Sales down 17.88 percent this financial year

[rocket2retro]

Well the numbers are in & my sales for the just ended financial year are down 17.88% on the previous financial year.

I put in the same amount of work.

I have approximately double the amount of listings in my store than I did this time last year. This is a result of not selling as much and the stock just mounts up.

Every year now it is decreasing & it is not far from the point where it is not worth the time/effort to sell on eBay any longer.

The hourly rate gap between me and my 15YO daughter (who works for $10 an hour) is closing fast.

I might have to ask her boss if he has any vacant positions!

[clarry100]

We are down 11.4% overall across all selling venues comparing the same two tax years.

In this tax year we have increased our ebay listings by about 30%,

We have opened up our own website, and

We have started selling on an etsy store.

The previous year we only had ebay.

[daydreams_12]

Many small businesses in the B & M world are a lot more down than 17.88 percent.  Look around you, every shopping centre has many empty shops where people have gone under.  I agree it is not easy to accept when so much work goes into your business but times are tough out there.  I am involved in the transport industry and while we are going reasonably ok but the auction yards are full of repossessed vehicles.  I hope things improve for you, try and stay positive and weather the storm.  Hopefully things will improve for us all SOON

[rocket2retro]

Thanks for your replies. I realise times are tough. If it were just one one year of reduced sales I wouldn't panic. However this is the 3rd year of significant declines in sales. From reading the boards it seems many sellers started to see similar delines about this time.

In the previous 10 years that I have been selling on on eBay every year I had an increase in sales.I attributed this to increased knowledge and efficiency etc that came with experience.

Obviously I could start selling on other platforms. However eBay is already a full-time job and finding the time to many other sites could be difficult.

[goodthingsforsalerobert]

Sales down 12.5 percent

increased listings by 25 percent

working more hours for less

[digital*ghost]

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@rocket2retro wrote:

Obviously I could start selling on other platforms. However eBay is already a full-time job and finding the time to many other sites could be difficult.

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To me that suggests the solution is to work a little less on eBay to explore other options. 

That is, with the situation as it stands, it's a full time job but you're not deriving a full time income, so if you can cut down on some of the "ebay hours" and invest those elsewhere, you'd still be working full time hours, but could end up getting back to a full time income.

I have 3 shops all up (two are on another site and each one focuses on a different sub category, while on eBay everything is in the one store). They each have some exclusive items, but it's easy enough to streamline the sales - if you get back up to previous sales volume, you already know you can handle that, so it would really be just a matter of the set-up. 

[englishrosegardens]

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@digital*ghost wrote:

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@rocket2retro wrote:

Obviously I could start selling on other platforms. However eBay is already a full-time job and finding the time to many other sites could be difficult.

---

To me that suggests the solution is to work a little less on eBay to explore other options. 

That is, with the situation as it stands, it's a full time job but you're not deriving a full time income, so if you can cut down on some of the "ebay hours" and invest those elsewhere, you'd still be working full time hours, but could end up getting back to a full time income.

I have 3 shops all up (two are on another site and each one focuses on a different sub category, while on eBay everything is in the one store). They each have some exclusive items, but it's easy enough to streamline the sales - if you get back up to previous sales volume, you already know you can handle that, so it would really be just a matter of the set-up. 

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I started my own website a few months ago and I'm just building it up slowl in my spare time, but one thing about it is that once I list something there it's permanent, which is equivalent to GTC on ebay.  I don't use GTC on ebay (for my own reasons) so I have to spend a fair bit of time relisting and the like, but I can save all this time for other things on my own site so I'm going to try and do everything I can to push sales on there. 

As for ebay, this last year I made a few changes that meant I do a lot less work for the same total dollar sales.  I know it's not always possible to 'work smarter, not harder' but if there's anything that can be made more efficient it pays to 'make' time to do it.  In my case I had to edit the title, description, price and quality in over 500 listings, but I saved far more time over the year than what I spent on editing, and will continue to save time from now on.