Whew 1000+ old item manual cleanup just finished....
Summary: ricarmic shared their experience of dealing with increased fees for maintaining multiple item categories on their online store after downgrading from an anchor store. They initially had over 1,000 items listed in additional categories, which was costing them $150 per month, prompting a thorough cleanup and reorganization of their store while it was temporarily closed due to COVID. ricarmic expressed relief at completing the tedious task, which also included updating listings and reducing prices. byto253 congratulated ricarmic on their efforts, while darak10 shared their own similar experiences, noting the tedious nature of such tasks. reallynicestamps added information about the complexity involved in managing such a large array of inventory.
When I downgraded my store from anchor in June, the fee for 2 category charges went up from 10c to 15c per item per month on COM.
I quit using 2 categories several years ago because it didn't seem to warrant the extra cost, however there were still over 1,000 of them live (remember I have items up to 12 or so years running). Unfortunately I lacked the enthusiasm to do anything quick about it (I absolutely hate "redoing" things) because the items were slowly selling and theoretically solving the problem on their own.
However the 15c each x 1000 per month was beginning to bug me above my enthusiasmlessness enough that I had recently been doing 5 or so "each day" to speed the process up, but this week I had the pleasure of having COVID again and my store is closed with the PO uncertainty so I decided to try to get through them all.
During the journey of "unsecond categorying", I discovered several other things needing fixing:
-old timers here will recall years ago all pictures other than the primary got "lost" for items renewing over a short while, I found about 50 of those and was able to fix up as I keep all my old pictures on flash drives
-stuff in less effective categories that were better to be moved
-stuff who's value has dropped and needed fixing. There were a lot more of these than I expected, and unfortunately NONE where the value should be more now 😪
I'm kinda sad that the store's closed while I updated them, it would have been interesting to see if the large number of price reductions in "old stuff" would've created any small burst in sales of them. It might still when the store reopens, time will tell.
You may recall that I analogize selling costs here as "advertising" expenses from pre internet days of old, so now the 2nd category fixup gives me around $150 worth of "advertising" "play money" to perhaps do some experiments with promoted listings, if required, otherwise it's an extra $150 a month in my pocket.
I'm sure glad to be done, somewhere around 20 hours of VERY VERY boring "work".....
reallynicestamps
·1 year agowhere all the inventory information about the product you want to sell is already there in 99.9% of cases i
Ricarmic is working in a category where the basic catalogue is 12 volumes long, covering 175 years of production, with three to ten basic descriptions for any individual item.
darak10
·1 year agoI've been doing some cleanup as well along these lines and it really becomes incredibly monotonous very fast. After 2 hours one day last week I was ready to start climbing the wall. The fundamental problem is the listing process here is way too work and time intensive. It should (have been, its too late to start now) be configured to operate like discogs where all the inventory information about the product you want to sell is already there in 99.9% of cases in their site database and all you have to do is add in some item specific info and you are done.
byto253
·1 year agoCongrats. That is making lemonade from the CP lemons.