eBay 10 cent listing day

Thursday December 27th was a 10 cent listing day on eBay auctions.

In past years eBay had free listing days. These were big hits at first and gave a real advantage to dealers like me who have automated inventories. I used to do wholesale dumps of my inventory on eBay.

The problem was that while it didn't cost anything to list, the number of items sold as a percentage of those listed tanked. Since it was free it didn't matter. For some years now though, eBay has been having fewer such promotions and not free.

That is probably a better idea. When they were free the site would just become overwhelmingly cluttered. Since I now have to pay a dime, I am using a bit more discretion as I load the site.

Rather than dump 16,000+listings, I took advantage yesterday and listed 316 items in the $25-$300 range from virtually all categories of material. Then since listings were cheap, I added gallery view so my images would show to viewers. That brings the auction listings to 45 cents each which is cheaper than a straight listing without gallery normally would be.

With so many others taking advantage of the cheap listings, I am hoping my better priced items will stand out in the sea of cheap un-galleried items.

If I am able to sell over 9.5% of the items, I will deem the experiment of adding the gallery expense worth while. Thats 2% more than the average sold in past big blizzard listing days, which covers the additional gallery charges at $25 per items sold.

We will find out next Thursday if I am able to sell 30 of 316 items. Should be easy. But to help it out, I am extending my free shipping and handling deal till the end of January.

If you buy three or more (non bulk) listings, and pay for them at the same time, I will pay for shipping and handling worldwide.

This deal applies not only to items at auction on eBay but also any items in my eBay store or on my ship cover web site.

Use these links to go there: Naval Covers

eBay Store

Inventory Time

It's year end and time to take stock of my cover inventory for the tax man as well as my own information. Turns out I have a total of 24,314 items with 16,163 unique listings in my internet inventory. Total value at my minimum prices of about $187,000.

That represents about two work years of labor if I use my standard estimate of 15 minutes per item on average for handling. The 15 minutes includes time on the shipping and handling end, so the two years estimate includes yet to be done work.

I'd be happy to give someone a 10% discount if they want to buy the entire inventory, perhaps a bit (lot) deeper if anyone were seriously interested. Not included are the boxes of yet to be processed material.

One of my goals for the coming year is to decrease the total number of items significantly, while increasing the average dollar value per item.