what happened to free listings on the weekend?

[wildhogs91]

I just do not get why Ebay doesnt make Listings free al the time?they would make so much more money.now they have taken away the weekend listings.I think it may be time for me to give up selling.the buyers have dropped off,this year has been the worse ever.

[brerrabbit585]

It's not just the fact that the site gets cluttered up with a heap of stuff that may never sell, or takes a loooong time to sell, but there are some sellers who have multiple duplicate listings for the same items.  Limiting listings reduces this occurrence and I'm all for it because in some categories it's hard to find what you want amongst all the duplicates and it's a real turn-off for buyers.

This has affected me both as a buyer and a seller.  I gave up selling a particular product because one of my competition had up to 10 separate listings for each of her items instead of one listing with a quantity of 10.  All she did was put an extra full stop or a dash or a slightly different word in her titles to get around the no duplicates policy.  No amount of reporting did any good.  She had absolutely woeful feedback and scant details in her listings but ebay favoured her so she got heaps of sales and I couldn't even get seen.

I've seen some real rubbish on sites where people don't have to pay fees so I like the rubbish pile in the shopping mall analogy.

[chameleon54]

One of the problems, particularly in sections like womans clothes, is that a lot of this stuff is coming out of op shops which have already priced them up.

Once the ebay seller buys them from the op-shop, adds thier margin, charges postage and pays the ebay commissions on the item and the postage cost, it all starts to get very expensive. This puts off many buyers who can go to an op-shop and buy the same thing for half the price.

I suspect that is one of the reasons womans clothing is such a tough market and why it is often sellers of generic, commonly available items who come to the boards expecting  asking ebay to provide its services for free.

[brerrabbit585]

I can't understand how anyone can buy clothes on ebay and expect them to fit. Shops have dressing rooms for a reason! I've bought shoes on ebay but only because I knew the brand, style and size, but I would never ever buy clothes online.

Our local op shop has way more clothes donated than they can handle. They used to take dozens of huge garbage bags full of good clothes to an op shop in another town but the other shop got sick of them because there were too many. Some of them were new or barely worn.

They would never have a $1 rack for slightly flawed or dirty items because they worried that people would buy them in preference to the others, but I think they would have sold a lot more overall. The local farmers weren't fussy about a dirty mark on a pair of jeans or a woollen jumper.

[*tippy*toes*]

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@chameleon54 wrote:

One of the problems, particularly in sections like womans clothes, is that a lot of this stuff is coming out of op shops which have already priced them up.

Once the ebay seller buys them from the op-shop, adds thier margin, charges postage and pays the ebay commissions on the item and the postage cost, it all starts to get very expensive. This puts off many buyers who can go to an op-shop and buy the same thing for half the price.

I suspect that is one of the reasons womans clothing is such a tough market and why it is often sellers of generic, commonly available items who come to the boards expecting  asking ebay to provide its services for free.

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I hadn't noticed that, but now you've mentioned it, it is more often than not, the sellers of used women's clothes that seem to carry on the most about promotions. Expecting them, then crying when they finish. In hindsight, in the past, it seemed to be the sellers of those items that would come to the forums every few days asking if there were any free listings going. That was in the days where you might get 100 free listings for a few days every month or so.

As an aside, I got unlimited maximum $3.30 listings on 2 out of 3 of my selling accounts this weekend. One already had the sell 10 items over $50 for $3.30 max fees and also 10 at $1.10 maximum fees. That account is my least active, but has had promos thrown at it!

[brerrabbit585]

I sometimes wonder whether a lot of buyers get cheap clothes on ebay so that they can afford to give the 90% that don't fit to op shops and just keep the 10% that do fit. That'd explain why some op shops are overflowing with more clothes than they can possibly hope to sell.

People's wardrobes are overflowing, op shops are overflowing with clothes, and ebay is overflowing with them. I'm surprised anyone can sell them when the market is so saturated.

[*tippy*toes*]

Years ago, Mr Tippy drove a garbage truck. The ones that deliver and pick up skip bins. The ones that came from the op shops were chock full of bags of clothes that hadn't even been opened. They get so many that they give up and just chuck them. One year, he had some time up his sleeve, so had a peek in the bin. There were bags of brand new baby clothes, lots of hand knitted jumpers (I scored a few of them!), tons of clothes still with tags, blankets in really good condition (which pished me off because the ads were already on the TV for the charities asking for donations of blankets and warms clothes).

Aside from what Mr Tippy carted in the skip bins, the Salvos would take at least 4 truck loads of clothes and what not a week to the tip and just dump them. I scored a few brand new things when that happened too, if he happened to be around. The other charities did the same.

I think it was as you say, they are so overwhelmed with "donations" (read, I have nowhere else to dump it, so I'll dump it on the charities who have no room for it). I think it has got even worse in the last few years. We still know people that work at the tip and the amounts of trucks going each week has increased significantly.

I don't donate any clothing or anything to the charity bins for that reason. They get enough already. Then sadly, a lot ends up on eBay, which no one wants!

[brabrad-ccge5oa]

you can always take a bag of old clothes to H&M & they will give you a 15% discount voucher off your next purchase. Yes I know they are one of the main reasons clothes become worthless but at least they acknowledge this & end up shreding the clothes to recycle them. Don't shoot the messenger please & I have zero association to H&M, just think its a better alternative than the tip.

[brerrabbit585]

Who's H&M?

A friend of mine shifted house a few years ago and took some stuff to an op shop in Adelaide. Out the back there were several skips - one for kitchen stuff, another for odds and ends, another for clothes, etc etc.

I can sympathise with op shops to a certain extent because a lot of people dump their rubbish on them. One day when it was quiet at the local shop I went through a rack of clothing over 2m long and pulled off everything with a tear, a loose thread or a stain. Probably between a third and a half of what was on the rack had some sort of defect. Certain people used to bring in filthy stuff and think they were being soooo generous. We couldn't keep up with the demand for rags for mechanics but not all clothes are suitable for them.

A woman who's in charge of an op shop in a small country town told me that when they were a Lifeline op shop one of the higher up people 'accidentally' left some paperwork on the counter when she left. Out of the $400,000 the associated six op shops raised in a year only $40,000 was left after expenses and the wages of ten people in management, so only 10% of what they sold actually went into providing Lifeline services. That's an absolute disgrace because there's a LOT of unpaid work goes into earning such a small amount, and then the services are provided by volunteers.

This woman got together with all the volunteers in that particular shop and they decided that if all the work they did voluntarily was only paying some manager's wages they'd prefer to run the shop themselves. They split off from Lifeline, got the council to give them an old hall rent-free, and in their second year they turned over $60,000, with minimal expenses (about 2K at most). All the money goes back into the local community. They don't waste much but do $5 bags of clothes regularly.

I don't give anything to my local op shop because the money they raise goes towards luxury items like christmas hampers for the local kindergarten and spending money for the kids going to Japan on their school trips. There was a lot of politics there too and I refuse to go near the place now. If I give to another op shop I try and think less about where the money goes and concentrate on the fact that the buyers get what they want for a good price.

[*tippy*toes*]

According to Google, H&M is some Swedish multinational clothing company. Hennes & Mauritz. It's known for it's fast-fashion clothing for men, women, teenagers and children. Sounds a bit like Target! Not some high end fashion house.

[travelsizeme]

No, H&M is definitely not high end! It is considered “high street” fashion. It is in the same league as Zara and Top Shop. Fast fashion - cheap and high turnover of clothes (new stuff every couple of weeks). From my experience, the quality is pretty poor. I have bought from there once or twice when they first came to Melbourne but the quality really put me off. I prefer to spend more on a few quality pieces that will last than fill my wardrobe with junk I will never wear.