I really would like to hear back from those readers who currently sell on eBay, Amazon, Overstock, their own websites or a mixture of channels. How are your sales at each venue?
The press is saying that ecommerce is alive and well so lets put some meat on that bone and see which marketplace or channel is working best for you. Don't be afraid to tell me if eBay is doing well for you because ultimately if eBay is doing well other sellers want to know.
So either email me or post a comment about your Q4 so far. This is not a scientific survey, I'm just taking the temperature of the marketplace business.
7 comments:
Hi Scott: In June of this year I took half of my eBay Store listings (mostly lower end stuff) and transferred them to my Marketworks storefront. That left about 6,000 items on eBay. With that in mind, my sales for the past week are about 9% higher than they were for the same period last year. However, my post-Thanksgiving week sales are still less than they were in 2004 and 2005. My Marketworks Storefront is doing very poorly, and some weeks I have no sales at all. I am looking forward to Channel Advisor making some improvements in channel feeds. Right now, the basic feed for my type of product is still called FROOGLE on Marketworks, and there is no designated Google Base upload - at least not one that is titled as such, and no method of actually knowing whether your uploads succeeded. (Maybe someone who knows better can correct me on that, but that's my understanding.)
Oops, sorry for calling you Scott. I mean, Randy!
Hi Randy,
We primarily sell larger ticket items on eBay ... about 2200 listings. We have begun listing on Amazon a short while ago and just received our 1st sale. Sales are up about 32% for this qtr compared to last year. We have a website but on for info, but do list an 800 # for visitors to ask questions and place orders. About 50% of our sales are on our 800# as a result of seeing us on eBay.
Dave
I sell Nintendo Wii's and related accessories. Sales are through the roof!
Thanks for the comments Bill, Dave and Anonymous :)
I'm hearing from seller via email that they are flat to down on eBay and many not all are up in their other channels like websites, Amazon etc.
I did just get off the phone with one eBay seller (Nearly $4 million in sales this year so far) who is up huge over last year and seeing gains from both eBay and his website. He does not sell on Amazon and isn't considering it in the near-term.
Keep them coming.
More numbers from another eBay Seller:
eBay sales as a % of my gross sales in 2006: 79%
eBay sales as a % of my gross sales in 2007: 68%
Overall sales are down 24% year to year
eBay gross sales down 35%
Off-eBay gross sales up 17%
Biggest increases in my Off-eBay gross sales are from Etsy and my 2websites, as well as my Prostore which I did not have in 2006.
Decreases in my off-eBay gross sales are from several of the other venues I've used: Ioffer, Bidville, Yahoo (which is of course gone now)
Many sellers prefer not to have their information listed on the blog but I did hear from a seller who was fine with it, though I won't reveal who they are.
The seller is currently selling on eBay, Half, and their own website but about 98% of their sales come from eBay (and 90% of those are from auctions/fixed priced vs. 10% store).
They have actually seen very good sales growth on eBay this year (about $2 million last year and $3 - $3.5 million this year) though new/more active buyers on the site are not necessarily the cause. They have aggressively cut their prices and paid a lot more attention to what they are listing this year. As a result they've been
able to get sell-through rates as high as 37% in November/December(vs. an average of about 25% for the rest of the year) but their profit per sale has declined.
One number that was pretty interesting, for every $1 in profit they have made this year, they have paid eBay $2.
Last year they were only paying eBay about $1.35 for each $1 in profit.
Very interesting! Keep those emails and comments coming.
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