This is the second installment of my “Closing an Ebay Store” series.
In part one of this series, I told you about the childrens book collection I’ve been selling on eBay for the last two years and how it was coming to a close. I left off at my sales dropping to less than one sixth of its previous level almost one month ahead of my most conservative estimate and more than two months ahead of a reasonable estimate.
There I was, two weeks before Christmas, getting ready to do some shopping. I logged on to my eBay account on Friday like I had every day before that. Since I run auctions Monday through Thursday and Sunday, it was normal not to see many bids until the end of the weekend. That’s just the way it works for me. My customers have always seemed to take the weekend to decide what they want and put in their bids.
By the time Sunday night had come there were still only two or three items that were bid on.
Hmmm….that’s odd but not to worry. It will pick up. It always does.
Fast forward to the end of auctions on Thursday. With only one more auction night left in that week, I had successfully sold a total of four books!!! I currently put out over fifty books per week so you can imagine what that did for me.
Still, I’ve had a slow week here and there so it was no reason to panic.
I always take a look at my competition to see what they are doing and not much had changed. The sellers who consider themselves my competition were still using my initial bid price as a yardstick for their own auctions(even though my books are pristine and only once-owned by the collector himself); they were still charging exactly what I am for shipping or very close; they were still putting a bunch of these books together in a box to attempt to steal my bidders with clearly inferior product.
In other words…nothing had changed substantially in the eBay marketplace.
So, I started looking elsewhere for an explanation. I heard on the news shortly after this week that the Federal Reserve was going to be cutting interest rates because they believe we are headed for recession. As most of my customers are working-class people, I thought this idea needed further investigation.
I prepared a SurveyMonkey survey where I asked them how they felt about the economy and what they most prized in an online merchant. I’ve done one of these before and they can be very helpful if they are written correctly.
Join me for part three of this series to find out what they had to say and what steps I’ve taken to stir the pot and get sales happening again.
Jeff
[tags]childrens books, ebay store, whitman tell-a-tale[/tags]
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