Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about what to do if your items aren't selling on eBay.
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What To Do If Your Items Aren’t Selling On eBay
Rob: What's up, Pro Flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about what to do if your items are not selling on eBay.
Melissa: And this is without slashing your prices in half.
Rob: Alright guys, this is something that we deal with, a lot of resellers deal with. What do you do if you have items listed on eBay and they are not moving?
Melissa: Yeah, we get that question a lot. It's like, should I, you know, is my pricing too high if it hasn't sold? An item hasn't sold in a week or two or whatever. So we want to touch on that as you don't want to go and cut down your prices too quickly. So we'll touch on a couple of things that you can do to help your stuff move.
Rob: Yeah. If everybody starts slashing the prices, it brings the market down on everything. And we don't typically want to do that right now. eBay is definitely experimenting with different ways that they are charging their sellers more money to get their items seen and sold. So we definitely have to figure out, what is the best tactics that we can do? We're going to give you a couple of them throughout this episode that you can do that will definitely help you sell those items quicker, and hopefully don't sit, yeah, like I said, quicker or they won't sit as long on eBay.
Melissa: And pricing is important. So we can talk about that one first if you want, but, pricing your items is important.
You want to make sure that you are comparable to the market. So one thing that you may need to lower your price for is if the market has changed. So you want to check your sold comps again, if you have had something listed for a little while.
Rob: That's it. Yeah. Pricing is everything with this, but you, like we said, you don't want to slash the price just because you might have an item sitting there and you're trying to go lower and lower on the prices to get them to move.
Because like I said, it's just going to be a stair step down and it's going to lower everybody's value of their item, if we just go for that race to see who can go to the bottom of it. We don't want to do that. We want to figure out how to get them seen by more people. And a lot of the items that we are selling, These are a little bit more like a specialty item.
So we're definitely going higher profit.
Melissa: More unique items that might take a little longer to sell. So.
Rob: Yeah. So you definitely do not want to race to the bottom and see who can be the first to the bottom because then that just hurts the whole market all around and like I said eBay does they are experimenting with multi different ways right now. They are. So just because your item is not moving super, super quick, that is not the first thing that you should do.
It's lots of prices. Definitely we'll figure out the best way to actually get that item to move.
Melissa: Yeah. And we started, we wanted to jump on here real quick and do this podcast because you're doing a couple of things in your business. So you haven't really listed that. Like we had a slower start to the year because we've been focusing a lot more.
We moved our program over to the new software. So that took a lot of energy and time. So now you're taking, this is kind of like the beginning of the year. You're starting to get listed again. And so you took, here's another thing you can do. You took everything off, right?
Rob: I did. I did. This week, last week?
One of the tactics that we did is pull all of our listings off. Now, we don't have thousands of listings. I typically run from 80 listings to 120 listings at any given month. That is typically what we have listed on eBay. How much monetarily is that? Oh, yeah, we're over $200,000 in in eBay, yeah, for those items.
So 100 items roughly, yeah, we're over to between 200, in items. So, what I did is pull everything off and then I started relisting slowly. I didn't go and pull them all off and then totally relist. But I'm relisting them two or four items a night to get back up to that 100, thing. Now there's, this does two fold.
So, one of the biggest things on eBay is consistency. They want to see time on platform. Whether you're buying, and I've been buying a couple things on eBay, but also relisting the items consistently on a daily basis. They want to see that. So they will throw your items to more people. So that's one of the best tactics you can do on eBay is if you are stagnant right now, how often have you listed on eBay and go to like a 30 day listing challenge, go and try to list one thing.
It doesn't have to be super expensive, just get one thing listed for the next 30 days. And by the time you get into seven, 10, 15 days, you should start to see the sales pick back up because they love consistency on the platform.
Melissa: Yeah. They love the time on platform. And you also mentioned buying. So you've been buying a little bit just because of things that you've needed.
And I've been looking at, you've been looking for some shorts and so you started buying some that you like on eBay. And if you can change some of your buying habits to eBay, typically it takes longer than Amazon if you're, you know, you always shop on Amazon, but it can help the algorithm as well.
Rob: So absolutely.
So that is one thing, the consistency on platform, like we said, buying or selling. The next thing that you can do is keep an eye on those. If you don't want to end all your listings right now and you have listings right now. Are you looking to see how many watchers are on your listings? Because I don't ever list my items with accepting a best offer, but I will shoot a little bit lower price to a interested buyer.
The watchers that are on your listings. Yeah, I will shoot a price out there every once in a while, to see if I can get somebody who is interested in that. I know they're interested because they hit watch and they're watching the item. I know they're interested in that, so I might shoot them an offer out there, $50, $100 less than what I have it listed for, and it just goes to them.
It doesn't go to all of eBay, it goes to whoever is watching that listing. So, that's another tactic that you can use if you're not using it yet, and on the listing itself, it will say submit offer or send offers. I think it's send offers click on that button and it will allow you to send the however many watchers are on that listing at the time, it will allow you to send out offers to them once you send it to those those watchers, you can't resend another price to them, but as you get more watchers on the listing itself, you can send it to multiple people after.
Melissa: So say you had two watchers and you go and you send an offer to two watchers. Yes. You, if they don't jump on that, do they have a certain amount of time to jump on that?
48 hours. 48 hours, they don't jump on it. And you get two more watchers. You, if you send another offer, is it specific? Like you're sending it to them or you're sending it out to all watchers?
Rob: It's only the watchers that are on there at the time. So if you start with two watchers, you send the offer out. I know, but do you see who that is?
You do not. Okay, so you're not messaging, okay. eBay will not allow you to see that because you can go outside of eBay and do the transaction. So if you have two offers the first time, and then you wait, nobody accepts that offer. When you send it out, you wait another couple of days and you have two more offers.
So you got a total of four watchers. eBay's only going to send all the next offer out to the next two people. So, offers are a great way. We've jumped up a lot of business off of sending offers from offers. My tactic is when I list something, I don't want to show that I'm willing to take less money on it because that right away, people are going to send you offers on top of it.
And I wanted, if I have a buyer and I know my items are priced at the right price, if I have a buyer interested in that, I don't want to, slow down the sale process because they're gonna send me an offer I have time to respond back to that offer and negotiate that way. If they look at me and they see a good price on the item and they want it right now, they're gonna click buy it now and go. But I still have that opportunity once they hit watch to try and drum up that business with sending them an offer maybe $50 or $100 less than what I'm asking. And I can do that and it's a private offer to them so nobody else knows that I'm willing to take an offer.
So that's kind of my tactic. That's the way that I use my offers exactly. I don't ever show anybody that I'm willing to accept offers. And I shouldn't say never, cause I have done it too before on a listing. I have, put where I accept offers, but right now this is the tactics that we are using currently.
Melissa: Yeah. You don't usually like to have the opportunity. Cause also if you do have offers on, people know they're going to get it at a lower price. Like they're ready to go and dicker with you. Like they want to have that lower price. They're not. You're not, you're, maybe you're listing it higher because you're expecting it.
So that's a tactic in itself if people want the better deal. But you just would rather somebody shoot you a message if they want it, you know, a deal and you can shoot them an offer back.
Rob: And people will do that too. Even if you do not accept offers, somebody will even message you and say, Hey, would you take less on it? And it gives you the opportunity to just negotiate with that person, that single person, not for somebody else. Because a lot of people will just jump on our items and buy them because they're priced right. So you want to keep that one kind of behind closed doors. That you are willing to negotiate on and like Melissa said you can also price it a little bit higher knowing that you are going to offer or somebody's going to offer you less or you're going to take a little bit less on that item so you have a little bit of negotiating power with that.
Melissa: Yeah, so what about promotions to get your items seen? Huge!
Rob: So eBay like we said is exploring a lot of different ways that they can make more money on the sales. They started off with promotions a couple years back to where you can pay a little bit extra and they're going to try to give your more exposure.
Now they started out with starting like recommended promotion percentages at like one and two percent. Now they're up to, for our listings at least, it's like 12, 14, 15, 16 percent that they're recommending us promote it with that extra on top of their already fee that they're averaging like 13 percent.
On top of that fee that they're getting, they're trying to get another 10, 15 percent for the promoted. We do not do recommended. So if you are going to experiment with promoted, we definitely recommend you doing starting at 2%. They just raised that within the last year. It used to be, you could do 1 percent was the lowest you could try it at, but now it is 2%.
So 2 percent is the lowest that you can do. Click on promoted, do your own. Don't do their recommendation. Cause I said there right now they keep going up and up and up because they see an opportunity to make more money. Just do the 2 percent and try to get some business that way. And you're giving eBay another, another, another 2%, at the end of the sale afterwards.
So, but the best part about it is you're not paying it up front. You're only paying it when it sells.
Melissa: And we go back and forth on promotions. Like we'll test them out for a little bit and then test not using them. And it's kind of, you can't say like it's one way or, or not. And it also depends on what you sell, I think.
So, cause we went for a period that you were using it a lot and then we went through the last couple of months of you not using it at all. So do you have to use it? No. Should you use it? That's really up to your store. And it's always worth testing out. I think, would you agree with that? Absolutely.
Absolutely. And there is another kind of promoted listings too, where you pay before the item sells, which we have not done yet. And hopefully we don't have to, cause we don't like to give them money upfront. We don't do anything for listing. What is it? Insertion fees. We don't pay any of that stuff. So we'd rather we'll pay when it sells, but not before.
So hopefully we can stay out of doing that one.
Rob: So he's always doing stuff in the back end. They're trying to figure out how to make more money. So that is why the promotions are here. They're here to stay as far as I know. They're just trying to make more money, but experiment with it. I like right now for us personally, when I list all of my listings, I don't do promotions on any of them.
And then if they sit for a little while and I want to try promotions, I don't do promotions. I'll go to that 2 percent and I'll see if I can drum up business that way with the 2 percent and then go from there. And then we also send out the offers on that. So what other tactics did we have?
Melissa: Another thing that you can do if sales are slow is to re audit your listing.
So, checking your pictures, check and adding a video. Those two things can be huge and could be a reason why your stuff's not selling. If you already, you know, you're very experienced and your pictures are amazing, then that might not be the reason. But if you're, you know, newer or it's you know, you don't have as many things listed under your belt, the pictures are are super important because and adding a video so that the buyer is buying the item off the pictures.
They're not able to see it before they purchase it.
Rob: Yep, and remember we're selling higher profit items. So we're selling $500, $1,000, $2,000, $5,000. And that is a huge game changer when we actually put a video in of that item working and we have good pictures. Plus the description is accurate with everything else that's going on with the listing.
So definitely something that you want to audit your listing. You can do this after even if you have a listing that is out there for, you know, a couple weeks, even a month, you can go back and do comps on it. When you're auditing the listing, make sure you're looking at the sold comps and you're still on track with what it is should be priced at.
If you see any crazy dips or anything like that, sometimes if I see a crazy dip on mine, I'll still leave it there to reset the market at that current price if I know that it's a fair price.
Melissa: What is the knee one you did? The knee rehab machine. You reset. There was a comp for, do you remember how much it was?
I think it was like $600 or $700. And you sold it for $1,700? Yes. You listed it? Yes. And you didn't even have it for super long.
Rob: No. I sold it pretty quickly. But there wasn't a big, a large market. Yeah. There weren't a lot of comps. I mean, a lot of active listings out there. So you can reset the market when we need to on the listings that are, there's not a lot of competition on those listings.
So Melissa's talking about a rehab, machine that sat down on the table. You are the ground, you sat and put your knee in it and it accu, actuated or whatever. It went with your knee. Yeah. After surgery. With a machine. It was electric. And, when I saw it, when I got it, I walked past it the first time.
I think they were asking like a hundred dollars. I walked past it, went back to the truck and then I actually did the comps on it when I got to the truck. And I was like, I should go and try and talk him a little bit down on that. I think I paid $60 or $80 for it. Talked him down a little bit on the price.
We listed it and then we sold it. But when I did the comps afterwards, I saw that they were selling the recent ones had sold for like $600 or $700. And then I looked at the retail and the retail was well over, it was between $3,000 and $5,000. And I was like, this is way, way, this is not enough money for this because we try to average at 50 percent of retail when we're doing it. So I reset it. We actually went up to $1,600, $1,700. Don't quote me on the exact price, but I knew it was up there. It was almost double what the current comps were at. And we were one of the only ones. I think there might've been one or two other ones listed, that we also offered shipping on this as well.
And that's a big game changer. If you're not offering shipping on larger items, you definitely want to do that to get your items seen by more people, around the country. So anyways, but you can reset. The market for those, if you know that it had gotten too low and it doesn't have a lot of competition, you can raise that price and reset the market.
That's what we did with that knee one recently. And that's something to take note of for sure.
Melissa: Yeah.
So really it boils down to the biggest thing is being consistent is if your stuff is consistent. We do see a lot of times people, they get excited, they go and they do, you know, like maybe 30, they get 30, 50 listings up and then they wait and then you wait for stuff to sell.
Don't wait, just keep listing, keep that, keep the momentum going because then it will start to, what's the word I'm looking for? Snowball, it will start to sell. Yeah, so you got to keep that those, the momentum going.
Rob: There's a lot unknown about the backside of ebay about the algorithms about what they want. But something that is consistent for as long as we've been selling is eBay loves consistency and time on platform. So those are the biggest things even if like like we said just recently I started buying some shorts that I would normally go into a department store. I would normally go into amazon and buy and I started buying them on eBay just because I want to get on there.
I want to be on platform and I want to be doing that, as much as I possibly can while I'm relisting all the items that I pulled off all of our active listings and I started relisting them slowly, just to be more on platform and hopefully watch those sales come in. Cause we're right now, believe it or not, guys, we are in a dry spell ourselves. For the last couple of months, we've been doing like Melissa said stuff on the back end and I haven't concentrated and I haven't been that active on eBay. And we, when we do that, we know, we know how it works it. We don't get sales. So we have to be active. We have to do that. So that's what we're working through right now as well.
Melissa: Yeah. Cause we notice that in the summer too, because on the summer, we don't list, we spend more time with the kids and you don't really list anything. So sales get a lot slower. And then as soon as you get back from summer, we start listing again. And then stuff that's already been on eBay for a while that could have sold in the summer easily.
It sells because you start listing again. So, that really is the most important. And then auditing your listings and just double checking pictures are, and don't try to get perfect pictures. You don't have to worry like, okay, I gotta make my pictures perfect. I need these fancy equipment do with what you have.
Use your phone. Just make it clear, like a clear picture with nothing in the background. And just that you can make it look nice and you can cut out the background and use a white background on eBay. I don't personally love that. But you can do it and a lot of people do it. I don't either.
Rob: I feel like it sets a false.
Melissa: Yeah, a false expectation. It makes it kind of look better than it is. Like it makes it look like it might be a new item and you're selling a used item.
Rob: So I prefer these are personal preferences. So if it's working for you, great. Keep it up. We, like I said, we're very much, our biggest background, our biggest model motto is under promise and over deliver.
And I don't want somebody to have false expectations on something when I actually sell it. I don't want them to think, Oh, well this looks brand new because pictures always look better than it actually really, the item really is. You can make them look so much better in pictures and I don't want to do that.
Melissa: Yeah. So you guys, thanks so much for hanging out with us. If you want to get started in this flipping business and you're kind of been hesitating, we do have a free guide of 47 household items that you could go find in your house right now. Get started and sell. It's freeflippingguide.com and that will give you the download to that.
And yeah, so hopefully you can get this business side hustle going.
Rob: That's it. freeflippingguide.com. We'll put the link in the show notes too. You guys are awesome. Thanks for spending a little bit of time with us here today. We will catch you guys on the next episode.