When I list items on our eBay store, I follow a pretty simple process. Mainly because I do not have a ton of time to manually adjust listings to try to optimize them week by week trying to lower the price until I find the sweet spot. That method works great for other sellers and I would go that route if I had the time to spend on our store.
With my time constraints I follow a simple approach to my listings trying to keep it as hands off as possible. While that does not always happen, it does work well for my business.
Step 1: Use eBay to research what the item I am looking to sell has sold for on the platform. By doing a quick search on eBay, you can see all the items that are currently listed. On the left choose the filter options to view only completed sold items. With this view you will see what listings have sold and get an idea of the going rate for your item. This is handy to give me the high and low-price points.
Step 2: List item using the high price point of previous listing. If the high price included free shipping, I would deduct a round number from my price since I do charge for shipping. I list all items with calculated shipping. To make sure I am accurate I will weight the item in the box I plan to use and enter the weight and measurements into the shipping details.
Step 3: Next, I enable the Best Offer option to allow potential buyers to send me an offer if they do not want to buy at my current price. You can enable options to auto decline offers that are below a certain dollar amount.
Step 4: I list the item for 30 Days but do not use the GTC option. I let the item run for the 30 Days and then I like to renew the listing as I am finding better results when re-listing items. Feel free to try either way and see what works best for you.
With the listing running I just wait and see if the item sells or if I get alerts regarding offers. The nice thing with using the calculated shipping is that I always know I am going to collect the correct amount of shipping and will not lose money there. There are times where you just want to get rid of the item will take a low offer. I have made the mistake of taking an offer on an item that had included shipping but after packaging the item the shipping was more than I thought and ended up losing money on the deal. Even if you sell an item for $1 you want to make sure you make that $1
Try this out and let me know what methods you use to list your items.
