EBay General - Tips, Advice and QnA edition

eBay General - Tips, Advice and QnA edition

Question for medium / large scale professional ebayers:
How fast are you creating listings? What is your process / how did you optimize?

I'm a long time professional ebayer and decided to begin expanding the operation ~8 months ago due to having a significant amount of freetime. Things have been going great, but theres one thing that has always been a problem: I always want to make the listings faster.

Currently I use turbolister as its -much- faster than trying to create new listings on ebay (both single listings and the bulk tool), but it's still too slow for my liking.

Current process:

-photograph inventory

-edit photos in PS/Paint/Etc (Typically just cropping) one by one

-use pre-designed template to make however many listings I need

-fill each listing 1 by 1 (This is the time eater)

-hit upload, wait to see the inevitable error warning, adjust errors as necessary, resubmit

Every step of turbolister is painful. almost every possible action (from opening a template to filling each field) has a 5-10 second lag from action to response. I can list ~100 listings a day, but after all these years the slowness has become so painful I normally have to stop around 20 due simply to the frustration of how slow and buggy turbolister is

I would -LOVE- an option to remove that lag per field, and if I could somehow take a picture on phone and have it immediately load into the desired listing (thus avoiding the process of plugging phone into computer, migrating the images, etc) i'd be in heaven
As it is now, there's a 3rd party program (not naming to avoid plug) that appears to be what I want, but they want 20 a month and I'd like to find a free alternative if at all possible

so what's your process? How many listings can/do you make a day?

I used to follow the same process but it was such a time sink prepping all the listings then coming home for my day job to hurry up and pack a bunch of stuff for shipping. Then rushing up to the post office before they close to get my books out on time.

It was such a hassle i pretty much put it all on the back burner. Now i have a basement full of product making nothing for me. Oh well ill get to it when i retire in 30 years. That or i sell it all in one shot for a small loss.

Turbolister does suck. I ended up just going back to the built in lister. Take all my pics first, upload to comp, edit, use template i made, list auction. Its just a big hassle though.

in the beginning of my expansion I tested out a few different methods of listing to see if I could optimize the process any, one of those steps was trying the multi-listing tool built into ebay.

The results were worse than I could have imagined. increase the lag for every action 100% (click a title, takes 15-20 secs to open, click "upload pictures", wait 15-20 seconds to load, "submit" after selecting pictures- 15-20 seconds, etc)

The -real- kicker is since you're doing this in bulk you'd think it'd be all handled client-side during the creation process and hitting upload when you're done with your listings would cause it to upload said listings to ebay servers, but it doesn't, at least not as far as I can tell. How do I know? if you hit the back button by accident (my mouse has 2x buttons right above thumb that function as fwd/back in browsers) and have notifications disabled / instinctively click "ok" immediately- you've just lost everything you've done from the last time you clicked the save button. it doesnt keep a live backup going,

When you put it all together, it suggests it connects to ebay servers and uploads your input line by line (due to the lag and loading icon every time you click in/out of a field), but doesn't bother to keep a dynamic backup, and will ONLY backup when you click the save and finish later button. so effing retarded.

on another note, you went the wrong way imo. When I became stretched too thin I had to make a choice and lower one or the other, I chose to cut back on hours @ "real job" and put more time / effort / money into my ebaying. ~8 months later i was comfortable enough to completely quit the 9-5.

with that said, if you have any interest maybe we could work out a JV together. One way I've been expanding is taking on partners as a form of inventory growth (typically people that are pre-established and want to move more inventory volume) . If you're interested leave me some contact info and we can talk

Used to use Turbolister, but now I only use it for backups.

Actually, all my listings were created in Turbolister, but now I do "sell similar" and any unlikely new creations in Selling Manager Pro. Granted, I repeat the same 500 listings every time, with pretty much the same price. If I had 500 new things every month, I might do it another way.

I assume you've noticed that Sell Similar gets you a better placement than Relist.

So yeah, my circumstances are not the same as yours.

If I had to do batch edit of photos I'd use either the automation part of Photoshop, or do some other batch tool. Plenty to choose from.

The stuff you mention about creating each listing 1 by 1, I would do different.
I would export a turbolister file into CSV to see how it is constructed, then write the listings directly in Excel. I would use my outsourcer to do this (he is already handling 75% of the process for me, IE pics and product identification).
.

This was some good information, thanks user!

I've used photoshops automation to do various things over the years (watermark, size adjustment, etc) But you cant automate things like cropping since theres no definable rule to set for what to crop

like you said, your designs much different than, but that mention of CSV files may prove to be useful. I've never played with CSV files but I'm going to look into it and see if I can take advantage like you said. Thanks for the info

on another note since this is ebay general:

I Just sold a 50 dollar item and can't find it. wondering if I accidentally re-listed a sold item. FML.

i'm really confused. about two weeks ago this guy contacted me threatening to file a VERO report on one of my items. I just ignored it and he never did anything. now he just messaged me asking for the address of "me or my attorney". is this guy just retarded or should I remove the item in question? I feel like an actual lawyer or whatever would be smart enough to just buy the fucking item if he wanted to reveal my address.

the most important and obvious question: What is the item he is arguing about?

is this some random guy about a random item, or are you bootlegging something he has license to?

if its just something he made, you bought, and now you're selling the one you bought, he should have no legal ground to stand on.

If he has created and licensed something and now you're now selling unlicensed versions of it- that could cause some major issue for you and it'd be smart to stop.

Note if this is artwork or some kind of image/software design there are default copy protection laws that you may very well be breaking.

Also possible trouble if whatever the item is came with a no reselling/releasing/recreating/etc contract/clause/agreement and now you're breaking those terms

As for him requesting any form of information - ignore him if you want. If he's not a lawyer you don't have to respond to anything coming from him. Now if he has an attorney get in touch with you that's a different story.

With that said it is technically possible for him to report you to ebay and if you really are infringing or otherwise breaking ebay ToS you very well can be shut down however ebay sees fit.

curious about your story, please elaborate

it's a reprint of an old band t-shirt that's apparently unlicensed. I have the guy's name and I know he had nothing to do with the creation of the design on it. if he had any real control over it I don't understand why he didn't report the item like he claimed he would. also interesting - after a little bit of searching I discovered that someone who owns some hipster "gallery" in San Francisco is selling the same shirt considerably marked up, and the name of the dude who contacted me comes up as an associate of the guy running the place (he also lives in SF).

I think I'll just remove the listing because I don't want a potential hassle but the whole thing seems odd.

Oh yeah there are also two dozen other bootleg shirts of the same artist listed right now

Keep on ignoring him, IMO. The guy is obviously bonkers.

Get an employee OP.

I sell shit on eBay on the side for myself but the joy is that I manage eCommerce for a building supply company. I started it from scratch a couple of years ago and now I am doing about $80k per month on average. They let me hire two people who I now have do pretty much everything while I get patted on the head for bringing in so much money.

>Starting out selling surplus cards.
>Only able to sell 400$ worth of inventory due to my limits.
>Can't request to get them bumped up.
Do I just wait till my seller review on the 20th?

if theres some kind of gallery hes affiliated with / friends with there very well may be some form of licensing agreement they ahve. Assuming you don't have too much invested (ie only 1 or a couple) then yeah I'd just back off

I intend to, probably in the next 2 years. I have a bit more room to grow before my plate gets full and I need to bring in more hands for anything- but that wouldnt solve the issue at hand. If I hire someone and teach them the processes I use, theyll inevitably be at the same pace I am. My goal is to increase productivity by simplifying / optimizing the processes where I can because there's an obvious loss of efficiency being caused by inadequate, slow, buggy software.

I am assuming that you have a lot of low-priced product?

It's a bit easier for me, we don't do more than 200-300 listings per month but each is for a high priced item, i.e. some fancy yuropean vanity, or a $7000 slab of marble. I concentrate more on making sure each listing is as perfect as can be rather than getting them out quickly.

Would you recommend going into a niche or sell a wide variety of items?

>Assuming you don't have too much invested (ie only 1 or a couple) then yeah I'd just back off

yeah I took it down earlier. even if the guy is bullshitting I doubt it would be hard for him to come up with something stupid to get eBay on my case. i've never had any problems using eBay for the past 11 years so I'd rather not start.

fuck ebay and paypal fucking scammers who violate multiple laws worldwide, stop shilling this crap we dont need you anymore , new better always comes up

plz tell me the new and better i would like to know

Whats the shirt, if it can make money fuck it ill sell fuck those dudes sound like faggots. They can come at me idgaf

wait are you telling me ebay.com has 400$ selling limit for sellers? even if you open a shop?
Better work on some ghost accs + paypal then

When your account is new you have a low limit for listings. I've seen some people start with limits as low as 15 items and a couple hundred dollars of product is their paypal and ebay are brand new.

This is to prevent scams and various forms of bullshit. They regularly raise your limits as long as you're not fuckin people over.

Within a couple months to a year of selling, your limits will basically be too high for 99% of people to even keep up with. I just started selling last August and my limits are $200,000 a month and 8,000 items.

Pro tip: Max out your limits regularly and they get raised faster

You shouldn't have to edit photos in paint. I don't use turbo lister so maybe it's different but when you upload pictures to ebay there should be an option to crop/rotate photos as needed. Also, you can change the picture resolution on your phone to be smaller so cropping isn't necessary at all.

I do 100-150 listings a day, once a week. This is my process, don't know if it's more or less efficient than yours but maybe you can learn something from it.

>Lay out inventory in front of me
>Draw 8×6 grid on a couple pieces of printer paper
>Fill in one square for each item, write the quantity and name
>Seperate items by brand on grid
>Place one item of each type into a box
>Place the rest of the items of that type into a big 40 gallon blue storage tub (to be sorted after listing)
>Take the box that has one of each item
>Take pictures of all the items
>Upload pictures
>Sort into folders as needed, by brand, type, etc
>Many items do not need to be placed into folders as its easy to tell what they are from looking at the thumbnails
>Grab box of one of each item
>Take out item
>Research selling price
>Fill out listing
>Reference inventory sheet for quantity
>Fill out listing
>Cross out on inventory sheet
>Rinse & repeat 100-150 times
>Sort out items into shelf/into drawers