Now it’s Time to Market those Resale Items
Now it’s time to market those resale items using a variety of strategies. Marketing those Resale Items doesn’t happen by itself, even though eBay does drive traffic to your items. You have to do a lot more than just post an item, and hope for the best. In this section, I will go over key tactics for eBay search engine optimization, as well as pushing items out to other virtual sites. I will show you how to use a tool called vendoo to maximize your ability to post to multiple sites at once.
The Amount of Items you Post is Important
At this point, you have done a great job acquiring items of value, or you have spent time sourcing items from your house and garage. If you have just joined us on this page, spend some time looking at the Preparing Items for Posting Ecommerce sites to ensure you have prepped appropriately. While eBay does some marketing for driving traffic, it’s not fast enough to make quicker sales. Although I was making almost $100,000 in sales, $80,000 of which was likely eBay alone, I also had almost 2500 items posted. Now, I only have 700 or so items posted, as I am downsizing this business, and I won’t even come close to that amount. So, the more you can push the items out to different sites, the more likely you are to sell them faster.
Market those Resale Items through eBay Special Features
For eBay, the best things you can do to drive traffic to your items is to have a strong title, ensure some of the recommended item identifier fields are completed, and be certain your shipping is not too high for people to look beyond choosing your item. What also helps to optimize traffic to your items is posting every day, even if that means refreshing items. As well, having periodic sales can help drive additional traffic to your site.
Strong Posting Elements: It’s important in the title to use all the letters and see what keywords are being used about your item to make it strong. The item field identifiers are also important, but not every field needs to be completed. eBay will sometimes flag which fields are trending, and those are the fields you should complete. Filling in the identifiers could take a good, long time. and in the beginning, speed in posting is important, because having a bulk of items for people to select from helps to make your overall sales larger.
Other Key Factors: Shipping is also key, because if you don’t have the right shipping costs, people will move on to another similar item. Check out the shipping section for details on how to do shipping right. The other key factors are
- Refreshing items every 3-6 months will take the listing that is showing up as old, and relist it as a new item. This will push the item back to the top of the search function. I will take a handful of items each day, or you can do it weekly, and go through the process of reposting. Start by sorting your items from oldest to newest, having your oldest items on top. Then, take your listing, and click on the 3 dots to the left of the listing. Select “sell similar”. It’s really important that you do it this way, because your listing will keep everything you had before. When it asks if you want to keep the pictures, say yes. This is your time to edit anything that you feel isn’t working. You might adjust the title, or take updated pictures, or look at the shipping to ensure it is working. I almost always adjust the price a little. Before you turn the draft into a live item, you need to go back and delete the old, current listing. Otherwise, eBay will likely flag it as a duplicate listing. And if they don’t that can only create problems for you later, as you end up with a duplicate listing and might sell an item twice, when only one item was available.
- A periodic sale is good because people see the sale and will come to your eBay site. To do a sale, go into your Selling Hub, find the marketing drop down, and select Discounts. This title seems to change often, so if it has, look for something like it. They can’t seem to get the right title for a “sale”. Once it discounts, click on “create a discount” in the right corner. This will give you different drop downs. I usually select Sale event, and once into the sale area, I can choose which % off I want on a grouping of items. I do sometimes put over 50% of my items on sale if I really want to drive sales. It’s up to you.
- Making offers isn’t a big marketing area, but it can definitely help to increase sales. eBay will show you certain items that according to their algorithm have a strong interest in your item. This is based on how long they look at an item, whether they put it in their cart, etc. You can make an offer when that option pops up. I usually do a 5% of 10% offer, although if I want to get rid of an item, I have done larger.
Using Vendoo to Market across Platforms
Vendoo really did make life easier for increasing exposure to and sale of items. Vendoo is a tool where you can submit to multiple platforms using one listing. One of the reasons I usually start with a strong eBay template is that it has the most requirements, and so when I port over to the other platforms, there isn’t much to update. In this video, I walk you through how to post on various different sites within the vendoo application. I cover poshmark, etsy, mercari, and more. Vendoo adds new platforms every so often, so you will want to check every so often. And some sites, usually the very specific clothing sites, are not worth posting on, unless you have all clothes, because those sites are looking for very specific high-end brands.
Vendoo takes a little time to adjust, but once you get a rhythm, I can usually port over a listing to multiple sites in 10 minutes or so.
Now it’s time to market those Resale Items should also include Local Sites
Using Facebook to market and increase sale is really a must, because I do sell quite a few things locally. Facebook is included in Vendoo functionality which is great, because it has expanded the number of items I sell locally. I use it for local only, because if someone is really interested in shipping an item, they will message me. I used to only put larger items on Facebook, but with vendoo, I have put a lot more smaller items out there. And they sell! I usually can’t post for as high as eBay, and Vendoo gives you the ability to adjust pricing depending on the site. So, I lower the amount, and am often pleasantly surprised when a smaller item sells.
Other local sites to market that you may be wondering about includes Craig’s List or other local sites like NextDoor Neighbor. I have found that most other sites are not really worth bothering to post on, unless you have a very hard to sell, unique item that needs more exposure. So, at that point, I will post on NextDoor Neighbor, as an example. Sometimes, local sites can be location specific because when I’ve had clients in Denver I find some other local sites better when selling furniture. I still post on Craig’s List and up to about 6 months ago, when I’ve written this section, CL had been selling neck-to-neck in sales. Granted I did increase my number of postings on Facebook with the Vendoo option to port to FB, but regardless when I compared sales that were on both sites, the number of sales dropped off significantly with CL.
FB garage sale sites and its marketplace function has given Facebook an advantage over CL. I think a lot of people like FB better. I will also note when I have been a consumer on CL, the number of external ads has increased significantly, which is also a turn off. FB has managed to minimize its ads to a reasonable number.
We have more on this, be sure to see the Main Page of Information on “Second-Hand Resale” Here.