December by all accounts did not go well. I was slack on getting listings up which I think the mythical eBay algorithm punished me for. Sales were up in November but not by much.

I also broke my own self imposed rule to not buy anything for the whole month. This would have been less of a disappointment had I found some big score but alas I ended up punishing myself further by buying several items that I will struggle to make any real profit on after accounting for my time an effort. Not good business there. The other spending was on clothes on Boxing Day as the local Good Sammy was not only open but had 50% off all clothes and Linen. I found this too good to pass up and did indeed manage to spend $50 total (saving $50 as well) to score some really nice clothes that will be easy resells.

Decembers Improvement Focus – Inventory Storage System

So I finally got to fixing up my inventory finding a half-price special on clear storage containers at the local department store and stocking up.

I labelled and catalogued all of the clothes that had been stored haphazardly (the death pile) and assigned them a specific bin. Once I get to actually listing these I plan to add the bin number to the listing itself (Either SKU or in the actual description itself) so I can easily find this later. As mentioned previously this will benefit massively as I scale up to power through 500 listings.

The Stats

You can see the difference in this months listing stats down below.

This month I was very slack and the results reflect this.

Sales dollar amounts were up on less number of items sold (which is good). This means I sold higher value items over the course of the month.

Sales over the month were sporadic and seemed to come in waves. I was actually expecting a bit more, to be honest with Xmas but the rush never really came. I suppose many peoples money goes on other items like electrical during this time (which I currently don’t really sell).

Listing Strategy

I thought I took advantage of eBay’s feature which drops the price over time on several of my higher value items. I revised listings on my phone and made the changes. These were supposed to take effect 10 days after but nothing happened. I have manually amended some of my higher value listings to reduce prices but perhaps I need to cancel current listings and simply relist these again to actually get this feature to work…

Auto Hot Key

This month I added 2 things which help directly with eBay listing.

As previously mentioned I download all of the listing photos through Google photos. All of the new listing photos go into a single folder which I use as a type of holding bay or queue. After I create an eBay listing I was cutting and then pasting the listing photos into a separate folder and then switching back to the listing holding bay folder. For some reason that I can’t remember, at the time, this process was annoying me and I wanted to be able to finish with one listing and bounce straight into the next without leaving the holding bay folder. Surely there’s a way to automate that?

Well, yes there was and it was pretty easy automating the right clicking of the folder with the mouse and then key inputs to paste the photos. Now I can select the photos just used, hit the hot key (in my case ctrl+ctrl+F) and magically the photos are gone. This might seem trivial but when trying to list as many items as possible in 1 hour blocks I want to streamline the whole process as much as possible.

The second was automating searching for the listing title to quickly bring up similar results so I can see what other current listings are selling for. I do this to gauge where to set my starting listing price.

Business Improvement Ideas to Explore in January

January will be the month of the “Death Pile”. I had a humungous pile of clothes that I have brought over the last few months that I have been putting off getting listed. I’m not really sure why either as there is some really nice stuff in there which will sell for decent money. Maybe it’s the taking the photos and measurements. Maybe its because the last few clothes I listed didn’t look professional enough without a white background.

I have a nice new white background now (a procured white linen sheet from the Good Sammy Sale) so there are no excuses not to get all of these clothes photographed and listed.

This is literally how stupid this is, I had over 80 items of clothing ready to go. The resale value of this total is into the thousands with potential profit into the thousands, why wouldn’t I get these up as quickly as possible!!