Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about what to do if your item isn't selling and whether you should drop the price.
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Your Item Isn’t Selling… Should You Drop the Price?
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about a question that gets asked a lot. When do you drop your prices on your eBay listings?
Rob: All right, so today's gonna be a fun topic.
We are talking about when you should drop your prices on your eBay listings that are not selling.
Melissa: So this came up actually in our group. We did a, a live in our group the other day. And, we were talking to them and that was a big question that people had was on pricing. So, they said, when at what point, like how long do you let a listing sit before you start dropping the price?
And we have some pretty different points of view on pricing. So we just wanted to share with you kind of our thought process in the way we do our business model.
Rob: Absolutely. So if you don't know, if you're new to the show, we actually buy or I should say sell high profit items. So we're getting items as cheap as we can in local market, but we're selling them for lots and lots of money.
That's what
Melissa: typically about a thousand to $2,000 is our average sale that we're looking for. We used to do several, you know. And we'll do smaller items too. But right now, like we're at the point where we pretty much are looking for at least a thousand dollars for a sale.
Rob: Yep. And if you guys remember, kind of like talking about our, one of the last episodes we did about the dolls, didn't we?
Melissa: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Rob: That is not our normal thing to sell items that we might sell for $30 or $40, but when you lump a hundred of those together and you can sell them for four to $5,000, that is,
Melissa: I don't think it's made that much, but we'll see.
Rob: I absolutely do. We will list those for $4,999.99. $4,999. 99
Anyways, $5,000, let's just put it that way.
And we will take an offer. We'll see if we can get anybody interested and then we will lower it. But at the same time, that's really what we're going for. So those are the items that we're looking for the stamps that we sold, we paid $300 for them, sold them for $3,500. So we're really looking for these items in the local market, that we can buy.
And $300, $500, that's a lot of money to spend in the local market on a, on a single item. We don't typically like to go that high, but we do like to spend between $50 and a hundred bucks to be able to make a thousand, $2,000, $3,000. So that is what our normal model is. Let's jump back into the topic now that you guys all on board of how we kind of do our business. For us, when you're looking at items that are on eBay and not selling. Most resellers that are doing volume, they might have a system that they're like, all right, well, at a 10 day mark,
Melissa: do a coupon or a sale.
Yeah.
Or something like that.
Rob: 10 day mark. We're gonna do this. 20 day mark, we're gonna do this. At a 30 day mark, we're gonna do this. We typically price our items at the right price the first time, and it's a unique item, so it will take a little bit of time. Sometimes, not always.
Melissa: Well, sometimes they're 24 hours, but you know, it could take a little bit longer, but that's not the first thing that you should do.
There's a lot of other things you can do before you drop your price. And we actually, I was trying to think of our, our items. I can't think of a time that you really drop prices on things.
Rob: No, but I will, with the caveat, we don't drop them to the public, for the public to see. Yes. But we do send out offers where we will lower the price for that individual watcher who's on the item, but actually lowering the price for everybody to see.
There's a couple different problems with that. We'll dive into, yeah, kind of our thought process on this. But yeah, there's a couple different problems when you're dropping your prices on the items.
Melissa: So we don't. On average, we don't typically drop any of our prices, even if it hasn't sold. So we're going to go through a couple of things that we would do on a listing that might be stagnant or not being seen.
The only other thing I would say about lowering the price, sometimes we'll switch the price. So we'll do we typically list with an X amount of price with free shipping, we might drop the price and add on shipping to where it actually equals the same amount of money. But to the buyer, it might be more appealing 'cause they might see that, okay, it's this price we should be.
So we, we do play around with that. But that's pretty much the only thing we would change on a public pricing.
Rob: Yeah. But for us, my goal is to price it right the first time. And I'm pricing off of, a couple different factors. One of them being. What retail is on the item. Now I'm gonna give you an example of an item we just recently sold not that long ago, that steamer.
We've talked about it on the podcast. It was that Cleveland steamer, big commercial like oven steamer, whatever it is. We bought that, bought it when we were on vacation. Actually it wasn't a vacation. We were on at a mastermind out of town, up in Idaho, bought that on vacation for a thousand dollars, which is super, super high for us to spend.
But on the upswing of that, I looked it up before I bought it for retail, and retail was at between $40,000 and $50,000. So I knew a thousand dollars, those are pennies compared to what somebody would have to pay if they really wanted this. So we bought that thing for a thousand dollars. We actually sold it for $15,000.
I had it listed at $20,000 and somebody reached out to me and said, would you take $15,000 cash? And I said, absolutely. I got a thousand dollars into it. If I can turn in less than 30 days, if I can turn a thousand dollars into $14,000 into my pocket, that's what I will do. So they offered us $15,000. We took $15,000 on that sale. I did not lower the price and it was sitting on for a couple weeks.
Melissa: Who knows? Yeah, 30 days I think it was.
Rob: I didn't lower the price. I wouldn't lower the price no matter what, but that's because I looked at a couple different factors: what the retail value is, what is a good sale price on that off of the retail value.
And then I also looked off eBay comps. Now for this one, no comps whatsoever. I could not find a comp for an item this new because it was brand new still on the pallet. It had a couple little dings in it and that's probably why they got rid of it. But it was brand new on the pallet and never been installed.
So I couldn't find any comps other than what new items were listed for. And I don't even know if any of the new items, this exact one was listed on eBay, but I could find them on Google. And so those are a couple different factors that we look when we're pricing our items, we wanna see what retail value is.
We wanna see if there are any sold and active listings on eBay that we're kind of being, we, we want to make sure we're competitive with what we're doing, but we also don't wanna give it away if somebody's got a lower price. We try to make ours stick out with videos, with descriptions, with pictures.
We try to make our items list out and we have a hundred percent feedback on what we do, which is another topic for another day, but it's easier for us to keep a hundred percent feedback than a lot of volume sellers because we're not selling thousands and thousands of items in a year. We're only selling maybe a hundred items, a hundred items, if that so's easier for us to keep our, our buyers happy, with the items that we're selling because we are under promising and overdelivering on the items that we are selling.
Melissa: Yeah, so that's one of the first things. One of the things you, you just mentioned was, take, looking at your items. So checking it and seeing if you have a video added to the listing. So that's doing a whole audit on your listing.
Rob: That's the main word like Melissa said. Audit.
Melissa: Seeing how it is, because that is probably the biggest thing that can get your items sold better because we've done lots of these, we've looked at some of our students, we've looked at, reviewed a lot of different accounts and that typically, like you can get good pictures, but usually you can get better pictures. So it's just they don't wanna be perfect, like we're not looking for perfect, but just good clean pictures and lots of them. And a video definitely helps too.
And looking at the other active listings to try to make yours stick out more with the good pictures, with the title, with the descriptions, all that stuff come into play.
If you wanna move your items quicker, you wanna be looking at that stuff. But like Melissa said, that's the first thing is the audit. Make sure you're going back, maybe you took quick pictures on this to get it listed.
Yeah.
Rob: I know a lot of people,
Melissa: which you've done. You've done that before.
Rob: Yes. A lot of people get items, they wanna get them listed immediately.
They might not have the best background. You might have been able to see a little bit of clutter or, you didn't get the whole picture. It wasn't bright enough for whatever reason, you can go back and audit the listing before you lower the price of the listing.
Melissa: Yeah, and then the videos are super important, especially if it's an item that's higher value.
Some items don't need a video like it's a t-shirt or something. Like you don't need a video for those. But if it's something that actually powers on, those are really helpful for buyers to, to see that the item actually works.
Absolutely.
So then another thing that you can do, we do this sometimes is promoted listing.
So that is where you go in and you do an ad percentage to get your item sold, or seen in front of more people.
Rob: If we do use the promoted listing tool, the most we do is eBay's minimum. They allow, they used to allow 1%.
Melissa: Now it's two.
Rob: Now it's 2%. You have to do 2%. I don't like to do this. I don't do this a lot, but sometimes I will do it.
And I'll do a 2%, eBay fee, or eBay promotion fee on top of it. I feel like they work a little bit harder to, sell the item when you do have the promotion, but at the same time, and I don't know, how don't, I have no idea how the back ends of eBay work, like what it does and all that stuff.
I'm sure eBay can tell you more about that, but I do know, some of our items sell without promoted and some of them sell with promoted if I do promote it. So the biggest thing is a lot of our items are expensive. I don't wanna pay that 2% on $5,000 if I sell an item for $5,000. So I don't wanna pay that if I don't have to.
Sometimes if you are gonna use promoted, maybe you go in there and do promote it and you up the price a little bit. Maybe I shouldn't say that. I don't know if eBay tells you that that's against the rules. I don't know. But if I was doing it, that's probably, and we have so much profit on our items that I don't really have to worry about that.
But if you don't have the profit there, maybe be thinking of ways that you can get it seen by more people, but still not lose the money off the promoted listings.
Melissa: Yeah. And in our experience, I can't say, you know, in our experience that we've seen in the past, promoted listings, not promoting them, doesn't make them not go to Google.
I think I said that like with a lot of negatives, but like what? What I'm meaning is like, I think that they wanted to do promoted listings, gets your stuff pushed out on Google, but we have seen our stuff pushed out on Google without promoted listings. So we go back and forth.
Rob: With the caveat of we sell unique items.
Yeah. So I'm selling an item. If I'm selling a range,
Melissa: there's not a huge competition for it.
Rob: Exactly. I'm selling a range in the title. I have the title of the, or the brand name. I have the model of it. There's not gonna be a lot of competition for that exact model and range, typically brand name and range.
So therefore eBay typically will put it over onto Google after it sits on eBay for a week or two, and you can actually do a Google search. And, our listings typically come up with that because there's not a ton of competition. And when you search for individual or a specific item, Google wants to have a lot of options for the potential buyer.
The potential search, the searcher of whatever they're searching for on Google. So our items, because they're a little more unique, we're not selling a t-shirt, we're not selling a hat, that would never, ever rank or come up on Google. We're selling these individual items, that are pretty unique and pretty cool, to make the high profit that we're selling them for.
Yeah.
Melissa: So instead, if you're going to think about stuff, think about your items that they're not selling. Don't let the first thing, your first instinct to be like, let's drop the price. Let's say let's go check the listing, see if we can make it better, and then see if you can make your future listings better, which also means you should also be making sure you're listing more. 'cause I know that is a big thing that especially people starting out, you get, 10 listings done and then you sit and wait and wait for them to sell. And I think actually is it limit 10 in the beginning? Oh five.
Rob: You said it's five now.
Melissa: Five. Okay. So you gotta get those ones sold. Once you get that limit increased, then
Rob: just in the beginning,
Melissa: just just in the, your first few sales, they just wanna make sure that you're, if you're new to eBay, you're not a scammer, you're, you're not a scammer, that you're legit, you're gonna ship out the items that you sell.
So once you get past that first initial five to 10 limit, then you can start listing more and get some more stuff listed. And don't just wait for those things to sell. Make sure that you're constantly, that feeds into the eBay algorithm. It likes when you're consistent on eBay. And that will also help your listings sell.
And the more inventory you have listed the more that can sell.
Rob: And that's what inside the group today, when we had that conversation with our, our members, that was one of the biggest things is I, I don't typically, if an item doesn't sell immediately, if it doesn't sell on my timeframe, I'm not looking to lower the price because I already know that I priced it at the right price.
I know I'm giving somebody a great deal off of retail for a good item. I'm not doing that. So what I'm doing is I'm looking at what else I can go get and get it listed because it is, the more items that you have out there into, the eBay, your inventory, yeah. The more inventory that you have, the better chances you have of building a normal routine of a check coming in every single week.
Consistently.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: Consistently. Especially with our model of the higher profit. We don't list hundreds and thousands of items. We list very few items, but we're, we're handpicking these items. We're finding these items that we can make a thousand, $2000, $5,000, $10,000 on a single item. That's what we're looking for.
So if, go ahead.
Melissa: No, I was just gonna say, and if you have stuff that's vintage, that's older, that really is hard to find a on 'cause they, you know it's 20, 30, 40 years old. You can kind of set your own prices and I would definitely not come down quickly on those, like I would leave them, let people reach out to you, collectors, or let people you know, be interested and then you can give them an offer or they can make you an offer for you.
On their own, but I wouldn't just drop the prices on some of those items. 'cause you, you've reset comps many times. Like, so you can just put it back up for a price that you think is fair, that somebody might be interested in, and then you can always come down for them individually. So.
Rob: Absolutely, collectors items is, are really, really cool because you can make some really good money and you typically on a collector's item, you can make more than what it actually retail sold for. Yeah. 30 years ago. Which
Melissa: because somebody's buying on nostalgia. Yeah. They're buying something that they had in the past or that their family member had in the past and they want it. And they're probably a little bit older now and they have the money to pay for it and they're willing to do that and that's worth it to them.
So.
Rob: And eBay’s where it's at, eBay is the only place where it's at other than for people like us that are going to thrift stores, going to flea markets, going looking exactly estate sales going, looking in Facebook market and the local are the local
Melissa: market.
Rob: Market. And then we're taking it and we're putting it on eBay.
So who really wants it, needs it, and we'll pay the money for it. We'll be able to find it and get that item.
Melissa: Well, thanks so much for listening to us today. If you wanna learn more about our business model of a little bit lower volume, higher profit flipping, check out our free workshop. We'll put the link in the show notes below, and you guys are awesome.
Rob: You're amazing. Have an amazing day, and we'll see you on the next episode.