I have a new theory about slow sales for Canadians

[sakic92710]

I may have been wrong about my theory on slow sales.  Most of my blame was on eBay's shoulders.  As if they were limiting how many views it was possible to get.  Thanks to their inept search.  However, I have been feeling the main issue may be the fact that many more Americans do not wish to make purchases outside of their own borders.  The amount of views I get is so low.  0-2 over a 30-day period on most of my items is ridiculous.  I'm not selling junk.  I hit a brick wall in fall of 2021 & nothing has improved since then.  However, my Marketplace sales have been ok.  Not great but, in some moments, kept me afloat.  Why would my items appeal so much more to local buyers, with less potential customers then a worldwide audience?  I think the pandemic affected their desire to have items shipped from other countries.  What say you?

[sin-n-dex]

Welcome @sakic92710  I've been trying to tell you for weeks to come and join us here. (For anyone who doesn't know sakic, they are a Canadian poster in the dot com forum).

I think you're right because on the dot com site buyers can screen for US location only. I'm not sure exactly where you live, near peterborough? You should look at cross border couriers in your area and see about dropping packages off to come into the US (and using a US item location), you may sell more items.

C.

[sakic92710]

Thanks for the warm welcome here.  🙂  😛   I do not have transportation so my options to get my packages to couriers is very limited.  I'm in the Niagara Region.  I used to live so close to the border that I could see the US from my backyard.  lol  Literally.

[sin-n-dex]

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@sakic92710 wrote:

Thanks for the warm welcome here.  🙂  😛   I do not have transportation so my options to get my packages to couriers is very limited.  I'm in the Niagara Region.  I used to live so close to the border that I could see the US from my backyard.  lol  Literally.

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Before I got a reliable car, and Chit Chats was in Burlington (I was living in Waterloo, it's 1.5 hour drive, still 1.5 hours but I'm near Simcoe now), I used to box up my shipments and put them in the recycle bin at the front of my house and FedEx would pick up the box. I was known, they showed up close to 8am when I put it out. You need to have enough shipments to make this worthwhile, FedEx box to Burlington is around $25 CAD. If you have a USA location in your listings you will probably get more sales, but you might have to build your customer base a bit to make this option worthwhile. Anyway that's what I did when I didn't have a reliable car and lived far away from the cross border couriers.

C.

[byto253]

To me it has always been a natural tendency for anyone that all things being equal you will order from inside your own country for delivered items.  To entice someone to order from outside their own country an item usually has to be very competitively priced or/and something desirable that they can't get elsewhere. 

[msau4301]

I've found the opposite to be true and the bulk of my sales are usually to the US.  

I had stopped my listings in November with the looming postal strike and decided to hold off for a couple of months while some of the chaos calmed down and finally did a few listings last week of January. I run auctions as I find they work best for me. I sold six items, five of them were for the US, one for Canada.  This tends to be somewhat normal for me but I do think that the views (and often bids) increase once there is any activity going on and this helps. If I have a few auctions with US bidders I think my items tend to show up for the US more than if there was no activity from the US. I was hoping there would be mostly Canadian buyers with the unknown (at that time) issue of the Tarriffs but even the items that had Canadian bidders were outbid by the US buyers in some cases.

I sell vintage Barbies, and I believe in a collectibles category people will still buy if the item is harder to find.

One of my items had a bid in less than 20 minutes (US buyer) so we are certainly still getting seen in search.

I am holding off again for a week or so as there seemed to be a lot of problems people were talking about at the border but will probably jump in again soon.