posted on January 30, 2001 10:01:54 AM new
I know it was just the superbowl and I know the economy is not doing so well, but, hey, I have to pay for the increased listing fees somehow! Guess I'll just have to get a job to pay Ebay. lol!
posted on January 30, 2001 10:09:35 AM new
I always see a major drop off around major holidays, and the super bowl. Hopefully next week will pick up again.
posted on January 30, 2001 10:10:54 AM new
Cant see that here, my sales are back up a slight after holiday slump(week or so), lets hope they get better across the board for everyone!
posted on January 30, 2001 10:22:30 AM new
Thanks for the encouragement! Our sales were great right after Christmas then last week they were terrible. This week doesn't look to good thus far either. My guess is that everyone spent their extra money on beer/food for the big game. Hope things pick up or I really will have to get a job!
posted on January 30, 2001 10:51:13 AM new
Not just you. Was doing pretty good until this weekend and it was like everything dropped off. Hardly any views at all and only a couple of bids. Views haven't picked up much either. Maybe folks don't have any money left to bid after paying their gas bills!!
posted on January 30, 2001 10:54:58 AM new
January has been good for me and seems to be picking up even more steam now. Hang in there; I'm sure the bidders are on their way.
posted on January 30, 2001 12:02:49 PM new
I'm so glad to see this thread... to see some positive comments on this subject. Every single one of my seller friends agree with musicman. Some that were selling as a hobby are thinking about quitting. Others, like myself, are listing very little. For me, it has changed drastically from last year at this time.
Also, after several hundred auctions with no problems with non-payers, non-responses to my EOA emails, that seems to be about all I am running into. So I see a change in the TYPE of bidders also ~ across the board ~ low end to high end. With the online auction scene changing so rapidly, I have lost a lot of motivation....used to love to do online auctions..not any more...first time that ever happened to me in this business in 25+ years...lack of motivation for all reasons stated, and a few not stated.
posted on January 30, 2001 12:15:20 PM new
I think it must depend on what category you're selling in. I'm selling 90% or more of what I'm posting the first time around. Items that didn't even get hits in December are selling at prices far higher than I was asking back then. Life here is good. Hope it improves for the rest of you.
posted on January 30, 2001 02:13:06 PM new
Sales are way down for me. I have been cutting down on my listings as well. Most of the items I sell are on the $$$ side. I try to come up new ways to attract bidders.
posted on January 30, 2001 02:21:13 PM new
Bidding isn't just down in my categories, it is DEAD. I'm out until it picks back up. Paying all those listing fees with no sales just isn't working.
posted on January 30, 2001 02:39:52 PM new
It's slowing down for me too. November / December and beginning of January was keeping me busy. The bidding is picking up a little steam before auction close, but still is slower than anticipated. I hope this is only temporary.
posted on January 30, 2001 05:23:53 PM new
December and January were Great but The end of last week Bidding just stopped lots of veiws nothing in bids.
Im thinking many are getting tied up in taxes and have there computer tied up with there tax programs or are busy getting there papers togeather to have there taxes done my guess is things are going to be picking up soon when the people start getting the earily tax refund checks.
last year march april and may bidding was wild too when the mass of people started getting return checks.
posted on January 30, 2001 06:23:12 PM new
Hi! This cmsstudios, It's not the holidays or the Big game or Tax time. It's the added fees from ebay, Paypal and USPS. They are taken there toll on buyers! The lowest fee for 3-day priority mail with tracker is $4.30.(most items weight over 1 pound) Then to list your item and receive paypal payment (which we the seller add to the item bidding) is overwhelming the buyer! That's why ebay is looking for another way of collecting fee with (BIN)The e-auction sites are slowly hitting bottom with NO buyers to be found. The only way for ebay to stay afloat is to merge with someone BIG!
For the auction person above who said their sales are up 90% What are you selling MONEY!
posted on January 30, 2001 06:31:26 PM new
It's way down for me too.Only thing getting bids is real cheap items.Alot of items going off with no bids and very fews hits.
posted on January 30, 2001 08:29:38 PM new
My guess is it probaly has a lot to do with what someone is selling. I list two main catogories one sells 99% of the time the other probaly 50% on the first go around. I did just start listing this second item so we will give it a month or so and see what happens.
posted on January 30, 2001 08:36:31 PM new
My bids are up and doing good. Some items don't sell well either.
The month of december was slow for me.
I go to yard sales and buy resonable so I can cut the cost for my bidders.
Doing good since August when I started selling.
posted on January 31, 2001 03:58:26 AM new
I can think of 3 main reasons, and they have already been mentioned here.
1) Increased heating costs (natural gas, etc) have people worried, and tightening the purse strings a bit.
2) Increased shipping costs
3) Tax time
Last year this time bidding slowed down a lot as well. I just think with the increased costs lately, on top of tax time, people are slowing down and thinking twice or three times before spending the $$ on a possibly "frivolous" item. Come late Feb and March things should pick up again.
As for me, I normally sell older toys, but dabble in almost anything that I can find at a good price. My bids have been down also...but not sweating it yet!
"Who's tending the bar? Sniping works up a thirst"
As I check in here to read the boards every so often, this type of thread pops up with regularity. I think it's OK for people to vent when the performances of their auctions seems down in contrast to times past.
But, without knowing what people individually are selling, it's hard to draw any concrete conclusions from the wide variety of testimonials posted here. Sure, an uncertain economy, rising energy and shipping costs will have an effect overall.
My overiding curiosity when I read this type of thread is "what are these people selling?". I often think if I knew the answer to that question, things would come into focus.
Often when I persuse a catagory where I don't sell and have very little knowledge of, I am shocked by the number of auctions ending with no bids. Moreover, when I see a seller selling a large number of similar items ending one after another with hardly a bid, I wonder how they are staying in business or justifying their time spent listing auctions.
I think for those who are buying new stuff from wholesalers and trying to peddle it online, sales will become ever harder. If you can do a search on any particular item and find hundreds of the same thing for sale at any given time, you are selling the wrong thing.
For those who think that the items that you can easily find new at the average flea market can be transposed into sucessfull online auctions, I think will be disappointed. I'm am not saying that this applies to those in this thread, but I have seen ever more crap like that in the mix the last couple of years. Just like it's hard to make money selling Amway, Tupperwear, and products with similar schemes that people have traditionally sold from their homes, these type of business will eventually fail here on the internet as well. The type of products based on pyramid selling schemes have made their way on the internet, and supply outweighs demand. There were a host of products and items that used to sell well, because the average joe hadn't figured out yet how to sell online or where to find them en masse for themselves. Wholesalers or distributors don't care about your bottom line, they want to move product. And they don't give a damn when widgets pile up in your garage because they are selling them to everybody at a "discount",and you can't make a dime. Imitation is a form of flattery that has put the kibosh on a lot of people's internet auctions.
The bottom line is knowledge. Being a middle man on the internet as a small timer won't work. Too much competition, and your suppliers don't give a damn. Unless you really have an exclusive arrangement, or are selling one of a kind things, you ain't going to make it. Selling here sucessfully will never be as easy as simply buying from a wholesaler, because there will always be somebody bigger with more money, who can negotiate a better deal, and then undersell you until you quit. It's Walmart on the internet. Small timers have to have specific knowledge of items that are used, old, out of print, or so cheap new that they can undersell everyone. Familiarity with the current market is crucial so you know what to pay. It's hard work, book time,internet time, and beating the bushes. Selling on Ebay will never be as easy as cutting someone a check for a couple of hundred widgets.
posted on January 31, 2001 07:31:12 AM new
A very large AMEN to what atticques00 stated!
Ebay is a much more competitive market than it was a couple of years ago. There are a LOT more sellers and a LOT more items, and it has become (as atticques00 so aptly stated, “Wal-Mart on the internet”). Ebay has done a great deal to encourage this by moving away from an auction format and towards a retail format and mentality.
I sell collectibles. I do it the “old-fashioned way” – as an auction, no BIN. Bidding since the first of the year has been somewhat sporadic. Very good the first couple of weeks of the year then slack the third week. It seems to once again be good right now.
I still think that the WATCH feature is a bad idea for sellers, particularly those that sell collectibles. While I appreciate the first bid, it is the second bid that I love. That second bid (by a second bidder) is what makes it an auction and establishes the value of the item at that moment.
I have had several items up for 10-day auctions where I have ended the auction after 9 days because the item, while a clear winner in my estimation, had no bids. Invariably I will receive a flurry of e-mails saying “I was going to bid, but...”. Yeah, right – like you didn’t have an opportunity for the past week. This is the effect of the WATCH feature. True, you could always “watch” previously by setting up a system of bookmarks, but ebay institutionalized it. I feel it is to the detriment of the seller. As for BIN – I would never use it. I don’t give a rat’s you-know-what about setting the final price. That is what I want my bidders to do. Go ahead, surprise me!
posted on January 31, 2001 07:50:42 AM new
As far as good quality, desireable antique items, bidding seems healthy for people who list good stuff with reasonable (or no) reserves/starting bids.
A pattern has been emerging where some regular sellers who list large amounts of admittedly top-quality stuff, but have pegged reserves at very high retail levels. Most does not sell or reach reserve. For many items, the buying pool is not unlimited, and when buyers see this pattern, they do not even bother to bid on the seller's auctions.
I can understand that no one wants to give merchandise away, but I can say that sellers of equivalent merchandise with no or low reserves were doing very well on their prices, with heavy bidding activity.
I think it is just human nature to be more aggressive in bidding when you know your bid has the potential of actually getting something.
FWIW, these are observations about fields where I am knowledgeable about current market prices.
posted on January 31, 2001 08:21:35 AM new
Damariscotta: I agree with you completely.
Reality is that many people who post here are reluctant to disclose what they sell on eBay, therefore these 'is bidding down?' threads never seem to say much.
But I think if it were possible to take a poll, you would find that the majority of the people who are NOT complaining are the collectibles sellers with desireable vintage merchandise. This is the category I fall into.
Sellers in this category have little to hide. My selection of merchandise comes both from studying the eBay market, and from 25+ years experience in buying and selling these items. I can afford to start my auctions low, with no reserve, because my cost is usually well below 'wholesale'.
Basically, I think the most successfull sellers are those who had already paid their dues, before eBay ever came along. The sellers who complain, were under the mistaken impression that this whole thing is a way to 'get rich quick'.
posted on January 31, 2001 08:38:58 AM new
>>>many people who post here are reluctant to disclose what they sell on eBay, therefore these 'is bidding down?' threads never seem to say much.
>>>>
I don't even raise THAT issue anymore, since I have been jumped on in the past for doing so. Don't want to give away any trade secrets, you know.
Of course, the assumption that someone might steal the idea of selling merchandise lines where bidding is felt to be off is rather a puzzling one.
posted on January 31, 2001 09:35:45 AM new
corrdogg - I really liked your post! I agree completely! The auction dynamic has been somewhat destroyed by these "features". I liked the days when Ebay was an auction! It was not only more profitable for the seller but it was more fun the whole way around.
It is true that certain categories wax and wain as far as bids go. But there are some periods when I can go out and look at other's auctions in a variety of categories and still see a wanting for bids. I believe that Ebay works alot like the stock market, certain sectors(categories) rise and fall but there are things that affect the whole of Ebay. We just don't have a number, like the DOW or the NASDAQ, to go by. So we post things like, "Has bidding been down lately" on the boards. (I may have just given some bottom feeder out there an idea for a site which supplies an Ebay Exchange Rate or EER for short! We'll all be getting spam now "Come visit our site!". At any rate, it's a very hard thing to judge (I always loved the charts in Ebay magazine, don't know how accurate they were, but they gave you some clue).
Yes, things are somewhat saturated now as opposed to 2 years ago. I am still impressed with the amount of bids that everyone gets even with this saturation present. It shows just how large Ebay's user base really is.
This year is going to be an uphill climb no matter what you sell. All of the poor economic conditions (layoffs, gas prices, energy prices, etc) do not make people want to buy on Ebay. When it comes down to loseing the house or loseing the "widget". The house will win
My auctions have been doing so-so in the past few weeks. I find my things at thrift shops, garage sales and estate sales and I only buy at rock bottom prices so I can afford to start my auctions pretty low.
I don't specialize in any particular thing and wonder if sometimes this hurts me because I'm not known for a particular item. I frequent several sellers who make handmade items and repeat buy from them pretty often.
Anyway, I agree that the new eBay prices and higher shipping costs have something to do with the drop-off in some categories. As a frequent BUYER, I find myself asking if I really want to pay an additional $4.00 for an item I purchased for $5.00. For this reason it is hard to justify selling all the low-end merchandise. I am not wanting to list anything unless I can be sure that it is likely to get higher bids. This makes those surprise items (the ones you never think will sell as high as they do) fewer and farther between. Recently I have been selling used books because I can ship them media mail for less and I can find them around here for 5/1.00 and resell for about 10 bucks profit. Not a big deal, but it can add up.
posted on January 31, 2001 04:34:30 PM new
What I would like to know is what is the best credit card situation? It seems like I have been selling much more lately with the credit card, but Paypal is taking as much as Ebay. So I can not afford to sell much too cheaply.
. At any rate, it's a very hard thing to judge (I always loved the charts in Ebay magazine, don't know how accurate they were, but they gave you some clue).
