possible selling while on extended time away?
Summary: The discussion centered around the issue of selling items while on an extended time away. The participants busybeas_books, ricarmic, and musicyouneed contributed to the conversation, but their exact comments are not available for summarization.
We are finally retiring in June and will be RV traveling for 4 months or so before coming back home for the winter. Game plan was to do the 30-day time away and keep renewing that when needed and open as usual when we get back. I saw a few posts here about this, plus about changing things to out-of-stock. I don't want to lose my 9000+ listings.
We also sell stuff that we find on our travels on FB Marketplace or kijiji (local pickup only). Been doing that while on vacation for the last few years. I'd like to open the eBay store while we are away to sell a few things, probably just enough to make the monthly store fee. Larger potential market on eBay, plus with payments and postage do-able online it's a lot easier to sell from anywhere.
So, my thoughts are to use the time away as above, but before leaving bulk-edit the buy-it-now price on my present listings to some ridiculous amount, say $200? so no-one will buy them when we open the store to sell the occasional other item. Or do the high-price bit and just keep the store open.
Any thoughts or ideas?
musicyouneed
·5 months agoI have gone away for 95 days in 2024 and in 2026. What I did was put myself on time away for 30 days. Just before the 30 days expired, I ended all my listings. A week before I returned I did a sell similar and relisted all my items with a time away for 10 days. It worked perfectly for me. In 2027 I will be away for 132 days and I will have to figure out the best way to do it. But it will be something similar to what I have done in the past.
ricarmic
·5 months agoI have a problem with another site that synchronizes ebay items and can't handle bringing the shipping over.
Because of that, I set my international shipping on that site to $300 to stop people from buying before they ask what the actual shipping is, and darned if they haven't purchased with the stupid high shipping twice this year. Note that both items were small, like $9.99 plus $300 shipping and $14.99 plus $300 shipping. On that site PAYPAL is the payment vehicle and guess what in a refund scenario PAYPAL doesn't refund their fees (their accurate, I guess, belief is that they did the work to earn the fees, its our problem if we want to refund) so on both of those I lost money because the paypal fees that stuck were more than the price of the item.
My point is that stupid high fees don't necessarily stop purchases and be careful about whatever the bots think of a scenario here where a $15 item with $200 shipping ends up with a $200ish refund or full refund (which is a bigger defect potential problem).
As well, you run the risk of a fair number of annoyed potential purchasers sending emails asking about the stupid high shipping and/or they just block you going foreward on the belief that you'll always have the high shipping prices.
These are my actual experiences, although different categories may experience different results.