Readers Questions

Why Aren’t My eBay Items Selling?

Today’s question comes from someone from the Wholesale Help member’s club in a private message. I won’t quote the whole thing, but I’ll give you the gist: “I researched my niche, I found an item, I bought the item, I had some good sales, and now the sales have slackened off. Why are my items not selling?”

There are a few things to cover with this. I’ve narrowed it down to three core selling elements, and it all ties together with a fourth. The three keys are: demand, profit margin, and competition. Your profit margin and lack of competition don’t matter if there is no demand. Your lack of competition and demand are pointless if there’s no profit margin for you to make money off your sales. Your demand and profit margin mean nothing is the competition is too high, because you’ll never be seen among the crowd. These are all good things to research before you by a large number of an item. Of course, if you find yourself having issues with these things, it’s best to lower your price until you sell out of the item, make your money back that you spent on getting said item in the first place, and try again with something new.

Of course, there can be variations to these rules. For example, it’s okay if you have a good profit margin and low competition but the demand is a little lower. When buyers do look for the item, low competition drives them to you and the high profit margin puts money in your pocket. If profit margin is the weak element, but you’re still selling a large number of the product, you can make that work. If you sell fifty items at a £1 profit, you’re still going to make £50. I don’t like to do it that way, but it could work out. Competition is hard when it comes to variations, though. If there’s a high demand, you may still make some money, and it may be worth it if the profit margin is astronomical, but several dozen other people have that same idea.

The final thing that ties all of this together is scale. It would behoove you to stock your eBay store well with complementary items, because some items sell quickly, some don’t, and some fluctuate between highs and lows in regards to demand. Having more items stabilizes your business. If you have one item that you sell five times per month, you’re still doing okay. But, imagine if you had twenty items, all of which sell five times per month. Instead of making five sales per month, you’d be making a hundred. If your profit margin were at, say, £20/item, you’d be making £2000/month. In terms of sales, that’s not bad at all.

While that’s the general overview of the question itself, I’d like to take a moment to thank you guys. By my donating 20% of all the profit from the sale of my eBay tutorial DVD course (which is still available for sale!), we’ve managed to raise over £300 for cancer research, which comes out to over $500 USD. If you haven’t already gotten the DVD, I wholeheartedly encourage you to do so. The DVD will help you and your business, and your purchase will help fund cancer research.

Check out the video below for a more detailed description of the above!

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How to Ship Multiple eBay Items

Glen over on the YouTube channel had a great question for me about shipping multiple items.

“I am new to EBay and plan to sell items slow to begin with, but obviously I want to speed it up. How do I handle shipping multiple items a day? I’m not too worried about the time aspect – more the cost. Are there any tips that you have for saving time or money? Do you always use the Postal Service or sometimes FedEx? Do you have your own label printer and scale?”

There’s no specific answer to this as such, because there are many different ways to post. Some of them will be country-specific and the cost will vary. You as a seller have to determine whether time-efficiency or cost-efficiency is more important. Once you get past a certain level of selling, you might be able to earn some discounts on shipping rates from your local post office, so keep an eye out for that possibility.

Personally, for the most part, I use the integrated postal application right on eBay. If you’ve got heavier items, you’d be better off to go with a courier, but for smaller things, the application on eBay is convenient.

You tell it what kind of parcel you’re sending, and the options and pricing will vary by country. After that, it gives you a whole host of different shipping options. On thing to note is the option for the recipient to sign for their package upon delivery, because it deters those people who like to pretend they never got their item so they can ask for their money back. I’d suggest you use this option on anything over £5 in value, lest you lose out on that sale.

When I use this feature, I purchase what are called two up labels, which means that you can print two labels per sheet. They cost only pennies, and they allow you to use the eBay integrated postal application right from your home. You print the label, slap it on your packaged item, and you’re all set.

Check out the video below for a more detailed explanation of all of the logistics of this process!

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How to Set Up an eBay Store

Today’s question is from Jack over at the Wholesale Help private Facebook group. He asks, “I’ve been selling on eBay for about eight months, and just opened a store this week. A video guide about setting up an eBay store and the basics would be really helpful.” It’s an extremely good question, since we’ve talked a lot about having an eBay store, but never quite talked at length about making one.

Before we get started, let’s talk about the good things that come from having an eBay store. If you’re selling regularly and you want to list multiple items regularly, an eBay store is a good idea. In the UK, you get up to 200 free store listings that last for thirty days that you can set to auto-renew. You still pay a nominal final value fee, but you don’t get any regular listing fees. In contrast, their visibility isn’t as high as an auction item’s, but they’re a good way to list a lot of things.

Jack has already signed up for his eBay store, so we’re going to go through a few settings that I think are worth looking at. We start at the My eBay page, down on the bottom right, where you’ll see a section entitled “Manage My Shop”. This is where you can customize your store. The navigational options are off to your left side. We won’t go through everything, since there are a number of things there to play with, but we’ll hit the critical points.

The first one is “Search Engine Keywords”. You’ll want to spend time coming up with the main keywords for your store, since these will help your products to appear in the search results. You’ll have space for primary, secondary, and category keywords. Think about brand names, descriptions, and the main things that will help your stock move. Don’t put in unrelated keywords, though, because it won’t help you at all, and you can get penalized for it. Just think critically about your main keywords. If you’re having a hard time, check out the Google Keyword Tool, where you put in your primary keyword and receive the popular sub-keywords for it. An increased chance of showing up in the search results brings about more traffic to your store, which means more potential sales, so doing this well is crucial to your eBay business.

The next thing is “Display Settings” up at the top. This is where you can upload a logo for your shop. If you don’t have one, be sure to check out fiverr.com – it’s a website where you hire someone for only $5 to do a variety of things, like design a logo for your shop. It takes only a few days to get it back, and you’ll have an attractive, inexpensive logo to decorate your shop.

Also important is the “Listing Frame” subsection of “Marketing Tools”. There are tons of customization settings here, so you can change a number of things about your store. You can show your logo, display specific categories, decide how your items are formatted in your store, and a number of other options. I advise you to click around and check out the different options and play around, just to see what you like the best.

This is also where you can put a link to sign up for a shop newsletter, which leads me into email marketing. Over in the toolbar, you’ll see an option for “Mailing Lists”. EBay allows you to create your own newsletter to keep in touch with your buyers, which is a huge deal. It takes moments to set up, and the right wording can earn you repeat buyers, which earns you more money. It reminds people about you and your store, and it helps them to find their way back. You could alert people to lowered prices or when you have new stock, and it keeps them going back to your store. You can use this creatively – when I was selling iPhone cases, I offered a free screen protector to anybody who signed up for my newsletter after they purchased a case. The screen protectors were cheap enough (I got them for only a few cents each), and it convinced people to sign up. Newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your customers, and it adds zeroes to your profit at the end of the year, so figure out how it works for your own store and put it to use.

Make sure to check out the video below for all the visual guides to help you through what you’ve just read. Pardon the blurs, but I’m using my own eBay account for reference, and I don’t disclose my personal accounts due to some previous issues with eBay that cost me a lot of time and hardship. The important bits are still there, though, so make sure to go ahead and watch the guide.

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Sale Hoo vs E-Commerce Website

Today, we’ve got a quick question from Wholesale Help member Nick. He wrote in to ask which is better to use, a Sale Hoo store or your own e-commerce store.

First of, we need an explanation of what these things are.

An e-commerce store is a website where you sell your own products, which is used outside of eBay or Amazon. I think it’s a good idea to use one because it gives you another channel for selling goods, and the cost is a lot lower because you don’t have eBay’s seller fees. After you’ve got an eBay or Amazon store set up, it’s a good idea to branch off and start your own e-commerce site. A good way to do this would be to create a reputation on eBay before opening your own e-commerce store, and when someone buys from you on eBay, you could offer them a voucher for 10% off your own store. On the other hand, Sale Hoo offers a very good web-store subscription, in which you sign up and create your own store using their template system. You can build a nice store easily through them.

A lot of people want to save money and start their own e-commerce site, and I personally think this is a big mistake. I’ve seen people’s efforts in starting their own site, and it’s not the best. The stores typically look dated and basic. The tough thing is, the person who made the site probably spent hours on this wasted effort, and more labor hours are coming their way when they realize they’ve got to manage their store and stock all by themselves.

You don’t have to do this by yourself. Unless you’re someone who is extremely well versed in code, it’s not worth the strenuous effort to make your store by yourself.

Of course, you could pay a professional coder to build your store for you. Web designers and developers are prevalent online, and their work will look very nice and professional, but these people do not come cheap! For professional work, you could be looking at prices in the thousands. You could get someone to do it for less, but remember that you usually get what you pay for with these types of things. Higher price means higher quality. It’s worth it to spend the money if your profits are tremendous and your business is well known, but if you’re just starting, I’d advise against going down this costly path.

Before you’re well established as an e-commerce business, it’s probably for the best that you go through a site like Sale Hoo to design your store. It’ll be a quick process to build it, and your store will look good once you’re finished setting it up. This saves you time, money, and heartache. Down the road, maybe you could revisit the idea of branching off on your own, but at first, before you’re making a lot of money and taking the world by storm with your sales, its definitely a better idea to work through Sale Hoo.

Check out the video below for some more information about these options!

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Auction Listings or “Buy it Now” on eBay? Which should I use?

Melvin over on the YouTube Channel asked a great question about eBay auction formats:

Hey Andy, How do you decide on which items to place for auction and which items to place for “Buy it now.” Do you suggest the full 7 days for an auction?

The fast answer Melvin is both, it very much depends on what items you are selling and what your selling strategy you have.

If you sell unique items on eBay that you think will be very popular with allot of interest I would always put them up on an Auction format and let the buyers fight it out, often the price will finish higher than expected because several bidders are driving up the price.

If however you are selling multiple new items you may want to set a “buy it now” price so that you protect your investment and ensure you get your desired profit margin. That way the buyer can decide if they want that item for that price, this way you only need one buyer to decide to buy your item to get your desired profit, with the auction format you will need to have at least two bidders competing against each other to get the price up. Buy it now is less risky but you could be limiting your profit by setting a fixed price. So you need to have a bit of experience here and know your eBay market, you need to have a good idea what you are likely to get for your items and make a decision based on your experience of the market.

Another factor to consider is that generally auctions that start low will attract more bidders and viewers to your auction in search of a bargain so you tend to get more traffic to auction listings. So in order to get the benefit of both situations I have the majority of my listings Buy it Now with a few regular auctions of my best most popular items in auction format that will generate more interest and traffic that will click through to my store and look at my other buy it now items.

Another feature of Buy It Now is that you can list one item for 30 days and if you have a store you can select “good til cancelled” which will automatically re-list your item at the end of the 30 day period. So for a small price you can have your item listed for a whole month rather than just 3, 7 or 10 days of the auction format.

Also worth considering is that once you list an auction it will finish at the end of the selected time frame, 3 days, 7 days or 10 days, but if you list something buy it now you could get a sale within the first day, I have even had sales within minutes of listing items so buy it now can be great for fast profits .

So to sum up I would say try different formats and different duration’s and see what works best for your items, the key is to learn what the likely selling price will be for the items in your market and so you can then make an informed decision. For example if I have bought an item for £5 and I know from experience that they generally sell for £30 – £35 if I want a quick sale I can list it “buy it now” for £20 and I can be quite happy that the item will be sold pretty fast. However if I don’t mind waiting a few months for the return of my investment I might put it at £35 “buy it now” and make more money but it might take 4 or 5 months to sell. Another way would be to say that it only cost me £5 so I’ll list it auction format for £4.99 for 7 days and I know that whatever happens I wont be too far out of pocket, and if it finishes for £14.00 I have still made a quick sale and a reasonable profit. So you can get different outcomes with different formats, that £14 auction listing could well finish at £42 if you’re lucky so you really have to make a decision based on how much you have paid for the item and how fast you need your return.

Experiment, test track and gain experience as you go, oh and enjoy it! It’s allot of fun!