates. They are niche categories. I'll assume your items are priced at the market rate and not over or under priced. If you fix your shipping for your cards, and you sold 10 cards a month for every 100 listed, that's probably a pretty good sell through rate. eBay doesn't work in a way where everything you list sells right away. In order to sell a lot on eBay with niche or low sell through products, you need thousands of listings. At one point, I had something like 4000 piece of media listed, and that would generate 400-500 sales a month. A low sell through rate tends to be more draining when you only have a small amount of items listed, because it feels like nothing is selling, when the reality is that your sell through rate is similar to bigger sellers you just don't have as much listed.

 

4 - You need to promote your items. If an eBay item is not promoted and doesn't sell within the first 24-72 or so hours of you posting it, it probably won't sell, or it won't sell for a very long time. The eBay search defaults to a preference called 'Best Match'. That means when I type in an item like "Tim Stutzle Young Guns Rookie Card", eBay has an algorithm that will decide which sellers items to feature higher up on the 'Best Match'. Both newly listed items and promoted items get a leg up in being one of the first items shown. Promoted listings is an entire can of worms that I can't get into here because it is getting exceedingly complicated, but if you don't understand it at all, the best thing you can do is to simply choose a low flat rate and promote all your listings using that low flat rate. It might not be the most effective and optimal way to do it, but you will at least get some additional exposure via the 'Best Match' search and off-site traffic like people coming from Google searches. The only time you don't need promoted listings would be for a very niche or rare item with a lot of buyers and almost no competition. For 99 percent of items, you need promoted listings to make sales. 

Message 10 of 11
latest reply

No Sales

I was answering to the author of the thread. Not my fault you do the same and perceived it as adressed to you. 

 

You don't have much sympathy from me sorry. I wasted way too much time trying to help you or trying to buy your things. No need to be an expert to understand you can't sell a $5 item for $100 or can't charge $150 to ship a few cheap cards. 

Message 11 of 11
latest reply