To Bulk or Not To Bulk?

[saveonlineshopping]

Just wondering on what everyone's thoughts were on bulk listings - are they worth it, do they generate more traffic/sales than regular listings, are they easier/more difficult to manage, etc?

I'm toying with the idea, but if it is not a great way to generate sales, I won't bother with it.

[extra-keen]

I use them for some products. Those products were sold individually before these type of listings became available. My sales figures for those items has pretty much stayed the same - so I guess the good thing is I didn't sell less. Those listings are just as easy to manage as one off listings.

[stampingpaws]

I use bulk Buy It Now listings and am very satisfied. I sell 17 different Stamp Albums on CD and list them with qty 10 for 10days and use automatic relisting. AS I prepare these CD's from a master file as they sell I never run out of stock. If I sell some during the first listing they are automatically re-listed with the reduced qty. Periodically I increase the qty back to 10.

Works great for me but probably as I sell thesimilar items over and over again.

Best wishes

[mbselections00]

Hi, I was driven to use them to increase the number of individual items I can list, as I'm stingy & won't pay listing fees - it would just not be viable to sell here, and I can easily use more than the allocated 200 per month.   Plus I thought in some instances grouping related items may increase sales.  The biggest plus is they are a great asset for selling bracelets where I need the buyer to nominate a size.

I would like to think if anything it has perhaps increased sales, but only slightly - I get many buyers who still only buy one item from a bulk listing.  It has been wonderful for bracelets though - most buyers select the correct size - but of course it's hard to know if any buyers have walked away because they didn't know the size - I guess it could reduce impulse buying    The problem using it for bracelets is that technically, to offer each bracelet in each available size, means making & photographing 8 individual bracelets for each listing.

Now, the really disappointing and quite frightening aspect is that most times when you re-list, the listing reverts back to original stock levels - it does not re-list with the stock left when the listing ended - so that can be very dangerous.  Since discovering it was not me losing the plot, lol, it is in fact the wonderful system, I now re-list multi variation listings individually and check stock - so it does become quite time consuming.

As with so many things I guess, there's pros & cons and they can vary from one individual to another - taking into account how many items you would list this way, the volume of sales, how much back up stock you have & even how good your memory is, it may be you could afford to relist once or twice without checking or adjusting quantities listed.

Sorry, feel like I've waffled on a bit and perhaps not been much help, but hope I've at least given you some ideas

[saveonlineshopping]

Thanks so much for going in to so much detail! I had no idea that the bulk listings were glitchy, and I deal in a lot of small-quantity items, so that information is super helpful to me. I guess i'll have to be super careful how I approach this one.

Though I do have my listings set to stay 'live' even when sold out, so that may mitigate this problem. I guess we'll see.

Thanks all!

[digital*ghost]

I am a big fan of the variation listing format, but I don't use it for all items - one of the most annoying things to me is that you can't remove variations (unless that paricular variation has never sold). I have some items now where I have a few variations left, but I won't be restocking any of that item at all once they're all gone, so the ones that are sold out remain in the dropdown menu, greyed out with 'out of stock' noted, which bugs me because I feel like it gives the impression the item will be restocked (in other words, it's like saying "currently unavailable", which begs the question "when will it be available", and sometimes the answer is 'never').

So, unless you'll be maintaining all variations of a certain item, individual listings might be preferable. I also personally prefer to only use variation listings when I can clearly display an item in the gallery image as well as indicate the differences. eg Say I was selling a t-shirt that was available in different colours, sizes and with different prints - you can usually only best display one visual difference in a gallery image, so I would put each print as a separate listing to have that as the main image, with a small section at the side indicating colours available.

With bracelets, if the only difference is length, I only photograph one and use it for all variations (unless there is a significant visual difference between lengths, for most of my stuff there isn't). 

[helenm777]

The only benefit of Mulit Variation Listings is I think..have not really checked ...

If 1 is sold it does not end the listing. Using 1 off listing for same items means you have to relist that item and therefore loose one of your listings when you have to reslist the product

Not sure but recently added 2 different sizes of the same item and then realized I had to relist the item that did not sell loosing 1 of my precious free listings !