Rob and Melissa Stephenson, from Flea Market Flipper, share tips to get your eBay sales moving.
Check out our free workshop: https://learn.fleamarketflipper.com/flipping-workshop-new--0b9f0
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fleamrktflipper/
You can find us at: https://fleamarketflipper.com/
How To Get Your eBay Sales Moving
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we're talking about what to do if your items on eBay are getting stagnant, are not moving. Alright, what's up guys? Today we are talking about eBay sales and more specifically, what to do if you have some things listed that aren't moving as fast as you would like them to.
Melissa: So we have not been listing on eBay for the last probably, I'd say three months or so. Like really, we haven't listed much this year, so, and we've had a lot of travel and stuff go on. And we just had three sales this last week, and it's because of some stuff that you did this week. We, so we were very stagnant, because we haven't listed anything, like we just haven't been doing anything.
And now you've got back to it. So we kind of wanted to talk about maybe you're at a spot where you haven't been doing your eBay business for a little bit and you wanna jump back in and kind of some of the things that rob did to help that or maybe some things you can do to your listings to start, get them to move.
So.
Rob: And this is legit because our last three sales that came in were over $8,000, in three items. Which one of them moving the needle, one item being the $8,000, but still, I think it was like 8,500 bucks, somewhere in that area, and just doing a couple small things, moved the needle, got these sales to come in.
Exciting that you're able to do this when you do not have a lot of time on platform. Like this is one amazing thing about this business. You can do this in the pockets of your day. You can do it when you wanna do it, and you can also get more business coming in, by just doing a couple specific things on your business to your business, to get the sales to come in.
So we're gonna be really, really diving into all that throughout this episode.
Melissa: And there's really one main thing, but. Next, and on the next episode we'll dive into those three sales that we did. We, we still have two to ship out, so we have to see what the shipping costs will be. So we have all the numbers and we'll dive into those, specifically all those numbers and what the profit was, of course, on the next episode. So we will do that. But sweet, let's just dive into that first one. So the big one that you do or that we've noticed over time, time and time and time again. This is not an official release by eBay. It's not an official thing that's out there that says this will get you more sales, but time on platform.
Always, always, always gets us more sales. So the more time time you spend on eBay, listing on eBay, you know, even changing some of your stuff on your listings or even scrolling and looking at different comps. Time on platform really does make eBay want to show your listings more.
Rob: Absolutely. Even buying on platform.
Yes, if you're buying stuff on eBay, if you're scrolling on eBay, if you're updating listings, if you're checking out titles, if you're doing descriptions, all that stuff. The more time you're spending in on the platform, the more it is rewarded. Now, I don't know how this works. We're not, yeah, we don't have any inside, inside track to eBay.
Melissa: Just the, what it say experience, just that it's worked a lot over the years.
Rob: Just by doing this for the last three decades, this is what we have seen time and time again. And this is exact proof of it, for these three sales that just came out of last week, because of us being so stagnant ourselves in eBay for the last three months, trying to do some stuff on the back end, in the coaching program and all the other stuff that we do. That was eBay got pushed a little bit on the back burner. But now we started doing some stuff to pick it back up, which we'll be doing a lot more, to bring in more sales. But right now, a couple things that we did do. And one of the big things that I did, which is really cool, if you do go stagnant or you get busy at your current job, this is a side hustle for you. And you have stuff listed and it hasn't sold. That's exactly what happened to us is we were doing other stuff. We have the kids, we have a lot of stuff that was going on on the other portion of our life. But what I did is I went out and after being listed on eBay for a couple months, some of these items have been listed for a couple months.
I had multiple watchers that were on the listings themselves. So what I did. As I went through and I started sending out offers, some of them I dropped down 50 bucks that it might've been $200 or $300, in price, and some of them I dropped down a thousand dollars. It might've been $5,000, $10,000 at the listing price, and I had plenty of room to play with that.
I dropped down and I sent an offer out for a thousand dollars less. That right there was time on platform and it was giving the buyers who are watching my items, who might've been interested in them but didn't, didn't pull the trigger. Brought it back to top of, mind. Yeah. A top of mind for them. And that's how we actually got one of the sales was sending out an offer.
Melissa: Well, typically a lot of people watch them because they're looking for different prices on different ones. They want us, you know, kind of compare prices and maybe they will wait and see if you do send them an offer. So, so those people are prime people to be looking at your stuff. I mean, we do have kind of a, some people watch our stuff that are, you know, they just wanna see what we're selling.
But, we do have a lot of legit watchers as well. So your offers was the biggest one. You sat there for, I think it was just a couple nights ago that you sat there in your chair and you were just at probably an hour maybe you spent on the platform.
Yeah. Just sending offers on a whole bunch of your items, and then the big item took. They did. The big sale, right? So
Rob: that was the sale that came in from an offer. It was listed for $9,000. I dropped it to $7,999, which is 8,000 bucks. And they took on it, they didn't take it the first 24 hours, I think they have 48 hours to do it.
And they took it in the second 24 hours, that I sent the offer out, and they bought it. Paid for it immediately and now we will be shipping that out within the next day or two, on that. So I will note something cool about this. One of the other offers that I sent out, somebody else bought it without the offer price, so we had another one that was listed for, $399, $400.
Somebody gave us this, so it was a free item, that we got. I sent an offer out for $349.99. So just knocking $50 off of it. Guess what? Nobody took me up on the offer, but it sold for $399, just yesterday or the day before. So after I sent out the offers, somebody actually jumped back in and it might have been somebody who found it for the first time.
But that goes to show you time on platform is rewarded by eBay. So we actually sold that full price.
Melissa: And sending offers got just, just the activity, got to somebody else and they saw it. And then, your listing was shown to more people. And this again, we don't have, you know, eBay telling us this is what you have to do to go and like to get your listings shown.
We're just showing, just experience. We're just telling you what has worked and what has worked for a lot of our members, we've noticed too. So just kind of all that experience put together. But being on platform does help, so being consistent, and that is the biggest thing you can do for your eBay business is be consistent with your listings, but, we have gone three months without listing. And now I think he listed maybe one or two things in there somewhere, but then, hardly anything. Yeah. And now, you know, just sending out offers and now he can be more consistent with listing stuff again, and then that will get the ball rolling again.
Rob: But that is the cool thing about the business is you have the leniency, the you have the ability to put it on the back burner and leave it alone. And when something sells, you ship it out. When they don't sell, you have the opportunity to go in, be more active, send out offers, and do stuff like that. So, like we said, this is, years of our experience.
We've done this, we've tested this time and time again, and it seems to always work when we do test it and get on platform, send out offers. Or just on platform changing titles, recomping stuff out, doing that kind of stuff that you do start selling stuff. So really, really cool.
Melissa: The the funny thing is, is we always say the sales come in threes and they do, like, this is our third sale was two days ago.
And then hopefully we have another three that come in soon. But it's funny how they just come in threes and it's just kind of weird. Not that that's anything like official either. It's just kind of weird that it happens in threes. Yeah. Was that first one, did you send offers out on that bread maker?
No.
Rob: No. Okay. One of our daughters, the first one was sold,
Melissa: but it sold after you sold, sent offers to everybody else.
Rob: It did, it did. Once I was on the platform, once I was actually in there doing stuff, that's when that one sold. It's been listed for a little while, so, yep, it has. And that's when that one sold.
So we shipped that one out yesterday. We'll ship the other two out within the next day or two. So we'll have all the other numbers that we can, talk to you guys about the profits and all that other stuff 'cause I know you guys love to see that. We will be talking about that on one of the upcoming episodes of that. But yeah.
Melissa: One, one of the things I wanted to add, when you send out offers, a lot of times people feel like, to get things moving, they need to drop the price. So they need to drop the price of the item and that could help, but it's not necessarily the best way to do it. So sending out, like if you were gonna go drop your item a hundred dollars, you're way better off giving, shooting a hundred dollars offer to your watchers to get a sale versus dropping the price.
Because a lot of times it's not like, at least with the stuff we sell, it's different depending on what you're selling, obviously, if you're having to be competitive with different people, but like for the stuff we sell, it typically takes, you know, the right person needing that model number and wanting that unit that we have. We do a lot of appliances, a lot of exercise equipment, a lot of those things that people are looking for those things. So dropping the price isn't necessarily going to get them sold any faster. It's, but sending out offers definitely could.
Rob: Absolutely. This it's a great point.
And we don't wanna be the race to the bottom on, on the items that we are that we are selling. When I list an item, I do the comps. I know I'm very, very competitive with the price. I wanna keep it at the top range of what items are selling and what items are worth. So even this one thing that we just sold for $8,000, I haven't done a comp in a couple months.
After we got it listed, but I did see somebody had sold one. When I did the comps on it before I listed it, I did see that somebody had sold one for like $4,000 and I had the opportunity to lower this down to that price, but I knew that it was an expensive item. I knew the retail on this was, I think $25,000 maybe this one even was $50,000.
I don't remember exactly what it was. It was high. Yeah. But it was way, way up there. So I knew giving somebody a really good deal on a good item at $9,000, $8,000 was a really, really good deal. So I didn't have to drop it down to $3,000 to get it sold when the right person saw it. When they saw my history that I sell stuff, I sell more expensive items when they sell all that stuff. They put it all together and they bought it just because of that. So, don't race to the bottom. Don't try to get your items down cheap as possible. Yeah. To get them sold. If it is a good item, you have it listed well, you have it listed with good pictures, you have it with a good description and a good title, it will sell for what it is worth. Don't race to get to the bottom on your listings.
Melissa: Yeah, that was my other thing is to other things you can do. The biggest thing. I feel like that. If you're really trying to, you have listings already. You're really trying to get things going, send out some offers, get things going, time on platform, and then start listing again.
But other things you can do if you have been listing consistently. So say you have, you're getting something listed every day and stuff feels like it's not moving that much, you know, go, you can do an audit of your of your eBay listings. So, you know, check your titles, your descriptions, your pictures, your videos.
Typically when we go look at somebody's account, they're, they could have better descriptive words in the title or their pictures could be a little bit better. And we're not looking for perfect. Like we talk about this a lot. Like do not let perfection make you not do it. Because if you say, okay, I have to have the perfect background with a new camera and all this stuff, like, no, it can be, but it just has to be a clean background.
We've only ever used our phones for this business. We don't use, I mean, I guess before phones you used a regular camera, but I mean, we only use our phones. We use a bare wall that we have, you know, you don't have to do anything fancy. It just has to be clean. No clutter. Good pictures of like not fuzzy pictures and show the product off well.
So.
Rob: Absolutely that. And the other cool thing that I was talking about that's really cool about this business is if you are consistent, if you start listing and you list, and you list and you list, and you treat this as a real business, if you wanna be consistent with a paycheck, kinda like you go into your job every day, you don't get to go to your job.
If you have a job, you don't get to go one day and then take the rest of the week off and still get paid the same amount of money. You have to be consistent with this business just as well. So if you want to treat this and you wanna have an income coming in consistently, you really have to treat it as a business.
You gotta put time into it. That means getting stuff listed. That means checking titles, checking descriptions, checking comps. Typically, our comps on eBay are good for 90 days. That's when we list something. So if I have something that might be sitting for over three months, I can go back and re comp it and see if anything has sold or all those comps had fallen off, you can go back and check that stuff and adjust if you need to.
But don't race to the bottom on the comps. Don't race to the bottom to get it 'cause our goal is not to sell our items at the cheapest possible rate that we can. Our, our goal is to get what these items are worth. Get full price for these items, but not fully, not meaning retail. Yeah. Not full retail, but full price of what they're actually worth.
And we have reset comps before we've sold, we've, I bought something and saw the retail on it was $3,000 or $4,000 and the, the one that had sold was like $500 for a comp, not a lot of competition on it. And I resold the, the, I mean, I reset the comps, I think like $1,600. That was a knee brace, or knee, rehab machine that we got.
So you can't actually reset comps as well when you really build this business well. And you have good feedback. You have a hundred percent feedback on that, and people know what you're selling is more expensive, so, or you're selling more expensive items than they can trust to you as a seller. So, just some really, really good tidbit information, to be thinking about as you're trying to grow this business, as you're trying to get into higher value or higher profit items.
These are things that you should be thinking about.
Melissa: Yeah, and one other thing is like, even when you're listing your item, think about, you know, kind of being able to give offers too. So that's why we list them maybe a little bit on the higher side, especially in the beginning of what we would want to get, knowing that we could, you know, give a $50 offer off or a hundred dollars, whatever, you know, obviously what the price of your item is, what makes sense.
So we can, we have a little bit of wiggle room to do that, but what also gives us that wiggle room, this is a completely different tangent on, but what, whatever, what also gives you that wiggle room is making sure you're buying the item at the right price. So like, we are always trying to buy an item about about 10 x, like we buy it 10.
Divided by 10 of what we're going to sell it for. So if we buy something for a hundred dollars, the goal is to sell it for a thousand dollars. So we have enough room to give offers. We have enough room for eBay fees, we have enough room for shipping costs. So that is the formula that we've done over the years, and that works to make sure that we, we make enough to make this business worth it.
So.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: Yeah. So. Awesome.
Rob: Alright guys. So if you have enjoyed this episode, we love doing episodes for you like this. We've also created a new workshop that we actually go in and find high profit items, in the workshop. We do it live with you guys.
So if you wanna check that out, there will be a link below. Jump in, check it out. We have a great time, like I said, talking about this with you and actually showing you exactly how we do what we do. So you guys are awesome. Have an amazing day. We can't wait to see you on the next episode.