ebay ninja training

February 27, 2012 7:52 PM

How can I learn how to efficiently manage eBay sales of large amounts of stuff?

I've got a ton of stuff to sell on eBay which I've been selling slowly using various tools like Turbolister, a very basic spreadsheet, a free template builder and the eBay Seller Manager. It's slow, inaccurate and leads to less than stellar results for me and for buyers.

I've scoped out a lot of different ways to make this easier from Blackthorne to Seller Manager Pro, to Inkfrog to Auctiva. I have yet to find a system I found usable for me. It's not that these systems do not work, it's that I find the teaching methods interminable, boring or confusing. Surely there's a way to do this that's straightforward since so many are doing it.

It seems to me there must be people who have this down cold and are willing to show others how to do it. My Google fu seems to not be able to discern the true search, as I end up on some marketer's wet dream of bullet points and 'make millions now' web site, just buy our lame CD collection.

To restate my need, I just need to find an effective way to manage inventory and get it listed and accounted for on eBay that has a good learning path attached to it. A training for sale would be fine.

Learn to create, manage and keep accurate records of your eBay sales, scales from 1 to thousands. Simple, accurate, bullet-proof.

Help me out here, hive-mind. I need a cluefinder.

posted by diode to computers & internet (4 answers total)

is this a side business for you, or your core business?
posted by thermonuclear.jive.turkey at 10:45 PM on February 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Random Tips:

*Keep all inventory in one place, if you can.
*Assign some sort of number to each item and record it on the spreadsheet. When you list the item, put the ebay item number in the spreadsheet as well.
*An invoicing program helps. Yes, you can use ebay's seller page for keeping track of stuff, printing packing slips, etc, but having access to it offline helps too.
posted by luckynerd at 11:56 PM on February 27, 2012

A large part of my day job includes listing massive amount of stuff for sale on eBay for a non-profit. Just to clarify, are you wishing to list ONE ITEM repeatedly or are you going to be listing different items? Like, "I have 2,000 lightbulbs that I want to sell one at a time"? Or, "I have ten boxes of different things that need to be listed"?

If it's the latter, we basically use the strategy @luckynerd lined out. I've found that performing tasks related to this in blocks helps. We use biggerbids.com for some consistency in our listings (every auction, I think, should look similar with just different pictures, titles, and descriptions). I fill a box with stuff to be listed, photograph about 20 things at once, and load them up into a photo editor. They are quickly edited and renamed so they can be easily found. For instance, "lighter 1, lighter 2, etc". Then they are quickly listed. After that they are placed into a numbered box. I've got an inventory log and the items are then entered there -- "lighter is in box A1". When it comes to keeping records, at the end of every month I hit up our sold tab and print out what's sold. For accounting and profit purposes, I just add all that up and it's sent to our accounting department so they can keep track of what I'm making for the organization.

Hope this helps. If you're in fact listing one thing over and over the process would be much easier. In terms of a program
posted by youandiandaflame at 4:48 AM on February 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

This is part of my day job, like youandiandaflame. My company builds a recreational product with a lot of accessories from other vendors. As a result, we tend to accumulate mass quantities of new, unused items that that are unneeded or obsoleted for our current designs. It's a lot of stuff in all sorts of different varieties, not just one item sold over and over again. We're not trying to get rich quick on eBay, just recover costs for items that tend to accumulate as stranded inventory.
posted by diode at 11:52 AM on February 28, 2012