Ebay Sales Traffic 17th Dec To End Jan 2013

Woke up this morning to an email from ebay telling me that they have given me 5,000 free listing BIN or auction style from the 13th to 21st Jan 2014. If I did not have the feature store the free listing would not have been offered ebay has said.

It is midday Monday 13th here and have just finished listing 150 lots and am ready for listing tomorrow. Know it is time to make some stamp packets.

It is really nice to get some free listings this time of year but I still wonder if sales will happen in any sort of good numbers. But here's hoping!

Free listings are the main problem with ebay !

Without the listing fee there is no incentive for the seller to price to sell! Too many overpriced items just sit out there and take up space turning buyers off.

In the days before so many free listings buyers would start items low to make sure they didn't get eaten up with listing fees.

BidStart is a good example too. Hardly any new items get listed there. It's the same old stuff day after day.

These auction sites need to be reminded of what an auction really is.

I'm as guilty as the next guy. With no listing fees I start my items higher than I used to.

kcaramat: I strongly disagree as I don't follow that model at all. I only list on free days as the 30 cents per listing adds up fast otherwise.
And if you've seen my auctions in the past, I always use the auction method and start everything at 99 cents or less regardless what it is. I would think if I had to pay listing fees I would have to start things higher to make up for the costs.

Saying that, ebay has given many of the U.S. sellers up to 200,000 free listings between the 13th and the 21st. I'm almost prepared to launch a mix of older and new listings by tomorrow. There won't be 200,000 listings as ebay has set limits on most sellers, but I have about 6,400 items ready to start - 99 cents each or less. That's a savings of over $1900 in listing fees.

Higher fees normally equal higher prices - that' standard economics. Why would you increase prices if ebay is cutting you some slack? Stores which allow items to sit for more than a week with BIN prices can also lend to higher prices as items have a longer period to find a buyer. Sellers who think catalog prices are the golden rule or just cluless about prices equal higher prices. Also it seems dealers who normally sell via regular stamp shows have higher prices too, but at stamp shows you have less competition and there's less material for buyers to choose from. If you want to sell on the Internet, you have to be more comepetitive, have superior service and communication and (I can't stress this enough) you have to put a whole lot more into your descriptions and photos in order for people to find your items and feel confident in knowing what they are buying. "See photo" doesn't cut it. Without free listings ebay there would be less material to choose from and the prices would be even higher to absorb the overhead.

Will

Battlestamps. I applaude what you are doing ! All sellers should be encouraged to list at 99 cents or less. Then we have an auction.

ebay should discourage, not encourage fixed price and overpriced listings by charging a listing fee on them. They need to encouarge items starting at less than a dollar. No listing fee is the perfect way of doing that.

Pricing an auction starting cost is a science on its own.

Some listing strings of the same issued stamps starting at 99c or $1.99 has worked very well for me.

But it should be all about the buyer searching on ebay and looking at the prices the competitors have and buying the cheapest item from the search through bidding.

But a buyer will also pay a bit more for good service. As Battlestamps has mentioned service, description, communication and images are very important areas and I believe more so than the listing price.

The best part of having an ebay store with unlimited listings is the ability to list single items. We have found that this model used in the right areas has worked very well.


I have my pricing model and it works for me. By lowering or raising the listing costs directly governs income. If you can not get your stock at the right price nobody is going nowhere. Many things have to aline to make selling work on ebay.

When we have our ebay anchor store up and running our final value fee is 7.5%.

How does this FVF compare with US.com & UK.co charges?

ebay gave us 5,000 free auction listings from the 14th Jan up to and including 21st Jan.

Started the auction maturing with 27 lots with bids on them.

The sales would not of payed for an anchored store but every bit counts at the minute as Feb has a huge ebay bill incoming.

So today the listings freebies finish. But they are telling me I have 160 listings left at no cost because of the feature store so it should let me list most of tomorrows listing. At the end of next week normal listings with our anchor store will start again. Which is very nice. That bit extra income helps a lot.

With the extended listing from Dec over flowing into Jan & the 2,000 free listing that ebay offered over a period of 8 days in Jan. We managed a very modest income of a bit over $350 which is a gratefully received for our monster ebay bill for Feb.

Our store opened up again on Monday The 3rd Feb. Lots of work to get the store in shape again.It is going to take 2 to 3 week all going well.

Looks like over 400 listings tomorrow. I do not really want to count them. Wednesday is our best day of the week and we just about have a complete set of all high values plus a good amount of perf differences from 1990 to 2013.

Personally I can't STAND the BIN fee, it's absolute garbage, not to mention that non-store users don't have to pay for BIN on their first 50 auctions (or listing fee) but the stores have to pay for BIN from the get go unless it's a BIN only non-auction listing.

BIN should be free as many people I know don't want to wait until the end of an auction, myself included. So optimally it would be nice if I could offer the auction style, but with a BIN for those that want to grab something right away. As a store subscriber, the most annoying thing for me is having to pay for a BIN on auctions. I will do all fixed price listings and then the next time they do a 5000 free listing with bin promo, I will end a few hundred auctions and then relist everything auction style with a BIN.

I feel like I can't even pass gas without ebay trying to make money off the methane.

Hi Faken

Can see you have a bit of pain going on. I will talk about some of our painful journeys with ebay's ways.

I have some BIN only items up, packets & kiloware, my prices might be a bit high but I feel the biggest mistake I made is I did not list them as auction or BIN & auction.

We started the 1st 27 months as a ebay.com store until US ebay pulled the carpet from under us. They called us "inter boarder traders" & then the one that totally smashed us was "Aliens".

The 1st 2 months on ebay Australia as a store we could only afford a 20c BIN listing as a auction listing was $1.50 under $100 and no free listings of any sort for a store or no store & 1 month before we changed to AUSeBay they dropped the $1.50 gallery image charge per any listing.

Then a huge changed 2 months later, in May 2013 AUSeBay offered us an Anchor store for $499 per month with unlimited BIN or auction style listings. ebay.com's Anchor store at that time was $199 per month with 5c BIN & 10c Auction under $20.

AUSeBay still charge a $1.50 per auction listing under $100 for non store owners after their 40 free listings & for Basic & Feature stores after their free listings finish. I still think a BIN listing is 20c per listing after the free ones.

When we changed to Auction listings our sales jumped by over 400% and that was using the same BIN item costs. It looks to me our buyers want time to find the best deal & plan ahead as using a budget for buying.

Edit: To correct dates.

Started the new stamping season with 50 lots with bids on them.

A very nice welcome back!

This week starts with the 1st time we have had over 1,000 listings.

Yep! A sharp drop in sales per normal mid Dec we find and we are using ebay feature store Jan as a norm.

Things should be back to normal beginning Feb with the building up of an ebay anchor store once more. Have heaps of stock I have never listed before.

Looks like a very good year for our ebay store. A bit more stock to bring on line. It will be our 5th and final year of our apprenticeship in selling on ebay.

Anchor store for $499 per month with unlimited BIN or auction style listings this is a big fee to pay especially during the quiet months. Personally I find the feature store is the best value, anchor store not worth it unless your a huge dealer. December was huge for me but Nov was down compared with last year. Am taking a break from auctions this week and next then back into auctions Jan 2nd 2015. I find this time of the year Australia post is well begind in deliveries so things get held up in back log. Good time to have a couple of weeks off. KGV good on you getting 50 lots with bids, I got up to 60 lots the other day, but not listing anythig new this week. Happy xmas & holidays to all.

Hi Duncan.

The 50 lot was last Feb.:)




An anchor store for $499 unlimited auction listings is the best by far store option for us.

With 250 different interpost listing per week alone it is making the listing cost half price.

So for next year we will list 5,000 lots per month. So if I did not have the anchor store offer it would cost me $5,000 per month to list the stuff instead of $499.

If I had the time there is covers all years, Decimal 1966 to 1989,
all of pre-decimal that I could develop and list but who has the time.

1966 to 1989 is ready to go but I just do not get the time to list it.

But coins are the next extra we will do!

Our selling focus is locked in and we are ready to do our 5th year apprenticeship on ebay