I had a nice week of sales last week due to a large auction batch. Setting up the auctions was quick and painless, but the packing and shipping felt a lot more like work than my typical day to day. But it was a nice way to get a quick boost in sales. I am thinking about running another batch of auctions to end on Cyber Monday. The free listings are one of the perks of having a store, may as well use them.
11/6/2022 – 11/12/2022
Total items in store: 904 (down from 1255 last week, most of the discrepancy is from unsold auctions which I haven’t relisted yet)
Items sold: 71 (4 via best offer, 6 via seller initiated offer, 9 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $3008.59 (up 44% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2088.95 (up 48% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $42.37 (up 3% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 16 hours (same as last week)
Highest price sold (net): $119.51 — Vince Carter Topps buyback rookie card hand numbered to 100
Lowest price sold (net): $7.35— Gino Odjick Pinnacle Tough Times autograph
I have many copies of this card and have regularly sold about one a month in the $15 range for the last six months. Since I have been messing around with auctions, I figured I would try an auction with a start bid of $9.99 and see how that went. The ending price was $9.99. Shows you how auctions go most of the time.
Some more auction numbers and my thoughts.
I had 300 auctions end last Sunday. 21 sold from bids and 279 did not sell. I had 247 auctions end last Monday. 1 sold via a best offer, 32 sold from bids and 214 did not sell. I’m not sure I would draw too many conclusions from this as I think my Monday batch were “better” items or at least better items for auction.
I did $1780 in sales via auction and surprisingly $1200 in sales from fixed price listings. I had one order of four fixed price listings for almost $300 so that certainly helped my overall numbers, but even without that, I was happy with these numbers.
Almost everything sold for minimum bid or one or two bids up. This is why it’s so important to set your minimum bid at the true minimum you would take for an item. Just two items led to a true bidding war, and those were very timely listings — autographed rookie cards of players who had starring roles in the World Series. I got lucky with those but even with that, the bidding wars only added up to an extra $75.
Almost everything was paid for within the first three days. The only listing that looks like it will go completely unpaid went for a mere $10. I might spread out my auctions over a few days next time to see what effect that has, if any.
Part of my auction success is because trading cards are the #1 subcategory for auctions, but I sent some of my other random unique inventory to auction and received two sales. This 100+ year old book sold for a bid of $30 after months of no activity as a $50 BIN/best offer listing, and the buyer already left happy feedback. This photography book went unsold at auction but had 1 watcher who (I assume) is the same watcher who accepted my 20% offer after I relisted it.
Three buyers added onto their single item purchase with other items from my store in the same order. I scheduled all of my auctions start times staggered a few minutes apart hoping to get more buyers who grabbed multiple items. I wonder if that might be less common with “new eBay” than it used to be a few years ago, but honestly it was well worth the $50 in scheduled listing fees to set the auctions up and forget about them until they were done.
There was not a ton of rhyme or reason to what sold. Some of the items were “bargain” prices and some were very close to my BIN/best offer price. Some were older listings which had not had much activity in the last six months and others had received offers which I had auto-declined and ended up selling to that same buyer for at or near their offer price. There are a lot of different factors which go into why an item sells and when it sells, and I think it’s helpful to play around with your listings regardless of what you sell or how big your store is, and see what works best for you. Especially now that bulk editor is as fast as it is.
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