A very important eBay seller super power is consistency. As actor/filmmaker Denzel Washington has famously said, “Goals on the road to achievement cannot be achieved without discipline and consistency.” The same is true of eBay selling. You’ve got to be both disciplined and consistent your business. Let’s talk about three crucial areas for eBay sellers to be consistent in.
#1- Your eBay seller super power, list, list list!
First and foremost, in using your eBay sell super power of consistency, you want to list regularly. eBay emphasizes over and over again the importance of doing so. Keep those new listings coming! It will enhance your items’ ranking in search results and help to drive traffic and sales.
One eBay tool that makes it easier to list every day is Draft listings. Always keep some listings in Draft, ready to be finished and go live. Draft listings can be created via your phone or computer, and they are available to all sellers. I speak about this in my video, Get Consistent eBay Sales This Way!
Get consistent eBay sales this way!
In fact, many sellers find it convenient to take photos via their smartphone camera and upload them directly to eBay.
Then they fill in a few of the blanks on the SYI (Sell Your Item) form, save the listing as a draft and finish it later on their desktop or laptop computer.
If you have a few partially completed listings stashed away in Drafts, you can list anytime you have a few spare moments. This enables you to list pretty much every day, which is ideal. Use my free guide. eBay Listings That Sell, to craft winning eBay listings
I hear sellers brag about posting a dozen listings in one day, but then they may not list anything else for a week — or even longer. You’re better off listing even just one or two items as long as you do so on a daily basis. Cassini (eBay’s search engine) likes fresh content and rewards sellers who create it by ranking their offerings higher in search results. So discipline yourself to be consistent about listing.
#2- Send offers to buyers!
The second aspect of selling on eBay wherein it literally pays to be consistent is sending offers to buyers. For this, you’ll need to keep an eye on Seller Hub via your desktop or laptop computer. The information you need is not shown by eBay’s mobile app.
Check your Seller Hub Overview page several times throughout the day so as to be able to send out offers ASAP. Look in the Tasks module for “Listings eligible to send offers”. Just click on the number of items. From there you’ll be taken to an Active Listings page filtered by listings for which you can send offers.
Don’t be stingy about your discounts if you want to make sales! When you send out an offer, you’re basically creating incentive for the buyer to make the purchase. Maybe it’s in their cart, or they put it on their Watch list.
Either way, it tells eBay that this shopper is interested.
Now it’s up to you to close the sale. A mere 5% or 10% off may not be enough to seal the deal, unless the item is priced very low. Try offering 15%-25% off. You can even offer more, especially if the listing is stale and/or the item is not generating much interest.
Furthermore, unless you are just too totally slammed to respond to offers manually, allow counteroffers. If you don’t, you’ve shut down any chance of a sale. Counteroffers give your buyer the chance to respond. This allows you to negotiate with them.
By the same token, if you set up your listings to automatically decline offers under X amount of dollars, you may be turning away business. That’s never a good thing!
So check your Seller Hub Overview page several times a day.
It will enable you to greet newly interested buyers with your special offer within 24 hours. Additionally, be sure to include an enticing message with your offer. You can say, “Thank you for your interest. I hope you’ll please take advantage of this exclusive limited time offer: X% off!”
#3- Know your numbers!
Be consistently aware of the financial metrics you’ll need to report for tax purposes: i.e., what you pay for inventory, shipping expenses, and eBay fees. Many times, sellers struggle to pull together these costs at the last minute. You also need to be aware of your gross income versus your net profit from your eBay sales.
My Reseller Genie (my affiliate link) can help. It’s the seller-created solution for eBay accounting and analytics. If you formerly used GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping, you’ll LOVE My Reseller Genie. It offers comparable accounting and analytics capabilities, then goes beyond them to do even more. MRG (as it’s known for short) will crunch your numbers for you so that you can concentrate on sourcing, selling, and shipping — and it can do so for multiple platforms.
To have proper accounting the team at My Reseller Genie advises checking and importing your numbers at least once a week.
Daily is best and does not need to be overly time consuming. It can take only a few minutes to double check your numbers, expenses and categories. Being consistent on checking your numbers saves you hours and hours at tax time. Try My Reseller Genie with my affiliate link, and use code KATHY15 to save 15% on your first month.
The eBay Seller Super Power of Consistency!
So there you have it:
- List consistently.
- Keep sending out offers to buyers.
- Do the math (or better yet, let My Reseller Genie do it for you).
See? Successfully selling on eBay really is as easy as 1 -2 – 3…as long as you’re disciplined and consistent.
The good news is that both of those traits get easier with practice. Think of it as your eBay workout
