Today I thought I would share with you a few tips and tricks that should help you increase your eBay sales through the slow times. I know sometimes eBay can be a hard job, because I've lived the hard times & the slow times. But if you keep persisting it will pay off.
- Reprice Inventory
Repricing your inventory is a great way to gain sales, it doesn't necessarily have to mean repricing your inventory downwards, sometimes you can even increase your prices slightly and get sales, although that isn't a proven tactic, many resellers I have talked to have said that when they have increased prices of items by 5% or so that has triggered a sale, maybe because the watchers of the items are scared that you may do another increase in the future and therefore panic buy the item, who knows. But repricing your inventory is definitely a good strategy.
- Have a sale
Many of you will be aware of the sale function eBay offers, this can be a blanket sale across your entire inventory or you could just select a few items to put on sale that are struggling to perform. It can be whatever percentage or amount off the items you like, but I believe the maximum period a sale can run for is just 14 days, however this should be enough to have a positive impact on your sales. The problem I find when doing a sale is that it is only a temporary measure and once the sale is done your sales may sharply plummet again.
credit:http://www.swimzi.com/sale
- Use promoted listings
So eBay now have a function in which for an extra percentage of the sale price you can promote your listings up the search results, very similar to that of promoting a website within the google search engine. You can set your 'ad fee' which is the percentage you will pay to eBay and choose which items to include within your campaign. I did a post on promoted listings recently trialling it out and as you would expect for a paid service, it worked great and increased my sales in one week by 40%. I do have a bit of issue with promoted listings however because it seems like it is just another way for eBay to grab their hands on more fees from us sellers. I go into a little more detail in the video below.
- offer multiple purchase discounts
This is a good idea as it will encourage not only multiple sales but the chance of repeat custom, if your buyers are aware you offer a discount for purchasing more than lets say 2 items or that you offer a discount on a certain spend they are much more likely to come back. Although I haven't used this much, I do believe you can go into the eBay settings somewhere and set up these multi discounts. It's similar to a sale in one respect however if you set this option up right, this maybe a more sustainable way to gain sales over the long term oppose to the shorter term. Definitely worth giving this one a go.
credit: https://financialtribune.com/articles/domestic-economy/80548/iran-to-lead-global-ad-spending-growth
- Rephoto/Retitle Your Items
You may think that this is an unnecessary painful task, however if you have a handful of listings that maybe under-performing, it could seriously help out the sale-ability if you just take a little bit of time to rephotograph or re-title them with a better background, better lighting or better keywords, you'd be surprised at how well your listings may perform after a change up like that. It also makes you feel much better inside knowing you are providing a better display for your items and you are adding more value to your listings overall. Never underestimate the power of a good keyword and photo.
- Buy It Now to Auction
This is something I actually tried just recently, I used the eBay 'send to online auction' button to send a couple of joblots of video games to the auction format and although I did start them less than my buy it now price and I did in the end have to take a little less money for them, but it gave me a couple of extra sales that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I would suggest if you are going to try this method to do it with items that are more desirable on eBay and that have many buyers just waiting to grab their hands on what you have. For example items like video games, Lego, certain popular toys, precious metals etc. This works well but unfortunately you may have to take a little less than your original buy it now price in some cases.
credit:http://www.richardblanco.com/auction-hysteria/
- Rebundle Items & Create a Fresh Listing
So what I mean by this point is for example if you have a couple of bundles of different children's books that are simply under-performing, it may be worth taking the listings off eBay, bundling them both together, improving pictures and titling (as we mentioned earlier) and then creating a fresh listing for the now larger bundle of books. This option obviously works best with items that can be easily bundled together maybe plush toys of the same genre, similar books or magazines, video games etc. It is a great way to create a new listing out of a couple of old, under-performing ones. You may find that new listing gets picked off eBay by a buyer rather quickly as well so long as you hit the right price point.
- Simply List More Items
This is something you hear all the 'old hands' at reselling preach and that is to simply keep listing more items for sale and they are right, freshening up your store with brand new items for your customers to get their hands on is a brilliant way of attaining more sales, especially if the new items you are listing are good strong sellers and you have put the effort in with regards to making a good listing. I do have to state that it may take a few days or even weeks of consistent listing to improve your sales, sometimes you might list 50 items in one day and think that is fantastic but not see any effect from that for a few days or a week later. But all I will say is keep up the motivation and keep piling new listings on.
- Increase Account Activity
Now you maybe thinking how does this correlate with getting more sales, well this is just a theory that I have heard many people talk about but if you stay active in your account for example answering messages, accepting or declining offers, changing listings etc you may see more steady sales than if you were not active in your store for a couple of weeks. If you think about it this theory makes sense, in the example of YouTube if you do not publish a video for a certain amount of time they will not show your channel in the suggest column as much therefore reducing your exposure to new viewers. Could similar be true for eBay? If they see you are not active in your account after a few weeks do they maybe give your account a little less of a boost? Its all just a theory really but it is interesting to think about.
- Add Best Offer
Adding Best Offer to your listings can be a really good thing to do, I know a lot of people out there don't like best offer due to getting ridiculously low ball offers on higher value items, but you don't necessarily need to accept the offers. If you leave best offers open, many people think that it actually gives that item more exposure and there are a lot of accounts of people having a couple of pending offers on an item and the following day or so it ends up selling for full price. So sometimes just having it on and not actually accepting offers could be a good idea.
credit:https://www.colourbox.com/vector/grunge-best-offer-rubber-stamp-vector-illustration-vector-5748736
So I hope you enjoyed this post and if you did I would very much appreciate an upvote for the time and effort I attributed to making it. I also made a video, which I will post down below on this very topic, so be sure to check that out as well if you would like to hear a little more depth on these points.
As always thank you for reading and/or watching, I will see you in the next post.
Adam