Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about how to price your items right, so they sell on eBay.
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fleamrktflipper/
Check out our FREE Workshop: https://courses.fleamarketflipper.com/flipper-university-workshop-webinar
You can find us at: https://fleamarketflipper.com/
How To Price Your Items Right, So They Sell On eBay
Rob: What's up, Pro Flippers? On today's episode, we're talking about how to price your items so they sell on eBay.
Rob: All right, guys, on today's episode, we are talking about pricing your items and more specifically, how do you price them so they will sell on eBay?
Melissa: So we're kind of talking to somebody who's just getting started more, I guess I, you know, that's a little bit confused on how do you, how do I make sure that I'm pricing items to sell?
So luckily we do have a pretty fairly straightforward and easy way to do it and that is check sold comps. So, you can basically jump in to the eBay app, go into filter and type in whatever in the search bar that you're looking at to price and go in and filter, sold comps. So if you click toggle sold, you'll see everything that sold and then we can start looking at pricing there and that's just a great place to start.
Rob: That's it. And when you do do that, you're going to have a range of prices of items that have sold you're going to have a range of the lowest and the highest that items have sold. That's where you want to go in and you want to determine where you can actually list your item. One thing to note when you do do it, you can do completed listings and then underneath that there's a toggle for sold. You do want to watch sold because you don't want to do any comps on completed listings that did not sell.
That will not give you an accurate price that you can actually list your items for. So you have to know what items have sold for.
Melissa: They record 90 days, is it 90 days? So you can see everything that's sold of that item for the last 90 days. So it's pretty, that gives you a good idea of what an item can sell for.
Because, you know, sometimes we'll see what people will try to list something, especially if you know, you're starting out and maybe you didn't check sold comps and you are just kind of going off what you think it might be. Okay. And you can list an item for anything like you can go in and list an item that's selling for $20 for $100, but you probably won't sell it for that.
So we want to be competitively priced.
Rob: Absolutely. Similar to the housing market, you can go in and list your house for anything you want to list it for. But if you don't have comps, if you don't know what other houses have sold for in the market, you're just, you know, shooting in the breeze. You just don't know what you're doing.
That's how we actually do the eBay business as well. You want to look it up. You want to see what other items have sold the prices that they've sold for. Then you have a good idea on yours, depending on condition, depending on if they offer shipping, there's a whole, a couple other factors that you have to put in there as well.
But this is the starting point. You're going to have a lowest number and you're going to have a highest number and you have to figure out where to actually list your item on that scale.
Melissa: Yeah. And if you are starting out and you're trying to build your account, then you're going to have to be on the lower end of that sliding scale to get your stuff going because you don't have a lot of feedback yet.
And the goal is to grow and get more feedback, then you can be on the higher end. If you're an established seller, you can start to be on the higher end and sometimes you've even reset some comps. There maybe was one item that sold in the last 90 days and so you're like, I, this is definitely worth that and another way that you can check.
So, so what if your item is not, there's no sold comps? Does that mean I can't sell my item?
Rob: No. So that's the next step. So if you cannot find a sold comp on the item that you have, and this is more unique items guys, something that's not the run of the mill everyday items that are on eBay. Which is good. We like those kind of things.
We do. We absolutely do. We love those. So, and I'll give you an example. I sold a knee, what was it? A rehab. Is it a rehab? It wasn't that big. It was a rehab machine for a knee where you strapped your knee into it. That's what I was thinking about. It moved it up and down, up and down. And when I checked it before I bought it, I don't remember exactly what I paid for it.
Maybe it was $80. Yeah, $50 to $80 somewhere in there. This, this happened a year ago. But when I checked, when I was buying it, the comps on it were $700, roughly $700, $800 and I saw it and that was a good return for something that I was going to spend $50 to $70 on, a good return on and I like to get it that 10X mark, so I ended up buying it.
Well, when I brought it back home, I started cleaning up, started taking pictures of it. I looked up the retail value. I looked up what these things cost new and it was well over like $3,500, $4,000 and I was like, okay, wait a minute. This for some reason has gotten too low to where the comps are. That is how we find a value of an item If we can't find a comp on ebay, we'll go to retail and we'll start it at half of retail depending on condition This was in good condition wasn't used that much, so it was definitely at that 50% or even more that we could have sold it for. So I reset the market on eBay and instead of selling it for $700 or $800, we actually sold it for I think it was $1,600 or $1, 700, so $1, 600 is what we sold it for.
And I doubled what the comps were on eBay, but you have to take into account exactly what retail was and what our feedback was. We sell higher profit items, higher dollar items, and people can look at our feedback and see that we're legit sellers on eBay. They can see that we've sold items up to $25,000 on a single item.
So they know what they're getting is what we are offering. And that's one thing that you can do when you get your feedback up there and you start getting great feedback, a hundred percent feedback on higher profit items. So that's how we reset the market for this knee brace because of what retail was we took half of and that's the other format that I mean, that's the other process. If you can't find any comps go and find out what retail is on it and the good starting point is 50 percent of retail is where you can start out if it's in good condition You might even be able to get 75 percent of retail and depending on how many items.
Yeah. How many items are listed? How much competition is on eBay right now? We had no competition when we sold this. I don't think there were any other listings on there for this exact item. So I knew that I could reset the comps at a higher price.
Melissa: And so, yeah, if there are no comps, don't let that be like, oh, I can't sell it.
Cause you definitely still could sell it, especially if it's a unique item. It just might not have one on there, which is. It's perfectly fine. And I just wanted to add too, so if you are in the beginning processes, don't get discouraged if you have to put your prices a little lower in the beginning.
This doesn't mean it's going to be all the time. You want to grow your business, you want to build up that feedback that is super important in this business. Get your feedback built up, you know, have good working processes in your business. And you will grow it and you'll start to get that positive feedback.
It'll grow and then you can be more in the middle of those comps middle to high once you start growing. So.
Rob: Absolutely, definitely a great point that you cannot sell when you're starting out with 10 feedback, five feedback, two feedback, you're not going to get the high end of what the comps are. You have to price it low.
Just like Melissa said, you got to price it low, even below, maybe even below the average or the below the lowest comp that you can find. So your item will sell quickly and you'll be able to build up that feedback. Now, this is the long game guys. We're not giving you the short game. This is the long game when you're trying to build the foundations for your business.
This is how you do it. You build it up slow.
Melissa: One other question, kind of piggybacking on that. So, say I have my items listed for a month. At what point do I go back in and lower the prices now?
Rob: Such a great question. And after a month if the item has not sold, we do recommend you going in and checking those comps again.
Remember those comps are only going to go back for 90 days. So you're going to drop off the last 30 days after you list your item, the comps might have changed or there might be flooded the market with that exact item and you want to be comparable or you want to be thank you competitive with your pricing. Especially if you're at the lower end of your feedback, you definitely want to be competitive.
So maybe do a search on comps after 30 days that it has not sold and see the other thing you can also go on is your your viewed items, and your people who are saving the items. I forget. Yeah, I think it is saved versus viewed. Yeah, so it will show you eBay will show you watchers. Thank you. So eBay will show you how many people actually saw your item and then they'll show you how many people actually click save and saved that item and you can go back and check that as well If you're not getting a lot of even people viewing the item or watchers on it, it might be priced a little bit too high You might have to go back and re evaluate how you priced it.
But a 30 day mark for sure. For us, we're dealing with higher profit items. We don't go through thousands of items in a year. We usually sell under a hundred items in a year, to get us to six figures. That is our goal with it is we're selling high profit items to get the, to move the needle without having to sell thousands and thousands of items.
So for us, when we're pricing something, we can go back and look after 30 days. If it hasn't sold and see why it has not sold and kind of go a little bit deeper with that.
Melissa: Yeah. And sometimes it's not the pricing that it hasn't sold. It might be your pictures or your description. So you can always go back through and it's always a good practice to look at them.
But another huge thing that will make your items sell is to get more stuff listed. So then that, then those items will sell if they're priced right. So definitely check your prices. And yeah, and be in the middle of comps or the low end if you're starting out and make sure you're. What the market is bearing at the time.
And you don't, you don't lower your pricing right away. Like you'll sit at it for a while. That's not something you don't change the pricing after a month, but you also don't mind sitting on some stuff a little bit longer, right?
Rob: Something where we're at, the only reason I will change a price is if I actually start experimenting with free shipping versus flat rate shipping. So if I have something listed for $2,000 and I have free shipping in it, I might actually go back and lower the price to $1,700, $1,800 and then I might do a flat rate price on shipping at $200 where I can adjust that. eBay will see me in there messing with the item.
They might show it to more people for whatever reason or somebody might have been watching it and they'll see the price drop and they'll jump in and say, okay, well, now it's at this price, which I'm not really changing anything. All I'm doing is changing how some people look at items because some people will look at an item.
Yeah, I would rather have the free shipping. Free shipping. They'll jump on it for free shipping and some people are going to look at the item and be like, oh, it's only $1,800. Well, I got to pay for shipping anyway, so this is a better deal. So just, it just depends on how people look at the item. So I will do that and I'll do that sometimes in a month.
I'll do it in less than a month. It just depends on. When I go back to an item to kind of reevaluate it if I want to try and move it around a little bit to get stuff moving, I'll actually do that on my listings.
Melissa: Yep, so get those items priced well. Thank you guys so much for listening today. We do want to leave a quick reminder we have a free challenge coming up very soon.
It's quickly approaching. So we kick off September 19th. So go check out, learn2flip.Com and get registered. And we would love to see you three days in a row live. It's a three day challenge.
Rob: Learn2flip.com. Go register now. If you don't have your seat, grab it. We would love to hang out with you for a couple of days and help you make $250 in that timeframe.