take advantage of 40 free listings with multiple accounts?

[supagiftau]

Gday

The only way to sell my items are via auctions, which ebay is keen to get rid of, so sad, and a bit angry.

$1.5 insertion fee is a joke.

Now non-store sellers have 40 free listings per month, so what if I open up multiple accounts, let's say, 5 new accounts.

Would I enjoy 40x5=200 free auctions per month ? Or is ebay just going to suspend me for that...?

[digital*ghost]

Theoretically, you would be able to use 40 free per account, although new accounts are often subject to listing limits (often raised to 100 per month if a verified credit/debit card or PayPal account is on file).

You can (generally) have multiple IDs without issue, but opening several IDs at once with the same details might cause the accounts to be flagged - a member recently had a new ID suspended within 24 hours as eBay thought something about it was suspect, even though in all liklihood all details were fine.

[supagiftau]

Thanks.

I will just go ahead and try it later tonight.

If they want to suspend me, so be it, my business is already as good as dead anyway, what do I care.

I was selling approx 150 items per month, now, 10-20 per month, what a joke.

[haolove13]

I only have one account so not sure about multiple identities.

since the introduction of the ridiculous $1.50 charge there have been a growing number of bonus free listings offered.

And that has been for store and non seller listings.

I think last month I was offered and utilised about 400 bonus free lisstings so maybe just sit back and see how long they last.

I mostly sell lower priced items and at $1.50 per listing it is cheaper to throw things in the bin so I just use freebies now.

If I were to use a $ 1.50 listing for a five dollar item it is just not worthwhile.

at $5.00 there is $1.50 listing fee

paypal 43 cents

FVF 49 cents

and if you do not recover full postage cost you need to subtract that as well.

And if you have a purchase cost on an item then subtract that as well

or the cost of materials for production.

I recently looked at some items selling for $1.20 icluding free postage and could not work out how it is worthwhile.

60 cent stamp

33 cents paypal

12 cents FVF

cost of envelope

if product is free then you take all the effort for 12 cents.

And if you get chargebacks or paypal claims then you could lose a lot of money.

[supagiftau]

Thanks for your reply, but those bonus offers only last for a very short period, normally few days, and only happens once every few months, can't really rely on that.

[phorum_junkie*]

I sell on 3 ids, new stuff in a store, second hand at auction on one id then if they don't sell after 7 days they are listed on another id as BIN with Best Offere for 10 days so I have 280 listings available a month for the huge sum of fifty bucks, rather good value in my book.

[davewil1964]

Why do you bother with a shop if you are selling by auction?

Presumably you have at least one other account to get the 40 freebies on.

[davewil1964]

The bonus offers for non-store holders are generally non-specific. Even if you don't get the offer directly, the link that somebody will post normally works. In fact there is one running now.

Storeholders have had a heap of 5 or 10,000 free listing offers over the last few months.

[haolove13]

The bonus offers may be for a short time but I list most items for ten days, so you get a reasonable time for an auction.

In fact sometimes a ten day auction can be too long as items from small sellers get hidden by best match.

The categories I list in tend to work best at auctions that close on Saturday and Sunday evenings but like every rule on Ebay see rule one which says

1, there are no rules.

For the last four months there has been a constant stream of offers and most of them have been for BIN or AUC so I have used them to the best of my ability.

The minimum I remember is for 100 free listings for about three days so it meant I could list 33 items per day and spread them out over 12 days of finishing times by using 3 to ten day durations.

It works for me.

And then I still have my forty freebies to use at will over the rest of the  month.

[haolove13]

The fifty dollar figure is actually a bit of a furphy.

To calculate the cost of sales you need to add in the cost of paypal and final value fees.

If you sell $100.00 per month that makes a simple cost of 63% of sales in fees.

If you sell $1,000 per month that makes a simple cost of 18.4 % of sales in fees.

That is assuming you only use freebie listings. That does not consider the cost of product and assumes you make full recovery of postage and packaging costs elsewhere.

If you sell more it does get cheaper.

If you are just selling items on hand it can be effective but if you need to purchase products or manufacture things that needs to be taken into consideration.

The idea of a shop was for business type owners. Until you get to about $ 1,000 a month it is not really a viable business proposition.

Last month I turned over a bit over $ 1000 but only achieved that with the bonus free listings.

If I had just had 50 free listings in a store I would not have made enough to make a shop a profitable concern.

So many people think that by opening a shop the products will sell themselves and waste a lot of time and money learning the leassons.

And I did not mention the tax implications after $18,000 dollars either. !!!!!!!!