|
|
||
|
|
|||
What is the Best Day and Time to End an eBay Auction?The Online Seller's News, October, 2011, Volume 11, No. 20 Tips, Tools, News and Resources for eBay, Amazon and Independent Online Sellers ~ Published Twice Monthly (except in December)
Musings from eBay, Amazon, and beyond In the last issue I had an instant update about pre-ordering the new Amazon Kindle Fire so you could turn around and sell them at a higher price when they are in short supply. I am still getting email from some of you wondering if this is still doable and the answer is NO. It’s way too late now. To take advantage of this you needed to be on the pre-order list for the first shipments on November 14th. If you place a pre-order today you will already be on a later shipment date, so that train has left the station. But if you did buy within the first week you should be able to make between $100 and $200 on each one you bought. Important: One issue a reader brought up to me is that the new Kindles arrive set up on your account. You certainly don’t want to ship them that way. The answer is to make your purchase as a gift. There is still time to do this. Here is what Amazon said when I asked the question:
Note that Amazon says by marking as a gift the price will not be on the packing slip which is also good. I just finished a special bonus report for members of The Proven Amazon Course. The report is called: Winning the Buy Box on Amazon. It explains two strategies that work 100% of the time to help sellers win the buy box on Amazon. If you haven’t tried selling on Amazon you may not know how important that is, but any Amazon seller will tell you that winning the buy box is crucial to your success on Amazon and my report shows you two easy ways to do that. Several people have already asked me if they could purchase the report –but part of my agreement with Jim when we worked on the course together was to create some exclusive content. So if you want the report, just take a look at The Proven Amazon Course. Jim lowered the price by $100 a few weeks ago and this course is a huge bargain at that price. We call it the “proven” course because it really is. We have absolutely proven that if you follow these methods you will make money on Amazon as hundreds of happy customers are already doing. There is just one other place you can get Winning The Buy Box. We have made it available to members of our online coaching program, Online Selling Coach. A while ago I wrote about a bundling strategy on Amazon as a way to create unique products where you could always get the buy box. One of my readers, Brian T. took my idea one step further. As you may or may not know, SquareTrade.com sells warranties on electronic items such as Cameras, DVD players and so on. A SquareTrade warranty on a typical digital camera sells for $14. If you bundle that with a camera you now have a unique product you can sell at your price and get the buy box every time. I have written about selling on Facebook numerous times. One of the things you need is a shopping cart that easily integrates. One of the best is from a company called TabJuice. Here is an article from the folks at TabJuice about the benefits of selling on the Facebook platform: Social Commerce: Additional Outlets, Exposure, Buzz, and Revenue I have also written about Kabbage a few times. If you need a cash advance to buy merchandise to sell during the holidays, this is a great place to find it. They have a new feature that if you are also on Facebook and Twitter they will increase your cash advance amount available. I went into my account and registered my Facebook and Twitter account and they upped my cash advance limit by another thousand dollars. Amazon Re-opens Associates Program to California ResidentsCalifornia Governor Jerry Brown recently signed legislation repealing the law that had forced Amazon to close the program to California residents. Amazon is pleased to invite all California Associates whose accounts were closed due to the prior legislation to re-enroll in the Program. Associates who re-enroll will retain all prior account settings (login, Associates ID, payment information, etc.). For more details and eligibility information, see Amazon re-enrollment FAQs. This means any of you California residents who wanted to buy my book: How to Make Money With The Amazon Affiliate Program may do so again. Last week I was interviewed on Wholesale FM Radio about finding wholesale sources for your eBay, Amazon and website businesses. Here is a link to the interview if you would like to listen in. It’s about 30 minutes long. Lets get started with this month’s articles: [top] 1. What is the Best Day and Time to End an eBay Auction? Figuring out the best time and day to end an auction is one of the critical keys to success on eBay. The reason for this is that eBay gives every auction listing prominence in the eBay search results during the last 4 hours of your listing. This is true even when someone uses the Best Match default search setting. Look at this search result for golf putters:  Notice that even though I searched the best match, the top listings were for items ending within an hour or so. Therefore you want your listings to end on days and the best time of day when the most people are on eBay. You would not believe, how many people don’t realize this. They are working on their auction listings at ten o’clock in the evening and just launch it then. That way the auction ends exactly 3, 5, 7 or 10 days later at that exact time. So if you were in Los Angeles and launched a 7-day auction on Tuesday evening at ten PM, that is 1AM on the East Coast. How many people do you think are on eBay at that time? There are nowhere near as many as earlier in the evening, but still some. The problem is because there are so few people, you may only get that one bidder who bids the minimum amount and there goes your item as the lowest possible price. Here is a chart of what I consider to be the best and worst days to end an auction (all times are Pacific Time):
Different types of people shop at different times. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evening is when the most popular prime time TV shows are on. Young people are usually out Friday and Saturday nights. Older folks, who stay home, spend a lot of time on eBay during the day and on Saturday evening because it’s usually a lousy TV night. If you are selling something to business owners, they tend to shop during the day from work. Although evenings are usually pretty good, every year there are some really hot TV programs. If your auction ends during the finals for American Idol, you may get less activity. You want to be careful with auctions ending on holiday weekends when people are away and during big events like the Superbowl, World Series or Academy Awards night. Having said that, however, I forgot to end my auctions on Monday of Superbowl week and had most of them end during the Superbowl – yet I did OK. I think a lot of bored people who don’t like football or were fans of other teams, spent some time shopping on eBay. The auction duration you select is closely related to what day your auction will end. I personally prefer to launch my three-day and ten-day auctions on Thursday and Friday evenings so they end on Sunday or Monday evenings. Between 4pm and 6pm, Pacific time (7-9pm Eastern) seems to work best for me, but you should experiment based on the types of products you are selling. During the Christmas selling season when the site is really busy, I tend to run 3-day listings so I can sell as many items in the shortest possible period of time. I don’t worry so much about the auction calendar during that time (November 1 to December 21st). Almost every day is good during that time period. Having said all of this now let me say that these are general rules, with many exceptions. I like to use a research tool such as Terapeak or HammerTap to determine the best day/time for a specific product. For example, for some reason unknown to me, my Starbucks collectible mugs do best on Wednesday between 3-4PM. When I was selling my photo light tents they did best on weekdays during the day from 10AM to 3PM. So you always want to research, test and experiment. Lastly – you should know that the holiday season extends past the holidays. I always see strong sales all the way through January and I keep running my 3-day auctions until then, when I revert to my 7-day listings. [top] 2. Niche of The Month – Anything That People Buy During The Holidays That may sound like a silly niche but it’s not. If you sell in some collectible niche and it’s the sort of thing someone might give for a gift then you are OK. But most collectible niche sellers see soft sales during the holidays, as people are spending money on others rather than themselves. So this is the time of year to buy those things that people will give as gifts. That covers a lot of ground. Of course one of the best things are toys. And just in time, Jennie Hunt has just released her Holiday Toy Guide. I have been promoting this to my readers for the past six years and there are hundreds of my readers who have taken advantage of this service to make up to several thousand dollars of extra cash during the holiday season. (If you are a member of www.onlinesellingcoach.com, wait until October 12th when members can get the Holiday Toy Guide at a discount). Whether you are a member of OSC or not, if you want to make money selling toys this holiday season, you definitely want the Holiday Toy Guide. Beside the toys that Jennie can help you source the other big resource for both toys and other gifts and household items are your local wholesale merchandise marts. They all go by different names, such as design center, gift mart, merchandise mart and so on. Here is Seattle our merchandise mart is called The Pacific Market Center. The center has over 200 showrooms full of merchandise that you can handle and get wholesale pricing on. You don’t walk out with the goods, instead you typically place an order and the goods are shipped to you. My experience has been that I can place an order and get my goods within 2-3 weeks, so there is still time to order for the holiday season if you start now. To gain entry you will need a business card and your sales tax certificate for the state you live in. Some marts also require that you show them a check or deposit slip from a business bank account –but most of them don’t. Rather than travel to the mart and then find you can’t get in, its best to call them and ask what they need and make sure you have that. The thing you will find most attractive is that you don’t have to order in large quantities. Most vendors in the marts have a minimum opening order (MOO) of between $150-$300. A few have no minimums at all. But a few product lines such as Cuisinart have larger minimums such as $1,500 but that is fairly rare. Here is a list of the major merchandise marts in the US. (Sorry I don’t have these for Canada and Europe but you can usually find them with a Google search)
This is not a complete list. If you don’t see your city on this list, just Google terms such as “gift mart or merchandise mart + the name of your city. [top] 3. FAQ – On Using Amazon FBA as Your Drop Shipper for eBay Over the past few months I have written quite a bit about Amazon’s FBA program – the program where you send your goods to Amazon and they ship to your customers when you make a sale on Amazon. I have also mentioned that Amazon will ship your eBay and website sales for you as well. And this is the topic I get a lot of questions on. I have even seen forum posts with highly inaccurate information on this topic. So here are some of the frequently asked questions (FAQs) I get. Q. Is it legal or against Amazon policies to ship your eBay sales from Amazon FBA? A. Yes it is both legal and Amazon has no problem with it. In fact hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of FBA sellers are doing this every day including myself. Amazon charges a fee for storage and a handling fee when you create a fulfillment order. Here is what a fulfillment order screen looks like.  This is the first screen where you simply check on the inventory item you want to fulfill and then select Create Fulfillment Order from the drop down box and hit Go. Then you get this screen to fill out the information where you want it shipped and if you want an email sent to the customer. (Don’t do that for eBay sales).  Once you fill out this info and hit complete, you will go to another page to select the shipping method and confirm the shipment. Amazon will tell you the shipping cost and the date the item will arrive. Now, in the email field put your own email address so you will get the tracking info that you can enter into eBay’s page showing you shipped the item. Q. Does Amazon ship in an Amazon box or a plain box? A. At this time, Amazon ships in an Amazon box. I heard from someone at Amazon that at some point they plan to ship non-Amazon fulfillment orders in a plain box, but I have no idea when that will happen. Q. Do eBay and other buyers mind getting items in an Amazon box? A. This can lead to confusion, so what I do is send them an email that says:
Q. How much does Amazon charge for shipping and handling? Here is the order summary for an item that weighs 3 pounds and is shipping across 4 UPS zones: 
Amazon gives you two choices – standard or 2nd day air. On the left is the standard rate –total $6.85 for UPS Ground. On the right is 2nd Day air for only $10.15. The standard rate to get a UPS Ground package of 3 pounds over four zones is close to $14.00. So even with the shipping and handling fee you can ship for far less that if you sold it and shipped it yourself. This gives you a huge competitive advantage on eBay as you can offer free shipping or low cost expedited shipping –or even free expedited shipping. If you want
to learn how to do this, check out the
Proven Amazon Course. Jim
[top] 4. Increase Profits with Pricing and Inventory Turn Strategy The most common complaints from online sellers today revolves around the high fees charged by eBay and Amazon. Of course, one way around that is to set up your own website and sell directly to customers –and many sellers including myself do just that. But my website just doesn’t deliver the sales and profits I get from eBay, Amazon and Buy.com (where I recently started selling). If you work in a highly specialized niche with little competition then you can do well with a website as it will be easily found. But if you are selling almost any popular product, then you will be competing for traffic with hundreds, or even thousands, of websites. For example, my website at www.firepit-grills.com has a Google page rank of 3/10 which is actually really good for a small independent website. Yet that website only delivers about 15% of the sales I get on eBay for the same product. Yes I make more money when I sell a firepit there, but the volume is just not enough to live on. So that means for most of us, we are pretty much at the mercy of eBay and Amazon when it comes to selecting a selling platform. We can grouse and complain about that as much as we want, but as Frank Sinatra once crooned: “That’s life….”. It is highly unlikely that Amazon or eBay will lower fees anytime soon. So how do we make the most of it? My favorite strategy for making money in this environment is to closely manage my inventory turnover. Here is an example. Last week I scored a great buy on a Buzz Lightyear Talking Figure. Since they were a bit expensive, I only bought 4 of them, which was a mistake. I sent them into Amazon’s FBA warehouse and when they were processed and hit the platform. All 4 of them sold in one day! (See what I mean when I said I made a mistake?)  Other sellers (in FBA) had them selling at prices between $41.90 and $54. I priced mine at $31.90 and as I said above they all sold out in one day. My cost on these (I bought them from the Sale page at the Disney Online Store) was $24 each with free shipping. They cost me less than $6 ($1.50 ea.) to ship to Amazon –so my total cost was $25.50. When they sold I only netted $31.49 after Amazon fees, so my profit was $5.99 each (let’s round that up to $6 to keep it simple). Now six dollars doesn’t sound like much but here is where it gets interesting. If I had priced my toy higher –say at $45.00, they eventually would have sold as the other sellers ran out of product and mine moved into the buy box. But that could have taken several weeks. This way I laid out a total of $102 and got back $126. The time period was about 3 weeks (the time it took to receive the product and ship it to Amazon). So I made approximately 25% on my money in 3 weeks. Do that every three weeks; compounded you almost double your money about every nine weeks. That works out to almost 500% return over one year. Of course that assumes you plow everything back into buying and reselling without taking anything out for living expenses –but you get the point. Had I held out for the higher price of $45, I certainly would have gotten that, but it may have taken me another three weeks to sell out. Now my total compounded return is cut in half. That is the lesson about inventory turn. Now I am not saying that you always want to be the lowest price seller. The realities of the marketplace are that over time you have a large quantity of items for sale (I currently have over 120 listings on Amazon. With multiple quantities of most items I have about 900 total products sitting in Amazon’s warehouse). Once you reach that point you are making sales every day. Just this morning when I woke up and checked my email, there were 4 emails from Amazon with the subject line: “Amazon has shipped the item you sold.” That is not great, but that was on a Saturday morning and Fridays are not the best day to sell. On most Sundays and Mondays I will get 6 to 8 emails like that and as we get closer to the Holiday season that will easily double. The major point you want to take away from this article is that you make more money over time if you keep your prices towards the lower end of the scale, turn your inventory over more often and keep plowing as much of your profits back into quickly saleable goods as fast, and as often, as you can. eBay and Amazon both reward the lowest price sellers with search position. There is, however, one caveat: As we approach the holidays, if you have something in high demand, you may be better waiting a short period of time and get much higher prices. Had I had those same Buzz Lightyear figures in November, I would have priced them much higher ($50+) and they would have still sold quickly due to the holiday demand. [top] 5. New Wholesale Sources for eBay & Amazon Sellers Empire Discount is a leading supplier of toys, games and hobby items from the liquidation market. They offer starter kits and low volume as well as high volume deals on licensed toys and merchandise from the likes of Disney, Dora the Explorer, GI Joe, Toy Story and many others. Optical items such as binoculars, telescopes, rifle scopes and so on are huge sellers for Christmas gifts. Barska Optical carries a large line of optical products. The dealer setup page is a little hard to fine, but here is the link to open a dealer account. I am about as far as one can get away from all that Goth and Vampire stuff, but people do buy that stuff –and weirdly enough they even buy it for Christmas gifts. Bleeding Edge is a leading supplier of what I will just call Goth Junk. Use the contact form on the page to get wholesale info. World of Toys carries the popular line of Syma RC helicopters and many other toys. They are also a liquidation dealer like Empire Discount so the pricing is pretty good. Here is another RC Toy supplier: RC ARE US is a direct wholesale source for remote controlled products including remote controlled Helicopters, Planes, Boats and Cars. Pyramid Air Guns sells air guns, BB guns, pellet guns, air rifles, and airsoft guns from Crosman, Gamo, Walther, Beeman, Webley & Scott, Air Arms, Beretta, Daisy, Colt, RWS and many others. (Note – you cannot sell BB guns or Pellet guns on eBay –but you can on Amazon. The only BB guns you can sell on eBay are the airsoft type plastic BBs and paintball markers) Arrowcopter Inc. sells the world's highest flying toy with unique space age action. Made in the United States, the original Arrowcopter Toy is attractively packaged in clear bubblepack ready for sale. Email them from the website for wholesale quantity pricing. If you want to see some truly outrageous products check out Big Mouth. Big Mouth Toys is the creative force behind an exclusive line of high-quality novelty items. Their specialty is an assortment of humorous products targeting practical jokers of all ages –but not all of them in good taste. So beware. CompuExpert claims to be the Internet's largest wholesaler and retailer of video games and accessories. I don’t have any experience in this field so I can’t verify that claim, but they do seem to have a large and varied product line. JCH Tools Wholesale Tools, is a wholesale tools supplier who dropships. Again I don’t have any experience with them so I would advise a couple of small trial orders to see how good their service is. American Wildlife sells a collection of wildlife-themed gifts featuring a broad range of North American Wildlife designed to appeal to the outdoor enthusiast. See you again in a couple of weeks, Skip McGrath P.S. If you missed the last issue, click here to read it. 
 Click Here. Double your traffic. Get Vendio Gallery - Now FREE! |
 
 
 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
© 1999-
Harry McGrath, Inc., DBA Skip McGrath, Auction Seller's Resource and Vision-One Marketing. All Rights Reserved.
eBay Tools and Resources | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Shipping & Return Policies Home |
Newsletters |
eBay Training | Free Articles |
Tools & Resources |
Web Wholesale Search | Testimonials | Blog
Visit Our Other Sites: Official Geezer Guides | Auction Seller's Resource UK | Learn How to Make Money on eBay EZcube Table Top Digital Photography Studio Light Tent | Skip McGrath Coaching | Consumer Protection Review | Firepit Grills Please Note:
Some of the products and
services mentioned in this website, in articles, banner ads and
newsletters and blog posts are for products and services for which I
earn a referral fee or commission. We always evaluate anything we
recommend very carefully and each year we turn down literally dozens
of opportunities to recommend products or services where we can earn
a commission. Even though we earn a fee on some of our
recommendations, we only recommend products and services that we
feel will deliver good value and with rare exceptions, they all come
with a money back guarantee. |