Four Reasons Why Your Stuff Isn’t Selling On eBay (And How To Fix It)

Running a reselling business on eBay can be a bit of a rollercoaster. Some days, the sales are coming in thick and fast. You’re selling stuff within a few minutes of listing it. Your phone’s going mad with cha-chings. The eBay gods are looking down on you, and the extent of your problems is the fact that you won’t be popular with the Post Office staff when you’re turning up with armfuls of parcels, and there’ll no doubt be someone behind you in the queue who’s rolling their eyes or tutting at you.

You’re great at reselling! You’re basically Sophia Amoruso! This flipping-for-profit stuff is a piece of cake and you’re nailing it!

But then there are the times when sales are painfully slow, and you go for days on end – or even longer – without selling a single item. Your spare room is full to the brim of stuff you want to shift, and you’re secretly wondering whether reselling was a bad idea to begin with. You’re anxiously checking your phone every half hour for cha-chings or even a new offer, but nothing’s happening. It’s disheartening, it’s worrying, and it can really start to get you down.

Instead of beating yourself up though, it makes sense to pinpoint the reasons WHY your stuff isn’t selling on eBay. Here are some potential issues that you might have – and how to fix them.

1. YOU DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT PRICING STRATEGY

If you want to create consistent sales, then your pricing can’t just be guess work. You need to research. You need to know what your item typically sells for on the platform. You need to know about the competition that you’re up against, and work out how to position your item in the marketplace.

Luckily, eBay makes it pretty simple and straightforward to pick a price that’s going to give your piece the best chance of selling. You can use the advanced search tool to check out exactly how much the exact same or similar products have sold for, and how often they sell. If you’re asking for way more than the going rate – or there are ton of the same thing available on eBay right now that are priced cheaper – then that’s likely to be why you aren’t getting the sale, and you need to alter your pricing.

At the same time though, dropping your price isn’t necessarily always the answer. It might be the case that your pricing’s fine, but your item just isn’t highly in demand right now, and you’ll probably have to wait a month or two to sell it.

2. YOUR LISTINGS AREN’T OPTIMISED FOR SALES

If you check the figures on your listings, then you can do a bit of troubleshooting and work out what’s going on. If you’re getting hardly any viewers, then you need to work out why your chosen keywords aren’t getting you in front of potential buyers. If you ARE getting a decent amount of views, but no one’s biting, then you might need to do something a bit different with the listing itself to increase your chances of converting those views into sales.

When it comes to your keywords and getting the initial click, get in the head of your buyer and think about what they’ll be searching for. Are they more likely to be searching for a ‘Lovely Little Dress’, or a ‘Topshop Size 12 Tea Dress – Pink Floral Print’? Almost definitely the latter. Be descriptive, and give them the information they need to show them that this is the item they’re looking for. I use the formula of ‘Brand – Size – Style/Item/Colour – Other Relevant Descriptors, e.g. Material, Print, Season’.

Also consider…

• Have you got any spelling mistakes or typos in your titles that are stopping your item from appearing in the search results? (Okay, so this one might seem blatantly obvious, but it’s easy to make mistakes when you’re listing a lot of stuff. Just search on eBay for ‘Coverse’ – a ton of people are trying to sell their CONVERSE trainers, but are never going to reach their potential customers because they’ve missed out the N)
• If you’re selling clothing, have you included measurements? In my earliest days as a reseller, I didn’t bother doing this, and sell-through rate has definitely increased since I started taking the time to include the details. This could also help you to slash your returns rate
• Have you included plenty of clear pictures? I typically photograph from the front, the back, and the sides, I zoom in on any particular detailing like buttoning or sleeves, and I also snap the inner sizing and care labels

3. YOU’RE JUST BEING IMPATIENT (OR HAVEN’T CALCULATED A REALISTIC SELL-THROUGH RATE)

Sometimes eBay can lull you into a false sense of security. Maybe your sales were coming in thick and fast even when you only had a handful of listings in the early days, or maybe you’re torturing yourself on Instagram because everyone seems to be shifting stuff at a rate you can’t even imagine. But at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game. Are your sales ACTUALLY poor right now, or have you just given yourself unrealistic expectations?

As a useful benchmark, I aim for a sell-through rate of 10% of my total stock per week. So if I’ve got 100 items listed, I’m aiming to make 10 sales in a 7-day period. If I’ve had 3 sales on a Monday, 3 on the Tuesday, and 4 on the Wednesday, I don’t start panicking if I go three days without another sale – it all averages out, and overall for the week, I’m on track.

I find that looking objectively at your numbers stops the mindless flapping, and it helps you to eliminate the element of being too emotionally attached to what’s going on inside your eBay account and making bad decisions as a result.

4. YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH LISTINGS TO HIT YOUR SALES TARGETS

Suppose you’ve got one item listed on eBay, and it’s a blue body con dress in a size 12. To make a sale on any given day, you’re going to need to find a buyer who’s looking for that exact item, finds your piece via the search, and is ready to make the purchase. But suppose you’ve got two items for sale – your blue dress, and a pink wooly winter coat in a size 16. In the most simplistic of terms, you’ve just doubled your chance of making a sale.

Got ten items? You’ve just increased your chances tenfold, and so on. I’ve also seen it said that when you’re listing daily, eBay reward your activity with better rankings in its search. I don’t know how true that is, but it’s just basic maths that having more stock puts you in a better position for actually selling stuff.

And as a side note here, knowing your numbers is ESSENTIAL for hitting your goals. Let’s say that you’ve got a sell-through rate of 10% per week, and you want to pocket £500 (before tax) each month. Let’s also imagine that you’re making an average of £10 profit on every item you sell. With those figures, you’d need to be selling an average of 12.5 items per week. That means that you’d need to have 125 listings at any given time, and be listing a few items a day to maintain that as things sell. Obviously those numbers are general guides and they’re almost never going to be 100% accurate – but they serve as a good planning tool, and they’re useful for getting you back on the right track and troubleshooting where you might be going wrong when things are slow and you don’t know why your stuff isn’t selling on eBay.

Of course, eBay isn’t the only platform where you can earn cash from your stuff. Check out this post from Eileen at Your Money Sorted about making money by leveraging the sharing economy.

If you’re sourcing good items based on proper research, you’re creating strong listings, and you’re chipping away at building up your stock levels, then trust that your items WILL sell eventually.

Not necessarily overnight, and not always as quickly as you’d like them to – but the right buyer will come along, and the waiting game is sometimes just the nature of the beast.

Want to read more about reselling on eBay? Check out these posts: 

• Your Complete Guide To Buying Wholesale Vintage To Sell On eBay
• Why Reselling Clothes on eBay Is One Of My Favourite Ways To Make Money Online

 

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