Nothing Sold On eBay
On Thursday, April 18, 2019, I sold NOTHING on eBay.
I should be happy that it was my first eBay goose egg of the month since we had a record NINE non-sales days in March. A typical non-Q4 month sees 2-3 days without a sale on eBay, so that’s not a big deal. But sales this week, in general, are a little worrisome.
Let me explain.
Tinkering With Promoted Listings
I have used promoted listings since they’ve been available to me. I’ve tried just about every combination of promoted listings & running sales, and have found that just setting it at a flat 1% AND not running any sales is just as effective as going at trending or beyond and/or running sales.
But this week I decided to bump things up a bit to see if we could get a little more traction.
Monday-Wednesday, our best sales days of the week in 2019, I set Promoted Listings at the Trending rate + 2%. We had 6 sales over those 3 days, two (33%) of which were via promoted.
For reference, last week, which was a somewhat slow week, we had 11 sales Monday-Wednesday. Three (27%) of those sales were via Promoted Listings at a flat 1% rate across the board.
On Thursday I decided to try Trending +3% to see if we could do a little better than that. While impressions & clicks were up slightly, this did not result in any sales, promoted or otherwise.
This morning I put things back at a flat 1%.
I know that this is a very small sample size and is somewhat comparing apples to oranges, but that doesn’t meet my expectations. If those extra impressions are simply extra irrelevant impressions they do no good at all.
Promoted Listings Killed Search
I don’t have an issue with Promoted Listings in principle. It’s a marketing expense and if you have a product going after the same buyer, it’s a great idea. You wouldn’t think of leasing a storefront and not advertise to get people into your store.
But I have issues with the way it has rendered search pretty much useless. eBay search is so bad to the point that I actually search for eBay items in Google in order to purchases things that I want to buy. It’s a wonder that any of us selling anything through eBay searches.
Weekly Listing Challenge Update for Week 16 (2019 Q2 W3)
Yesterday I listed 35 items on Fazoom.com, 35 items on eBay and 0 items on Poshmark. All jewelry.
I was having one of those days where everything I did seemed to be in slow motion and the timeline was in fast forward. That’s a very unproductive combination, so I wasn’t able to knock out the last 24 listings for Fazoom.com.
I’ll get those items knocked out this morning and will be cross-posting to Poshmark, so I should hit 300+ listings completed this week.
| Platform | Listed | Goal | To List | Over |
| Fazoom.com | 76 | 100 | 24 | 0 |
| eBay | 61 | 50 | 0 | 11 |
| Poshmark | 110 | 100 | 0 | 10 |
| TOTAL | 247 | 250 | 24 | 21 |
Stay tuned to the What I Listed category to see the progress.
What’s Selling?
What did you sell yesterday and on what platforms? How are your sales going?
Leave a Reply