Any Thoughts On HipStamp?

I can't image how long it must take to scan so many items, KGV!

If you have KGVs with good postmarks, I'm always good for it. I'm a kind of postmark hound.

Every time we have one of these discussions it makes me nervous. I hope to get 5 more years out of ebay but my trophy wife maxs out her SS in a little less than 3 years so I guess I could stop then. I have worked for years building my ebay business and have nearly 400 followers, I have no interest in starting again on Hipstamps. I think the perfect solution would be for ebay to sell the entire "Collectable" category to someone who could operate it properly.

That being said my sales are fine I list 70 auction items/week all starting at $2.59, my average sale is $70 with about 10 bids per item. If I occasionally sell an item at a bargain price it's ok sales volume is more important to me.

Re. DOGGFD's earlier post...

Just read your post on how you list items on ebay at auction and then go to BIN with a synch on Hipstamp if they don't sell first time around.

Sounds like a really good strategy and I'd like to give it a try. However, doesn't it mean that your ebay inventory keeps increasing and so listing fees ultimately kick in after you've used your free quota?

Or are your Hipstamp listings detached from ebay at some point so that the ebay inventory is always at a lowish level?

nick777vvv -

Its all a numbers game, with a little patience thrown in. I've managed to sell on ebay for many years without ever opening a store there. I use my 50 free listings, and then wait for ebay to offer free listing 'specials,' where they offer anywhere from 50 to 200 additional listings. These offers vary in frequency depending on the time of year and I don't know how ebay doles them out and who gets them and when. Around Christmas time, for example, ebay had several offers, and at one point, I had over 400 listings active, all with no listing fees. Right now, I have 234 up, mostly BIN and 20 or so new items running as auctions. Anything that is in BIN on ebay is also listed in my HipStamp store. If items end unsold on ebay, I just let them sit in my 'Unsold' folder until the next free listing special comes along, and then relist them with no listing fees.
Using HipStamp as a "cloud," I can always pull items from there back to ebay. At times, ebay gets chintzy with free listing offers and items in my Unsold folder expire due to age...but they're always available to me at HS. Obviously, its important to keep adding new items (to both venues)to keep things fresh, but I'm always amazed at how many old items sell when I relist them.
All this said, my sales on HS have really picked up so hopefully at one point I'll be able to go 'all in' there and slow down my listing dance on the Bay. Its really time consuming to the point where I have less time to play with my collections...

docgfd

This is very useful, thank you. I wasn't aware of the flexibility of effectively using Hipstamps to send listings back to ebay after they'd expired. I will explore the functionality. Like you, I get plenty of free listings with ebay (currently 100 per day). At 3000 free listings per month, who needs a store? However, I'm sure it is a honey trap and if I used anything near my quota I would be pushed into getting a store.

So new listings at ebay with the main repository being Hipstamp sounds like a good compromise.

nick777vvv asked "who needs a store?"

Remember, store owners only pay 6.15% FVF's for selling stamps. Non-store owners pay 10% (I think) FVF's on stamps. At some point, your sales volume grows high enough (around $570/mo sales, if my assumptions & quick calculations are correct) where it's a no-brainer to pay the monthly store fee to get the lower final value fee.

That's the (only) reason I still maintain a store on ebay. Well, that, and I also believe ebay gives preferential search placement to store-owners over non-store owners, although nothing is easy to "prove" (or even understand) with ebay's search algorithms...

"Remember, store owners only pay 6.15% FVF's for selling stamps."

What level of store do you have? If memory serves, a starter store on ebay still has a 10% FVF, so paying $5/month for the 'privilege' makes no sense to me. Investing in a higher grade store does provide a discount, but isn't it based upon a sliding scale of some sort? And once you reach your store's monthly allotment of listings, you still need to either wait for free listing offers or pony up listing fees anyway.

HipStamp already offers a FVF discount on even their least expensive store, so as that venue continues to gather steam, it makes sense for me to migrate to there completely...eventually...using ebay strictly for a few auctions.

As far as search visibility goes, I've noticed no deleterious effect, but that's likely due to my selling predominantly postal history which makes my listings 'one of' (as opposed to, for example, selling a US Scott 295, where there's dozens up for grabs).

That all said, if my livelihood depended upon being a dealer, I would look at an ebay store much more closely. As a collector selling my overflow, I'm comfy not paying for a Basic or Premium ebay store and ending up scrambling to recoup those fees via sales (even with discounted FVF's).

docgfd, I have the $21.95/mo store type (not sure what that's called) - every store subscription at that level and above gets you the lower FVF's. If you're selling more than $570/mo, you should have that same store too. It will save you money.

I also receive a 10% discount on FVF"s for being a top rated seller. That lowers my net FVF to 5.54% on stamps.

I've looked at HipStamp over the years, but they'd have to be (well) below 5.54% FVF to have any shot at earning business from me. ebay has orders of magnitude more buyers...which results in better prices and better % of sales for sellers. Despite ebay's ongoing multi-year (multi-decade?) effort to ruin everything, they're still king (by a lot) when it comes to stamps IMO.

The arithmetic of fixed costs & break-even points is simple, but the mathematics are more complex.

For example, you might not even want to be actively selling every month of the year.

Or, at a certain age, you may find that you are losing a month/two here/there for illness, caregiving, life cycle events (your kid has another kid), major vacations, etc.

The monthly fee will have 12 months per year, but your sales target should be based on less than 12 selling months per year.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Don't forget that - here at least - there are usually a couple of ebay offers per month under which final value fees are limited to £1. Can be worth concentrating your better items at those times. And, as iP points out with his customary sagacity, there will be months - July, August for me - where you won't plan to sell, as well as others where circumstances will prevent it.

IP, you can go on a month-to-month basis with stores (stop paying when you're not selling, pay when you're ready to), but it's slightly more expensive than if you commit to a full year at a time. Your point is well-taken though - if your selling is uneven/you take "breaks" during the course of the year, then you should compare on an annualized basis (i.e. do you sell more than $6,840 per year - if so, the store subscription will still save you money, even if you do all your selling in a single week.)

GeoffHa, I don't ever recall a US promotion limiting FVF's to something so low... Surely there are strings attached to that? Regular sellers would list all kinds of expensive items if fees were capped at such an absurdly low level.

I have a premium store, 1000+ listings-its a hobby and fun. Am I gettimng rich? Heck no, $45.00usd a month vs. $100.00 on Fee-bay-still sell 50 free listings monthly an ebay-laast month on ebay was $200.00usd-last month on hip-$75.00usd-go figure. good luck

Thee are strings around the FVF offers - cars, and, I'm sure, lots of other things - but not the printed ephemera I sell!

srailkb -

" ebay has orders of magnitude more buyers..."

No argument from me there, and that's why I still sell there. Right now, HipStamp is more of a cloud repository for items that, over time, haven't sold on ebay. These items are selling more & more as time passes, so I think down the road, HS will become a serious competitor of eB's.

I just have a basic store at HS, and I think my FVF runs around 8%. I'd have to look at their fee schedule to see if their 'better' stores can compete with the percentage you're enjoying on eB, should I decide to upgrade some day.

I'll ignore the immature "fee-bay" nonsense, but if you're going to slag on ebay in favor of Hipstamp, at least have your facts straight.

The premium store on ebay is $74.95 per month, not $100... and it drops to $59.95 per month if you commit to a year's subscription. I don't know of anyone who uses a store and doesn't have a subscription. I suppose for beginners who don't want to commit, but those people are unlikely to be subscribing at the premium tier, instead opting for one of the cheaper tiers to get their feet wet.

It's a moot point though, as all these comparisons assume (erroneously) that your sales are going to be equal on Hipstamp vs. ebay. My experiences with Stampwants, I mean Bidstart, I mean Hipstamp as a seller when I listed the same items concurrently was that monthly sales on ebay were more than 10 times what they were on Hipstamp. Doesn't make half-price fees seem all that attractive any more, does it?

As long as Hipstamp retains its horrid, useless listing page format where everything is separated across several tabs, so you have to play clickfest in order to find all the information, rather than having a single continuous view option, I won't be back... as a seller or a buyer.

The site is a horrific user experience.