Why YSK is because this is where my ultra detailed intuitive perspective shines and I can tell you how to generate revenue on demand using eBay the old school way that still works.
This was a reply to someone a few days ago about how to sell a large gaming collection. That post was deleted, but this info was popular, so here it is as a post that will stay up.
I ran high end bicycle consignment on eBay professionally. It was a side thing when I was a Buyer for a bike shop chain, and what I did part time for nearly 2 years after disability. In total I sold $139k on that account.
You must be established on eBay in the first place. You need an account with at least 60-100 feedback first. Make purchases to get some of that, sell a few low value (to you) items at a really good deal for others and across different categories. You’re trying to show that you are a real person and imply your country of origin. Ship everything you sell the same day that payment clears, and get a receipt from the logistics handler every time.
When you package any item, take a picture of the item in the box, and keep a scale on your packaging table to take a picture of the boxed item with the weight on camera after sealing the box. You are going to have 5-10% of customers that are scammers. This combo will save you from their scams. You can use the imaged weight and shipping weight from the logistics carrier receipt to dispute the photo of empty packaging scam.
Shipping insurance is a complete waste of money. The most expensive thing I sold was a $14,900 Felt IA FRD without the Zipp wheels for $9600 on eBay after 1 season of use. That was a major outlier. Most bikes were $1k-$3k, but I was dealing with some pricey stuff that represented substantial risk. I had to deal with major issues a few times despite using better shipping practices than anyone else I have ever encountered. If you own the merch, you own the risk. I didn’t have that luxury. I developed the strategy of finding the advertised cost of the cheapest insurance option I had available and I paid this amount of the sale into my insurance account separately. That account went negative once near the beginning, but stayed about even with incidental drains occasionally. The hassle and time it takes to go in circles with the third party shipping insurance companies is the intentional obfuscation built into their scam. You will be able to recover any lost amount simply by working a minimum wage job for the same amount of time it will take you to get money out of these scammers. You could probably panhandle the amount quicker than the amount of time you will spend trying to get them to pay.
It will be nearly impossible for you to keep track of all of the fees and costs of eBay. I tracked everything as fees; taxes, logistics, insurance, supplies, everything. In could not close monthly books until 3-4 months after the sale. The total cost to actually sell items was 39% of the total sale as of April of 2017 with an account in perfect standing ~98% of the time. The lowest I ever got was 37% in a month and never topped 40%.
When you post items, have them boxed in advance and post the last picture of the item boxed. Add a unique number to this box, have it in the picture, and add it in the description of the item so that you know what is in each box to match with the purchase. Don’t count on your descriptions or listing. Don’t package whatever sold in the last few days after the listing is ended. You WILL screw this up and send the wrong things to the wrong people or forget something no matter how diligent you try to be. It is much better to have a label that prints and includes the listing details with the unique number matching the box; like today I sold: “K4R3N,” “IAN123,” and “JK1337,” and must match these values to boxes that say the same. Like, if you are selling video games, do not do: Brombus Brzezinski bought Final Fantasy VII Special Edition (6/10), Bambi Blowater bought Final Fantasy VIII Special Remastered Edition (7/10), and Blumbus Bluewaters bought Final Fantasy VII (7/10). If you package what sells after the fact, you’ll be slow and when problems with logistics happen your delay is only going to make the problems much worse. It does not matter that you have x days to ship items in the system or described in your listing. Ship it the same day that payment clears as a point of pride. When you have real problems, that is the only time to use your shipping window. This is the only way you can keep an account in prefect shape long term.
The price others list items at is a joke. Ignore this nonsense and only look at the sold history for items in the last 60 days. If you can provide better information and images than anyone else in this sold history, you are likely worth 10-15% more than the rest. Keeping a listing up costs money and is a loss that must be accounted for.
Low demand items without substantial sold history are worth less in this market. Emotional attachment is worthless, sold history is everything.
This is the key to doing well with generating revenue on demand: eBay has the most traffic of customers willing to make purchases on Sunday evenings between 9-11pm Eastern time as this will bridge the entire continental USA so that it is 5-8pm in California. The trick is to list your items with ten day auctions and time your listings so that they end in this time window on Sunday. In other words, you schedule ten day auctions that start Thursday evening in this time slot. Stagger your listings around 10-15 minutes apart so that a person can bid on and watch multiple items. Now, this is where the real hack happens and the details matter. You list these items to start for $0.99 with free shipping if possible, and with no reserve. This is not optional. Your conservative fear and desire to list the starting price higher will kill traffic interest and volume of initial views. The item must have an active sold history for this to work. An active sold history means there is demand. The initial traffic of a real no reserve auction on eBay will max out your visibility priority for suggested and relevant cross posts. This is more powerful of a tool than any other form of promotion. You’re going to get a several messages from all the crazy stupid people that want you to take their special offer of $2 to end the item. You love this stupidity because these idiots flock to this kind of fantasy listing in droves and are the reason this trick is so effective in the first place. Be nice to them and they’ll view the listing hundreds of times. A few might even go crazy with a sub $5 bidding war, which is even better for the listing visibility. I did this with $1k-$4k bikes all the time. I almost always set the max sold history value for similar items, but I also did detailed listings unlike anyone has ever done before or since with high end bikes on eBay. I documented every scratch, bearing, and part, along with detailed wear descriptions where I was downright negative by typical salesperson standards. I also used my automotive painting background to photograph cosmetic issues before and after I did minor touchups and fixes to really high end stuff. You must think like a skeptical buyer that is afraid of getting scammed when you’re creating listings and reassure them in a way that would satisfy yourself. Like prove that your games actually work in pictures, etc. There is only a minor element of sales pitch to tell what the item is and its intended use. The majority of your listing should be about telling the informed buyer every detail they are not even aware of questioning and gives them confidence to take the listing serious.
Only start your no reserve auctions to end on a Sunday that follows the 15th of the month, and only when there is not a holiday or major sporting event in the USA. People pay rent/mortgages on the 1st of the month. The largest pool of people with excess funds to spend a little more or get carried away with bidding are the people on the Sunday after the 15th of any given month. Never list items that are competing with themselves in auctions that are ending on the same night. Make your listings Buy it Now for a good price in the interm then convert these to no reserve auctions when you’re ready. Avoid giving any excuses that might indicate the person can procrastinate and get the same thing later or for a better price like mentioning you have more of these, or even listing the same item in another listing with Buy it Now while an auction runs.
Overall, this is how you dominate eBay and get your stuff in front of the most people, most often, and that is how you make sales conversions. No matter what you do, you’re going to have overburden that will not sell in any single market. This is why I was the Buyer for a bike shop chain that ran eBay and did swap meets too. Pick a number and and strategy for handling this. Like when you have sold $xx,xxx amount you’re giving the rest away to N and quitting. You will never experience a day when the last item sells.
Last thing I didn’t mention before, if eBay still has 1:1 images in the primary scrolling feed, absolutely make sure to photograph your leading image to make it as large as possible and fill the entire frame. Use a white infinite background or a low light studio photography setup. The background needs to be either 0x00 white or 0xff black, and the item itself needs to look real like it is not a stock photography image. The other images should be professional looking, but can be more flawed. The lead image should be edited using gimp with filters for contrast and saturation to make the thing pretty.
Very detailed, thanks for sharing.
I sense that you may get some satisfaction from the attention to detail and process itself. Discounting those, do you think that reselling items on eBay is ever a reasonable proposition as a primary source of income, or is it always a side hustle? Do you consider there to be better ways to resell? (Obviously that answer will depend on what’s being sold)
The term used in retail is Keystone. That means 50% profit margin. It is the benchmark. In cycling retail, few products are proper keystone margins. The issue is that keystone bumps the overburden losses so that the shop comes out to ~30%-35% actual margins. Even in a year round market for cycling, this will barely pay the rent and salaries for a sub par, maybe what I could call B-class location. Most bike shops go out of business within a decade because the margins are too thin. Any shop that lasts longer is either a write off hobby business or has an excellent bike service and maintenance business for low end junk only. The margins are too thin in bikes to make up for the overburden. I learned to specialize in overburden management. This is why I did eBay. I also sold customer trade in bikes and occasional strait consignments. Keystone is the secret to sustainable retail.
The reason retail struggles right now is because online sellers do not have skilled sales staff labor or retail space rent to deal with. It may be possible to run a business on at little as 25%-30% margins in some cases. You certainly won’t get someone like me doing the job though.
I can’t say how viable it would be to do eBay as a business. It takes a lot of space and organization between staging listings, storing listed items, shipping sold items as soon as payment clears, and a photo studio setup. There is a ton of time involved with listings and it is not really possible to make that into a 9-5 job easily. I answered questions and stuff right away during my waking hours. I doubt you could even find someone that could know and understand products like that as an employee. You won’t get a ton of consignments from most people. It is hard for a person to want to get rid of their bike and deal with the numbers in practice.
Let’s say you bring me your 3 year old BMC carbon road bike you paid way too much for and spent $3k5 on new. I look up the sold history for your exact bike and find 3 have sold for $850, $925, and $1225. You don’t know anything about how I’m using sold history, and you looked up your bike on eBay already. You found 10 bikes, of which 3 were sawn into pieces and smashed with a sledgehammer while they were listed for $50 over what you paid 3 years ago for your new bike. Now I have to explain why those listings were created by mental patients in a padded room somewhere. I have to show you that I can only expect to get the average sold history price for your stuff because you race and your 3 years is like a club rider’s decade and is beat to hell. Now I have to tell you what I can offer you. The final offer is $360. Do you take that offer for the bike you paid $3k5 for just 3 years ago? Most people can’t stomach that kind of offer. However that is accounting for all of the fees combined that I must pay other businesses (40%), then that is 40% of the remaining for me to do a massive amount of work to photograph and carefully pack the bike for shipping. I’m taking all of the variable risk and in most cases not getting adequate pay for my time commitments.
In a shop environment, as the Buyer, I was like one of the owners. I could assign employees or schedule them to do whatever I wished. I utilized them to do a lot of the menial work while I managed and oversaw the details on the side. Overall eBay was just a tool for me to manage the inventory of all of my shops. I bought many little eeww and awww flashy products people like to look at but will never purchase specifically because I could easily offload them later on eBay for cost. Like that Felt IA I mentioned in the original post, one of the owners got to ride it for a season. That was a 30% margin purchase. There was no chance I was selling a $14,900 bike out of my stores in an area without many high profile triathlon events. It was just eye candy. I marketed it as a rental bike too just for kicks and giggles, but no one bit that bait. That was a stupid expensive bike at the time and I had to order it well in advance. I sold a ton of other lower end triathlon bikes though and I got a good deal on a size run from Felt and Orbea. That anchor brought people into the store. The bike cost me $10,430 which was hard on my budget for highest end but there wasn’t anything spectacular in Road bikes in the same season, and that is only like 3 high end bikes I sacrificed. I think I sold the wheels for somewhere north of $1500 shortly thereafter. So in the end I managed to pull over cost… technically, but after you factor all eBay fees I actually lost around $3,770 to my advertising and happy owner in a hobby business budget.
In my experience, eBay is too expensive in total for what they offer and the support they give. You’ll find yourself in a pawnshop like business model and you’ll likely need a pawn license if you want to do it long term and be protected. One has to ask why the person is willing to take so little for such high end merchandise in the first place instead of trying to sell it themselves or just giving it away to someone where the act has more useful value.
That is just my take. I would consider it much more viable at a 20% total margin for all overhead from taxes to shipping and listings. At 30% it probably isn’t long term sustainable. At the 40% I experienced, this is the reason eBay goes to massive lengths to obfuscate the total fees involved with selling on the platform. They do not want you to know this number even if you sell a ton of stuff on there. It is hard to track all of it in detail.