good untill cancelled has started, with a "to help your item sell better" flag..

[esclyons]

just did a bunch of relists, and they all default to good till cancelled.. if they didn't switch back to 30 day listings for the USA, i really doubt they will listen to our concerns..

[mrdutch1001]

earlier in the day I was still able to list at 10 day for fixed price but short time ago that option disappeared and because I was bulk listing, have a bunch of fixed price on GTC. So I guess the balance of my listings will be a combination of auction format and GTC. I will be ending most of the GTC listings at 10 days, some at 14 days and others I will assess at the 10 day point and make the decision to end or leave for longer duration.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

Just seeing it now too as of a few hours ago. One of the recurring complaints on the US board was that for folks that sell only a few items or are away from time to time, it made it difficult to schedule/plan their life. They were extremely unhappy about that. Also for items that were time sensitive, it doesn't work very well. 

-Lotz

[2nd-time-around-jewelry]

I think I will be cancelling my Premium store subscription. Thankfully I only pay for it monthly. Sales have virtually dried up for me. I have not had any sales for 16 days. The GTC will not help my cause. Hopefully my unsold items will be kept for 90 days if I decide to sell again.

[femmefan1946]

@lotzofuniquegoodies 

for folks that sell only a few items or are away from time to time, it made it difficult to schedule/plan their life.

Seriously?

You've planned a vacation. Before you leave, you close your listings (or for the few that have a Store, put it On v]Vacation).

Done.

Noi visible listings, no sales.

This is not rocket surgery.

You get knocked down by a bus.

Ten day listings wouldn't help anyway. A backup person who can close all your listings in an emergency springs into action.

Done.

And what's the worst that happens?

You use all your Fifty Free Listings and are charged for a dozen or so at 35 cents each.

That's less than I paid for an ice cream cone at the beach today.

You get a sale and can't ship.

See "close listings when going on vacation".

I am old and cranky.

[femmefan1946]

Also for items that were time sensitive, it doesn't work very well.

Like concert tickets?

You can list them as Auctions with a set time of ten days or less OR you can close the Fixed Price Listing whenever you want.

Some people just don't like change.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

Removing features/options/choices is rarely an improvement. I find it strange that lots of folks are complaining about a complete drop in business as of late...Both US & Canadian sellers since this change was first implemented in the US. Will it boost sales here? Who knows? I'm not really all that confident at the moment it will. To be honest I don't recall any of the recent changes causing a major spike in business. At least, not to mine.

-Lotz

[forester_studios]

As well I often watch the reseller channels on youtube in the UK. There is a vibrant and very cohesive social network of ebsy sellers there. Many have been selling a long time and are very knowledgeable sellers and many of them talk about the significant drop in sales the last few months. Coincidence? Perhaps, perhaps not. We are all guinea pigs in ebays experiment.

[Anonymous]

How does "to help your item sell better"????  eBay better tell us!!!

[femmefan1946]

I currently also list on AZ and have listed on etsy in the past couple of years.

In my experience there, both sites ONLY offer "good till cancelled" listings.

I guess that explains why sales have been poor on both sites and why both sites are going broke.

[kawartha-ephemera]

I'm prepared to give GTC a go for a spell before deciding in my own mind whether this change is good, bad or indifferent. 

At this point I've only the experience of carrying 30 to 40 GTC each month since April on .com. The early results have been kind of uninspiring .... over that period there have been a total of 5 sales. 

I've yet to settle on a strategy as GTC is new for me, have never used it in the past, instead preferring auctions and 30 day  BIN formats. I did end a group after they had run for a full 2 months, have still a small group that are into their 3rd month. 

As expected the ebay impression data numbers trail off quite sharply over time.  I spent a little time tracking impressions for individual listings by adjusting the report dates, checking the trend for each of the last 3 months .... the impression declines month over month run anywhere from 20 - 50 %. Those are big numbers so it seems very obvious search loses interest in unsold GTC listings fairly quickly. Perhaps sellers with stores may circumvent regular search declines if they have regular repeat buyers using store search or even google search.

My first run strategy is going to be ...  let GTC listings run a maximum of 3 months, end them, replace with new inventory. We'll see how it goes.

[kawartha-ephemera]

---

@femmefan1946 wrote:

I currently also list on AZ and have listed on etsy in the past couple of years.

In my experience there, both sites ONLY offer "good till cancelled" listings.

I guess that explains why sales have been poor on both sites and why both sites are going broke.

---

Etsy does not have mandatory GTC, if a seller chooses to, they can limit the listing term to 4 months, at that point the listing automatically goes inactive without any action taken by the seller.  Sellers know what term they are commiting to there,, you can pay for 4 months on day one and then just let them run without fretting that they will rollover incurring unwanted fees. 

The folks behind etsy are not saints either by the way. Same search nonense is creeping in there too.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

@kawartha-ephemera 

See post 3 for a dot com experience for a test with sell similar when you still could.

https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/My-month-started-out-slow-only-20-sales-for-the-month-to...

Curious to know how business has been, since then?

In speaking to a US home seller that seems to have lots of transactions per month, their system is to use BIN with best offer and sell low for EVERYTHING and add a few bucks on shipping to make their profit.  Average sale price $1.30. Not sure if that will work for all. Guess, to each their own.

-Lotz

[reallynicestamps]

An average selling price of $1.30 strikes me as someone who is not good at arithmetic.

Allowing for Free Listings, a $1.30 sale would have a 13 cent FVF, plus a 30cent Paypal non-refundable fee plus a 2,9% * processing fee.

That's 47 cents. Before the cost of packaging and procurement costs.

And nevermind labour.

I can understand that kind of pricing if most sales are multiples -- we used to see that in the Scrapbooking category-- but on single items?

*for domestic sales, 4,4% for international sales.

[kawartha-ephemera]

That sort of figure does seem awfully low.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

@kawartha-ephemera @reallynicestamps 

Approximately 1100 assorted items. Clothing, shoes, books and collectables. A few sell in the 20.00 to 30.00 range but the vast majority of recent sales were under 5.00. Over 10 years selling.

-Lotz

[kawartha-ephemera]

@lotzofuniquegoodies 

The 1.30 asp product I would assume ships via regular lettermail.  Would I be correct in thinking the seller in that case is likely recovering all of the FVF + postage + envelopes + misc other costs with the S&H charge leaving the 1.30 as the net amount realized? 

Don't know what the product being sold is but at times low quality paper type of items can be purchased for mere pennies, not much reward in selling that sort of thing but virtually zero investment or risk either.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

@kawartha-ephemera 

It's a US seller using either First Class Letter Mail or First Class Package/Priority Pkg with normally insane rates attached.  Hardcover 300 page book 24.00 CAD for shipping via First Class Parcel.

Very likely things they are picking up for pennies.

-Lotz

[canshal]

I agree with you. Managing listings is becoming a real chore. And potentially costly. I am starting to question if a store is worth it....

[recped]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

How does "to help your item sell better"????  eBay better tell us!!!

---

I started using GTC in March even though I list exclusively on .ca, I did this because I didn't want to leave it until the last minute and then find myself confused about how it would work.

So far the results have been quite good, sales since March 1st are up considerably. Although I can't specifically tie that to GTC there are some indicators that prove that (for me) it helps.

One of the biggies is that previously my 30 day listings would end and it might be a few days or weeks before I relist them, now I'm seeing sales on things that in the past would not have been listed.

The other indicator is that for the items I have multiples of, I make a sale and then another a few days later and then another a few more days later and this is for things that in the past sold but usually only once every month or two.

I'm also see more traffic coming from outside eBay, it's still small but it's been growing. That means eBay's point about stable URL's is working as they said it would. Before using the GTC I would sometimes find my items through Google but when clicking the link I was often taken to a generic page instead of my specific listing, that is because the URL Google had was no longer an active listing.

All that said, June was really slow for me as it has been for others. Fortunately I had a couple of extremely large orders (not normal at all) which made my final numbers quite good.

It's only 2 days but I'm starting to see a bit more "action" in July.

For me at least GTC is following the same pattern as when under duress* I switched from all Auctions to almost all Fixed Price, I resisted for many years but when I made the switch in 2008 it became apparent that Auctions were outdated for my stuff with the exception of select rare and in demand items which most of stuff is not.

*The duress was my auctions were not selling as they had from 1999 - 2004.

These days as a buyer I often eliminate Auctions from my search results, I'm probably not the only one doing that. I only bother to look at Auctions if I'm searching for obscure items that will only be listed by one or two sellers.