Bulk Listing on Ebay - Advice?

[KC Doughboy]

Yes, I'm talking about doing 40,000 individual listings on ebay.

As for Invest In Baseball, thanks Sean, but as you may recall, we tried to do a deal a few years ago and it didn't work out too well.

[David W]

Originally Posted by KC Doughboy

Yes, I'm talking about doing 40,000 individual listings on ebay.

As for Invest In Baseball, thanks Sean, but as you may recall, we tried to do a deal a few years ago and it didn't work out too well.

If you work full time and as such have limited time don't list more than 10 items per day or you will be overwhelmed. It will take you years to get rid of them.

[parkerj33]

Now that's funny! Sean pretending to offer unbiased recommendations to his own company!

[ullmandds]

Originally Posted by parkerj33

Now that's funny! Sean pretending to offer unbiased recommendations to his own company!

+1

[JasonD08]

I was looking at on option for selling some bulk as well. The best consigners IMO would be PWCC or Probstein. Greg Morris is hit and miss and the newer guys that have come around in the last year or two have that capability but really crappy scans (crooked and in card savers etc.) Great scans with centering get premium prices and when they are poorly done it leaves money on the table. You will probably be better off listing yourself unless you want to leave 20-40% on the table due to poor scanning. If you list yourself make sure your cards are centered on a black background to show all edges. Good luck.


Jason

[JasonD08]

Eric,


Also if you are in the KC area, my business partner and I are working on a project right now addressing this exact issue. If you want to PM I can pass on my number and perhaps we could meet and talk about it.


Jason

[buymycards]

Be careful with Turbolister. It is OK for listing a few dozen items quickly, but it tends to crash when you are uploading several hundred. A couple of years ago, I lost 500 listings when eBay "upgraded" Turbolister. EBay could not recover them for me.

COMC can be good, but if you send them 40,000 cards, it will cost you $12,500 plus shipping - up front. If you sell a COMC card on eBay, you will pay the eBay fees. When it comes time to pull your cash out of COMC, COMC hits you with a 20% cash out fee, so it ends up costing you more than eBay. You do save time on scanning, listing, and shipping, so that is significant. In addition, COMC is quickly becoming another eBay in regard to high prices, and many sellers do not take offers, or they only accept offers that are 5% or 10% off of the original price. If you take a look at pre-war cards, there are many cards that have been on the site for 3-4 year with no price reductions. There is one seller who lists beat up T213-2's for over $400 and he won't accept offers. These are the same type of cards that sell for $35 on eBay. Just like eBay, when you do a search, your search will be filled with overpriced BIN's, just like on eBay. I guess what I saying is that if you have reasonable prices and accept offers, you will sell some cards.

If I was selling graded cards, I would send them to PWCC. It will save you a lot of time. I enjoy listing, selling, and shipping cards, so I don't mind the work, so you might want to list some of your raw singles yourself.

Anyway, you might want to analyze your inventory and do a mix of PWCC, eBay, and COMC, and the best place to sell is right here on the BST.

Rick

[Snapolit1]

Would need a staff of people to move 40,000 items. Not sure you've thought this through. Shipping supplies along would be daunting. Not to mention time and effort to ship.

[savedfrommyspokes]

Originally Posted by Snapolit1

Would need a staff of people to move 40,000 items. Not sure you've thought this through. Shipping supplies along would be daunting. Not to mention time and effort to ship.

If one person could ship out (pull, package, print label, etc) an average of 100 cards/hour (including both single card orders and multi card orders) and worked 8 hours a day w/o a break, it would take TEN 5 day work weeks of time just to ship out the 40,000 cards.

In reality, with 40k FP listings on ebay, a seller may realistically expect to sell 200-300 cards a day. So figure on 2-3 hours each day for one person to ship all of the sold cards from the previous day.

[D. Bergin]

Damn, I must be slow as trash. I need to set aside like 2-3 hours just to ship out 10-15 packages. LOL!!!


100 an hour?


It would take me at least a couple hours just to print out 100 sets of invoices and labels.

[savedfrommyspokes]

Originally Posted by D. Bergin

Damn, I must be slow as trash. I need to set aside like 2-3 hours just to ship out 10-15 packages. LOL!!!


100 an hour?


It would take me at least a couple hours just to print out 100 sets of invoices and labels.

I would think processing 15 packages in 2 hours is about right.....if you ship 15 packages in 2 hours containing 14-15 cards (on average), you can ship 100 cards an hour. If you have a 40k item inventory, likely you will be getting a good number of multi item orders as so many buyers strive to save on s/h.

If a seller is shipping nothing but single cards to each buyer, they will obviously get no where near 100 cards an hour, but 20-25 single cards an hour shipped would be more realistic.

[steve B]

I'd advise easing into it. I hit a wall at 20 items a week where beyond that I started missing emails and being a bit slow on shipping. I'm sure a more organized person would do a bit better. But it's best to set up the physical system for packing/shipping, and see how far your system gets you.

Anything that's a common card in average condition should probably go in a lot. There's a limit to your time, and it's far easier to list a lot of several commons for say 9.99 than it is to list 10 cards at .99 I never saw much difference in the percent sold, but it made for a lot less work. (I did pretty well for a while with lots of somewhat random "junk" 400 cards fit pretty well in a small priority box. After a while they stopped selling. Fortunately right around the time I had a local guy ask about larger lots and made a deal for about 20,000+ cards.

Steve B

[glchen]

I use TurboLister, the free tool from ebay, to upload my bulk listings. However, I only have ~300 listings total. Not sure if there is a way to convert from spreadsheet to TurboLister format.