Poor search results despite better prices

[mathman87vw4]

I'm trying to offload ultra low-end cards and I'm having extreme difficulty doing so.  It seems like nothing I have tried is generating sales.  I'm seeing some sellers move as much 2k+ units over 6 weeks and I'm thoroughly frustrated that I've only achieved 1% of that.

I concede that I can't compete with sellers in the ultra low-end space willing to do free shipping for 99c cards.  However, I see lots of sellers who charge high shipping fees and still making a ton of sales. Initially I charged a fair bit ($1.38) to cover postage and eBay fixed fees, but I mentioned in my title that I would manually refund shipping if they purchased more than one unit.  Recently I tried a bunch of things like dropping my fees to 48c, upping my promoted listings percentage but nothing has worked.  The same sellers consistently appear at the top with their high shipping fees and are making tonnes of sales.

It seems like the only thing people use is "Best Match".  Nobody seems to sort by lowest price + shipping; I would like to think I would have more sales if they did because I feel my shipping prices are competitive.

I like to think I filled out all of the item specifics fields to the best of my ability but it didn't matter.

I'm almost out of ideas.  The last thing I can think of at this time is photos.  The top-ranking listings seems to have photos for each variant.  Low-end listings have 120-200 variants and it would take forever to upload photos for all of them.  I don't have photos for every individual variant because it is so time consuming to add them.  It already took an awful lot of time to add all of those variants.

I've heard of terminating listings and reposting but it feels insane to put the exact same posting and expect different results.

Any guidance would be appreciated.  I'm not looking to make huge profits here.  I'm trying to utilize my spare time to recover as much of my money as I can.

[flipistics]

I've had very little luck with variants (in other categories). If you're set on using them, I would recommend you use some kind of language in the title to make it clear. Perhaps something like "Choose A Card" or whatever other sellers in the sports card world are using.

I'd also point out that you may want to rethink how you're selling the cards. Perhaps put logical lots together or something. Honestly, if you're selling a card in some cases for 0.99, even if you recover the full shipping value, by the time you pay for normal selling fees plus the $0.30 transaction fee, cost of shipping supplies, etc you're making next to nothing for the time it will take you to process and ship the cards. Some of the big sellers are probably relying on huge inventory levels to both get multiple items in each sale as well as eliminating the need to take photos (they've already taken them in the past, so they can simply tick their available inventory count up by one).

I wonder if shipping the items out without any protection in a PWE (you might want to write that out as most people probably have no idea what you're talking about) is also turning people off. I suspect getting rid of your entire discount section (which is rather complex), putting your shipping cost up to your actual cost, and just have (and mention in the description) flat rate shipping might get some better results.

Just some things to think about.

[mathman87vw4]

I appreciate your thorough feedback. It's not that I'm set on variants. I've just seen insane success from other sellers and I'm trying to figure out how to replicate that. Turbo listing one common card per posting feels more time consuming than variants. Regarding shipping, I didn't realize I may be conveying such a negative message. Lots of sellers don't actually specify it, it feels implied based on shipping cost. I am starting lower-end team sets. It moves more cards for less eBay units. I am also testing out "Choose A Card" verbage to see if that helps.