I agree, sooner or later, Vinted will make changes that will reduce or remove some of the advantages it has now…might as well take advantage while you can…

I did get ten new listings up on ebay today, so maybe that show of activity will give me a boost with the algo.

I have bought about 8 items on vinted and sold 3 so far.  A lot of sellers said they got a big selling boost when starting but I’m definitely not seeing that.  I priced with the anticipation of making offers to the buyer later, but now I’m thinking to just price it cheaply to begin with while you have their attention.  OTOH, under $10 I’m wondering if it’s even worth my time to ship fragile stuff.  Right now I put some mildly damaged bad vintage buys on there, also some textiles, etc. just to get my thrifted money back.  Some flea market finds I got very inexpensively.  If it’s fabric, at least it’s easy to ship out.  I am getting a little bit of a feel for what does better, like brass and vintage kitsch completed needlepoint works.  Hopefully I’ll sell off some more things before they start charging shipping.

I don’t care for the app design and the sellers I bought from did not mention flaws.  It is hard to see in the pics on the phone and easy to miss.  It’s also a time suck.  The platform must be getting really loaded up with stuff since it so fast to list.  I think there are a lot of resellers on there now with strong prices so I have bought less recently.

Good luck @retro! I heard somewhere that live selling is actually selling a community rather than the goods.  I definitely think there is something to that.

At this point, I have no plans to try Live shows, whether ebay Live or otherwise, but I might give it a try at some point.

@retrotreasures, best of luck with the interview!

Regarding ebay Live, I was approved for it I believe early this year. I had no desire to do that and didn’t feel my inventory really fits the mold. I have no idea why ebay approved and recommended me for it. The ebay grant this year revolves solely around ebay live. Worst yet, you had to do a video submission to even apply this year. Ewww! I prefer my anonymity on the internets…

I talked with my older kids about it, and I decided to go ahead and apply. I did my video – the first online video I’ve ever done where I actually put myself on camera. My plan is if I get the grant I’ll start up an ebay live with my oldest kid as my employee. She’ll run the socials and ebay lives. It will be her own little sandbox. Maybe I’ll join in, maybe not. Who knows! As a Xennial who has lived my whole life in a constant state of rapid change, what’s one more change and adaptation?

I made it to the interview rounds and have my interview later this month. Boy I sure would like that $10k!

Books, homegoods, games, media, sporting goods etc all sell well on Posh.

ebay is still king in regards to ASP and overall volume of sales. 50-60% of my items sold are on ebay.

Yes, photos of rulers are wildly deceptive, especially with the lenses in a phone. Any time I’ve ever took a photo of a tape measure I have to adjust the angle of the camera to make sure the photo shows what the actual measurement is. The dry erase laminated sheets work perfectly.

Don’t feel pressured to sell in categories you don’t want to. You sell the stuff that crushes my motivation. Sure I will dabble here and there in art or fragile home goods, but that is as far as I go. It has to be a truly special item that I find pleasing in some way. One of my favorite items I’ve ever sold was a large vintage decoupage portrait of a young lady on a piece of wood. It was just such a captivating photo – the eyes just seemed to stare into my soul. Apparently the buyer agreed as it sold for $200+ many years ago.   Generally though I don’t enjoy sourcing, listing, or shipping these things. I have to mentally slap myself when I start to consider these bulkier or fragile things while sourcing. It just ain’t my bag!

If you don’t truly enjoy clothing/shoes, then just dabble. Maybe dabbling could turn into more down the road. I started with dabbling in shoes. Now I have well over 1k active listings and am currently sourcing/listing/selling 30-50 pair a week.

I’m guessing people are using Pirate Ship because buyers think it is the cheapest, whether it is or isn’t….but I’m not going to rush into it. The IG learning curve will be steep enough without it LOL

Regarding Ebay it sure is hard to know what to do to make better sales.  My preference is for shipping to be a wash after materials (mostly I recycle) and then I offer various discounts to buyers adding up to about 20% max unless it’s a stale used item.  But I do get messages now and then about shipping costs and I also feel like in 2026 my items aren’t really getting seen with this level of promotion.  At my couple of online store reviews the tutor was really pushing the coupon, newsletter, and making a clearance section in my store.  He didn’t really push more promoting.

ebay has a Webinar scheduled for this Thursday about ebay Live…I suspect they are going to announce that they’ve expanded the categories and have opened Lives up to more sellers…they clearly want to push a Very Live Christmas this holiday season. I’m going to try to attend the webinar, mostly just out of curiosity.

I too am considering increasing my promo rate for the Holidays.

I use calculated shipping on ebay with a 50 cent handling fee and a 20% discount from the rate charged to the buyer (recently increased from 15%). I might increase that rate again….or maybe even just give up the full seller discount and pass the savings on to the buyer….shipping is crazy expensive. ebay would be wise to provide some sort of real reduction for the Holidays, but I’m not holding my breath.

I’m also thinking of providing an ebay coded coupon —5, maybe 10%—to anyone who buys an item on IG. Run the coupon through the end of the year. (Of course, coupons stack into any regular discount sales I run on ebay, so I don’t want to go too high….just hoping the coupon gets them to at least look at my ebay store.

I have some of that pottery , I was buying it years ago, but have no idea where it is stored LOL

Will definitely keep my eyes open for more. Thanks for the tip.

I’m still trying to figure out just how I’m going to handle IG. For now, I’m planning on taking PayPal and using PP labels to ship, but I might end up opening a Venmo account as well. Also, on ebay I have one day shipping, but I see a surprising number of IG sellers have 50 to 10 day handling times, and I’ll probably go with something like that, but try to ship much faster. I’m definitely not going to promise one day handling, if ebay actually gets busy for Q4, I could find myself in trouble with that (I do all the shipping for both of us, so even if I have no sales, if Better Half has sales, I need to get them in the mail.)

I also see a lot of people using Pirateship. I don’t have an account with them…have you used them? (I have also seen sellers saying I ship through Pirateship, but if you prefer, I’ll list the item on Vinted and shipping will be 99 cents….Gotta love resellers’ ability to adapt LOL)

No sales on Vinted unfortunately.  It’s a time suck but I’ll be looking for a few more things to source.  Handmade quilts are super hard to find here but those have strong prices even on Vinted.

A youtuber I love is starting a trend for Nemadji pottery and I’m trying to pick some up inexpensively.  I’d like to take some to the Fall markets.  I found one I’d like to keep for myself in a rarer color and the shipping was $20 USPS ground from the East Coast on Ebay.  It’s a 6″ vase.  I reached out to the seller and she said her measurements are correct but she’d refund any overage but wow.  Ebay really, really needs to work on the shipping cost.  It has me thinking about passing on a portion of my shipping discount for 4th quarter.  (Either that or upping the promo rate a bit.)  I need to look at my 2 and 3 pound labels and see if I can do a flat rate on either, but I think nearby buyers would be put off.

There is a lot of content on Youtube and Facebook about Ebay sales being way down in 2026.  Their numbers were ok for shareholders because I guess of inflation, the fee bump, and an uptick in trading cards and motors focus categories.  But with some of the AI listing tools, live selling, and Gen Z there is a lot more stuff coming online, which will push vintage prices down.  They really need to think about making some changes soon.

I put up a short reel and a post with a few items I’m going to include in an Instagram Claim Sale on Wednesday night. Hopefully, this preview will act as a teaser to whet buyer appetites LOL My understanding is IG basically shows the reel to non-followers, and the post goes to followers feeds. (Of course, whether anyone will actually see it, I don’t know, but IG does have analytics, so I can check later.)

My ebay Labor Day sale is ending in a few hours, with nothing to show for it. As you said, Labor Day weekend is probably not the best time to run a sale, since a lot of people are busy actually doing things, rather than shopping online.

Here’s hoping I get at least a sale or two from IG, but even if I don’t, I’ll keep posting more stuff. If ebay were going great, I wouldn’t bother.

I just bought an original watercolor painting on Vinted for $8 today.  You have to look closely which is a little trickier on the phone.  It’s very Wild West though you can tell some people are experienced resellers.

I listed about 10 items today and it was lightening fast.  No sales yet.  I have a bunch of items favorited so I can see what’s moving.  It seems like the completed needle works I mentioned, kitsch, plus certain home decor items are popular.  It’s a bit hard to know how low to price because I’m expecting people to negotiate and they can ask for 40% off.  I’m putting in one offs, things with small flaws, things my daughter commented on, and things I got super cheap or regret getting.  I have a pro iphone and had to turn off a setting so it would do close ups inside the Vinted app.

I’m definitely going to continue to cross post on Ebay because the prices are good when I do get sales.  I may or may not try bumping promoted on certain items to 6% or so to see if it helps if I have the margins.  Someone said they went to 9% and sales improved.

Good luck with Insta.

I remember I was excited—well, a little bit—when ebay first introduced their “Social Tool”…and I recall talking to an ebay team member about it, and she too was excited….all sorts of plans, what do sellers want? etc etc. And then….ebay seems to have basically forgotten about it, and it is poorly designed etc. (I suspect the same thing will happen to the new bundling tool).

I’m not about to abandon ebay, but I’m definitely looking at alternatives. ebay could still announce some new changes that will make me say “Wow! These could be game changers!” But so far….I’ve pretty much given up even hoping that ebay will really do anything that will excite me (as opposed to, maybe exciting Live sellers or Trading Card sellers….)

So, I’m selectively listing some stuff on ebay this afternoon, and tonight I’ll try putting up some things on IG. And I’ll keep  pushing both and see what happens.

I wasn’t aware of the Vinted limitations. Will keep that in mind. I’m thinking it might be good for sourcing right now….not that I really need more stuff. LOL

Keep on plugging!

My daughter (20 yo) says she is seeing a ton of online advertising for Vinted.  From what I gather, completed needlepoint and crewel is doing very well.  I’ll throw a few more listings on each day while the free shipping lasts.

Labor day weekend the retailers have great sales so I do remember that it is a tough holiday.  However, I only have two Ebay sales and I ran a 10% coupon, plus a 5% sale, made offers and listed.  A lot of long timers on Ebay Facebook groups are saying they sales are way down in 2026.  Some comments vary on the month of change.  For me it felt like visibility was poorer since January and I saw that in my promoted clicks traffic numbers.

Ebay management really has blown it.  They made a big deal about AI to the public and then a bunch of executives unloaded their stock.  Meanwhile they just have let all this buyer growth slip through their fingers and created ill will with sellers.  I’m so glad I started cross posting last year.  Unfortunately Nifty doesn’t have Vinted yet and Vinted doesn’t want software posted items.

I’m currently running a sale on ebay for Labor Day, 20% off a lot of stuff. So far, one absurdly low offer, that’s it. I have always felt ebay has neglected ebay Stores and Store Sales, and of course, now they want us to pay per click to advertise our stores or sales.

I’m going to try to list a few things on ebay this week…we picked up some decent stuff over the weekend at a town wide yard sale….but I’m also going to bite the bullet and put up my first IG direct sales….I’m not expecting much, because I’m just starting there, I’m hoping if I start posting now I’ll be able to develop a bit of a following by Q4.

With Q4 comin up, ebay sales should increase on their own, but I just don’t have much faith in ebay’s efforts on our behalf. IF I were doing ebay Lives and selling, say, Pokemon cards, yes, I would probably be all in on ebay. But my gut feeling—could be totally wrong—is that for a lot of my stuff (not all of it)—buyers aren’t looking at ebay the way they used to….they are on IG, or depop, maybe Vinted, etc. ebay has thrown away so many opportunities to be THE place to shop for this sort of stuff, and at this point, I don’t think they will ever get that market back….it’s just too diversified now, and I don’t think ebay is really interested in it.

I would love to remain ebay only, but I’m not ebay’s preferred type of seller….

I need to think about what I have on hand that would be really helped by free shipping – low dollar, lightweight items and relatively larger items maybe under a pound.  Vinted also showed me what items I had liked that ended up selling.  Some items are moving SUPER quickly.  It gives me a little window into what the young people are interested in and willing to pay for.  The algorithm seems to be pretty good at deciding what new items to place on your home page.  I wish I could cross post there but by the time they are added by Nifty, the free shipping offer is probably going to be gone. There are a lot of obvious resellers on there.

I don’t have a lot of followers on IG, but I’ve decided I’m going to try some direct sales on there…Of course, there’s a learning curve….I wish I had started months ago. Going to a small town wide yard sale this weekend, if the weather cooperates. This one runs hot and cold, but I usually do come home with some decent stuff. It tends to draw a lot of resellers though, so a lot of competition.

Glad to hear sales are picking up a little…I would really like a strong Q4, but ebay has been so sluggish, I feel I’ve got to really start pushing. And frankly, the state of the economy is worrisome….I do think buyers are going to continue to buy, but I don’t think it would take much to get a lot of wallets snapping shut….

The app is super simple and meant for casual sellers.  NO seller fees at all, currently FREE shipping, a small buyer fee.  They will ship anything under 4 pounds and I think a 12 12 12 box and even larger is ok.  You can also easily make a bundle.

There is a lot of haggling.  It might be a cool place to source because it’s super fast to list.  I imagine people are just throwing a lot of bins and garage sale stuff on there quickly and willing to take a pretty low price.  Some probably live in areas where they can get things less expensively than here.  The descriptions are terrible, categories are minimal, and you really have to look though a bunch of junk.  I’m looking for original paintings for example and I have to wade through a bunch of unrelated stuff. However, these are likely young people who might miss something or undervalue it.

If you are thinking of opening an account, don’t use your business name.  Supposedly if someone reports you as a “commercial seller” you get booted off the site.  I have to wait 30 days to change mine.  I didn’t know that when I opened my account.  Also you don’t want to be sharing on social media.

Also young people invading estate sales is on national news.  They mentioned the new term old lady core.

It’s interesting that you like the AI lister on Nifty so much.  Maybe it’s because I’m selling fewer clothes but I always have to rework the titles.  I do like the keyword function and I have copied someone’s prompts to control the description.  I use it sometimes for brand new items when I have stock photos.  It also got some of my measurements wrong when I used a ruler in photos so I might steal the white board idea – that’s a great idea.

Ebay seems to be doing ok working the focus categories and dialing up the advertising revenue but their shipping charges and fees are really inappropriate.  The newest thing is some sellers are getting a message that Ebay will automatically opt them in to pass on the seller’s shipping discount to buyers – while Ebay is still charging a fee on shipping!  What the what?  I guess they will continue to try to whittle down the margins of anyone not paying attention.

Poshmark has been great for me but the combo of offers-driven sales at 20% is rough for my new items.  I’ve always liked Mercari and I’m really hoping they make a comeback in 4th quarter.  They are holding at 10% seller fees and if they gather steam hopefully they can hire back some CS staff.  The District platforms I tried pretty much became live selling focused platforms and didn’t really take off after a certain point.  I’ve heard mixed things about Vinted but would consider trying some lower end stuff there if added by Nifty.  I’m looking out for more information about Facebook’s app.

I really am not so interested in clothes or running around to garage sales but I did go out on our Citywide garage sale day.  I got some high end clothing – Johnny Was – from a lady who lost weight on GLP1 and it all sold really fast and was super easy to ship.  Kinda made me think about garage sales in a different light.  I also got some free Ralph Lauren wallpaper that sold immediately.

I totaled my Sienna minivan at the beginning of July. That sucked, but there is a silver lining. Since it is a toyota it holds it’s value. I paid $38,500 in 2021 right before the chip shortage. The dealer was desperate for a sale so it was an awesome deal on a new van. My total payout was $39500. Yes, I got MORE than I originally paid even after 5 years and almost 60k miles.

The crappy part is the short time frame to get something else. I’ve adapted to so much chaos and change this year that I was inspired for more change, so I heavily researched EV’s. At the very last minute before my rental ran out I found a Chevy Blazer EV that was a dealer demo at local dealer that only had 4k miles. It is warrantied as a new car and qualifies for new car loan terms. I paid $29500 and they gave me a free Chevy V2H capable Powershift Charger. I don’t really want that charger so I listed it on ebay. This is a $2k charger! Mind you this is a loaded $56k MSRP SUV. I had cash in hand but since I got new car financing so I financed $25k and put the rest of the payout in a high interest savings account at 4.2% APY. I’ll end up making money putting it in a high yield savings vs paying cash and I’ll keep that huge chunk of cash on hand in case we move or add on to our house.. I can easily pay the $540 car payment with ebay funds as I have with all my other vehicles.

I’m installing my home charger this week. I get a $300 credit towards the $500 price of the charger and I’ll get a 30% cheaper rate on power to that charger as long as I avoid 8am-8pm on weekdays. A full tank of power will cost under $7, or about 3.5 cents per mile. My Sienna Minivan was around 13 cents per mile. There is also a FREE public charger at the Library that is a 5 minute walk from my day job location. The maintenance manager just installed an outdoor port for me to use in emergencies and in the winter at work – also for free.

If you have not explored EV’s yet, I highly recommend it. I was in the dark and since I live in coal country, ignorant people like to demonize it and quote outdated info. These cars are the future and the future is here. The battery will outlast the car, and there is practically zero maintenance. The next gen battery technology will be even better. There are sodium Ion batteries on the horizon the does away with rare earth metals like lithium and cobalt.

I LOVE my Blazer EV. It is super roomy, super comfy, and has sports car AWD performance. All the bells and whistles that came with this one in particular were just icing on the cake. My commute is 50 miles round trip a day, which is perfect for an EV.

Prices are dropping quickly, especially on used cars. A couple days after I bought this one, the local KIA dealer called me and offered $33500 for a brand new EV6 Wind. They don’t sell well in WV, so that was a really great deal. That’s also an incredibly nice car I recommend you check out if in the market. I’m keeping an eye out for a cheap Chevy Bolt for my daughter.  Nice ones with 60-80k miles can be had for sub 15k now, but I’m hunting for one significantly less than $10k. While I hate buying a 100k gas car, I’d happily buy a 100k mile EV. It’s likely good for another 100k with no maintenance other than tires and still have 80% or more of the original battery life.

But I did it and here I am and I’ll show some numbers as to why cross listing is essential now. List and forget is completely dead. Note that all numbers are sales price only, no shipping and before fees. It’s easier to compare apples to apples this way.

In 2025 from Jan 1 to 8/25 I had 939 sales for $44805 My store had 2989 items on 1/1/25 and 3641 on 8/25/25. My average store size was 3143. I averaged 46 new listings per week over this time.

I started cross listing slowly in late December and ramped up throughout Q1. I completed flat rate business policies switchover in March/April. Nifty also refreshes all my ebay listings with a 5% price reduction so my store is fresh – no stale listings.

My store had 4006 items on 1/1/26 and 4055 items on 8/25/26. My average store size was 4040 this year to date. I have averaged 63 new listings per week this year to date.

So almost 1000 more items on average, no stale listings, more new listings than ever before, and shipping was streamlined to a flat rate model of $5.99, $7.99, $9.99 and $12.99.  You would think my ebay store would be experiencing amazing growth, right? Well…not really.

To date this year I’ve had 1157 sales for $41862 on ebay alone. That is some SCARY anemic growth compared to the work I’ve put in to grow. It’s not even growth as I’ve been selling off old stale inventory for cheap.  I did all that major work just to maintain where I already was. It is terrifying to think how bad my sales would be if I had made none of these changes.

Now when it comes to cross listing I use Poshmark, Depop, and Mercari. This year to date I’ve sold 875 items for $21582. Items that have sat forever on ebay sell quickly on the other platforms. And a reminder – I only have about half my ebay items cross listed so the sales velocity is higher on these sites.

I’ve narrowed my focus going forward on clothes, shoes, and small misc items that are 1cuft or less in size, so everything I list will be cross listing compatible.

I averaged 34 sales a week last year through August and this year I’m up to 60 per week. I’m averaging 74 sales a week this summer. I’m a little scared of how many sales a week I’ll have in Q4 this year. I expect to break 100 several times. Shipping is SUPER annoying right now. I fully expect to cross $100k in sales this year (sale price only – before fees and shipping/tax not included.) That is only possible due to cross listing.

So what other benefits are there to nifty?

Store refresh automation: It’s automatic. Items on every platform get refreshed with no input from me.

Auto offers: I used to spend time every day sending offers. It’s all automated on all platforms according to the rules I have set up. There is alot of customization for this to work however you want it to work. You can even set up a delay for how long to wait until the offer is sent once a person looks at your item.

AI listing: Simply put, it is awesome once you are used to it. I now pay my two oldest kids to list for me. Currently I’m not really listing except for occasional items. My daughter lists clothes and misc items. My son lists shoes. When listing clothes she photos the items and has a dry erase template she writes down the measurements on and takes a photo of the template. I have every possible measurement on two templates.The AI tool integrates the measurements into the listing description and item specifics. It only incudes the measurements that have written entries. You can create custom rules for the lister to follow . You just add notes and prompts into a template and it follows the rules.  Once the listing is generated the kids do their own proof read and then do a price search on ebay or terapeak. The recommended prices on nifty are a work in progress. I don’t recommend using them. They’re right only about 50% of the time. Once they are done they mark their drafts as ‘ready to list’ and then I do the final review and post them live. I pay them $2 a listing with a $5 bonus if they do 20 listings in a day. It takes them each about 1.5-2 hours to list 20 items so they are both making $20+ an hour. IMy daughter is saving up for college/car and my son is taking flying lessons and saving up to pay for his lessons (expensive!)

Side note, they’ve both scored high enough ACT scores to get a free ride to college. Higher scores than I had even. Nice!

Sorry for the side quest – back on task!

The listings that nifty generates are quite good quality. It hits so many excellent keywords, there are SEO optimized keyword sections in the item description, there are endless AI templates to help streamline shipping options.  I’ve time trialed myself doing shoe listings with AI. I can do 15 pair in an hour start to finish, including basic cleaning. This is robust listings – far more detailed than the basic listings I used to do that didn’t even have a description other than “see pictures for details & condition”.

Bookkeeping: Nifty has some excellent tools to analyze your metrics. You can track your COGS (I’m not using this yet – another huge up front undertaking), your inventory SKU’s, and whatever else you want. I don’t know how anyone could use Poshmark or Depop to manage inventory. Depop doesn’t even have a SKU system and Poshmark is very rudimentary. I do all inventory tracking direct in Nifty, which then pushes that info out to the different platforms. So if ebay ever glitches with the SKU system, I am safe. I can just do a full refresh on nifty and it will completely fix all my ebay listings.

Ask Otto: Nifty has it’s own dedicated AI chatbot that is VERY useful. You get a certain amount of free credits to interact with OTTO each month, and after that it will start consuming your monthly credits. I’ve added some metrics to my weekly numbers this year to track clothes and shoes sales more accurately, as well as tracking cross listed vs ebay sales. I have been doing all this manually – so each week I would log each sale and mark it as ebay or cross listed, and then mark each sale as clothes & accessories, shoes, or other. This week I described to Otto what I have been doing and it generated the same report automatically. I double checked the classifications of my sales and the numbers and it was perfect. It got every sale properly classified. Now I have a report I can run each week I can trust that will generate my metrics without me having to spend 20-30 minutes logging data.

And the newest tool that Nifty just launched is AI bulk cross listing. Man I REALLY wish this was around when I started. Now if you have a bunch of ebay listings you can bulk cross list to all platforms. It does take 1 credit per item same as fully generating a listing, but I get 1000 credits a month on my pro plan. More than enough to do all my listing and do some bulk cross listing. I’ll make sure to use up my credits each month on bulk cross listing the rest of my items until I’m all caught up. Going forward all my new listings are already cross listed so there is no extra work to make more sales.

TLDR, I pay $90 a month to make an additional $600-800 a week this year without any extra work once it is all set up.  That’s an impressive ROI. I can entrust my teens to do ALL my listing and their listings are very high quality. I just spend 20-30 minutes a day proofing up to 40 listings. The rest of my time is spent with shipping and inventory management.

I did have one thing sell twice but I suspect that was user error.  I also had something I couldn’t find and thought I might have sold but I think maybe I decided to throw it into the garage sale.  On the whole it’s been very reliable and I wouldn’t be cross posting without software.

I feel like I’m getting a lot for the money.  I wish there was a reliable way other than Terapeak to decide on prices.  Then AI listing would be more valuable.  I’m still doing sell similar mostly on Ebay.

BTW, I’m still posting on Pinterest, which is quick.  I also kept using my under a pound flat rate which gets me Google hits.  I get an average of about 9% of my clicks from outside Ebay.

So, you are pretty happy with Nifty?

My issue with the Ebay promoted fee is that I’m not convinced that I’m really getting anything for it and I’m apparently getting less for more money, further liquidated by some sellers going all in on pay to play.

One thin I’m thinking about is a variant I guess of the list without PL for 30 days tactic….I’m considering offering items directly on Instagram…payment through PayPal I guess…for the first ten days (or whatever number)…with a notice that the item will be going into my ebay store at the end of ten days (at a higher price). Even if I don’t sell very many items that way, it will hopefully increase the number of people clicking through to look at my ebay store to see what I already have listed.

I do think people are buying our kind of stuff, I just don’t think they are shopping on ebay as much as they used to. Add to that the fact that ebay clearly is pushing eBay Lives and certain favored categories, and I think it might be worth trying to push before my stuff goes up on ebay (or at least some of it…some things I’ll probably still put up on ebay first.)

The promoted fees don’t add up to a lot for me at this rate but I’m curious what will happen if I drop it.  I stubbornly refuse to pay a higher percentage.  I would if I had gotten most of my items very inexpensively but I also sell brand new items and sometimes pay up a bit for vintage.

Gemini says this:

1. The “2% Anchor” Camp (Estimated at over 60–70% of independent sellers) Following the 2026 “any-click” attribution rule change, massive cohorts of everyday sellers shifted their strategy. Because any random click can trigger an ad fee on an organic sale up to 30 days later, keeping ad rates high is a massive risk to margins.The Logic: Sellers use 2% as a “participation fee” to prevent the eBay search engine, Cassini, from burying their listings.

The Pushback: Platforms like EcommerceBytes note that eBay has been aggressively prompting sellers with notifications warning them that competitors are using “8% to 15%” ad rates. Despite this pressure, the community consensus on Reddit and eBay community boards remains clear: “Stick to 2% to survive the margin squeeze”

2.The “Dynamic & Priority” Camp (High-Volume Power Sellers)Large-scale retail sellers and liquidators frequently bypass the 2% strategy…

I guess I if most people are paying the participation fee then I’d better be careful not to drop it.  I’ll be in no man’s land potentially.

I suspect there are multiple reasons for slow ebay sales, much of it tied to ebay’s refusal to recognize just how effective their competition has become, and much of it tied to ebay’s inability to focus on anything beyond ad revenue, ebay Lives and ebay sales centered on a relatively few categories (trading cards, designed handbags, etc).

I think the only way I’ll be able to keep this up is to go nulti platform and to push social media, Waiting for ebay to wise up is a losing proposition.

I agree I haven’t done very well on Ebay since January.  I’m kind of a boom and bust lister and I feel like changes were likely made in January that hurt my visibility.  During the first three months I could see that I was getting fewer promoted clicks for my same low percentage.  I refuse to go higher.  I’m going to stop promoting now on brand new listings.  Nifty doesn’t promote when they relist so I can do it manually then in bulk as they get refreshed after 30 days.

I think I mentioned that I have Nifty refresh my listings very often now.  I think it helped on Ebay after I changed it to every 30 days (from 90 or 60 before).  My guess is that they are really pushing down stale listings. I haven’t been good about updating my old ones.

ebay apparently had a strong Q2, but you wouldn’t know it from my sales. ebay is definitely putting its emphasis on Livestreaming and its focus categories, especially the higher end stuff like designer handbags, watches etc. But for a lot of what I sell, I’m not sure ebay is top of the buyer’s lists anymore….and ebay is doing too little to change that. So as much as I kind of hate to complicate things by going multichannel, I think I probably have little choice. How do you handle taxes for multichannel?  Do you combine all your revenue and expenses as one business?

One thing about multi channel and using social media….while it will be extra work (especially due to the learning curve)…it might revive my reselling enthusiasm, which has been on life support with ebay. I still see so much potential at ebay, but it’s been ages since they’ve really done anything that made me say : “Now, this might be a real game changer!” So, maybe trying new stuff will revitalize things?

Crosslisting was awesome for me.  I’m not sure about Depop.  I’ve heard that people are pretty frugal and service is not good.  However, I had two sales on Ebay I’ve had to cancel very recently after the software has been super reliable.  I think it might have been me doing something wrong.

I used to not watch much tv for many years but I watched Making a Murderer and it made me think of the old podcast discussion.

Since ebay’s purchase of depop has gone through, I’m thinking about trying to list some stuff there….while it is geared towards clothing, they do allow other stuff as well, and I’m going to see if I have some stuff that might fit the depop vibe. I’m hoping ebay itself might make it easy to cross list but even if they do, I suspect it will not be till next year at the earliest.

Multiple platforms and social media are goals for Q4, but I’m not pushing any of that really until I get the place reorganized. That isn’t just the inventory, it’s also improving the shipping station and photo station. I figure that will take up most of August. (I’ve cut back on sourcing, which is hard to do at the height of yard sale season, but I’ve still managed to pick up a few decent things. Also, just did a little sourcing on WhatNot…I’ve never been big on online sourcing, but between time constraints, the cost of gas, and not getting any younger, it is making more sense.

I too an trying to lose weight. No drugs. I seem to have hit a plateau right now, but I think if I can add in more exercise it might move the needle again.

Here’s to better sales soon!

I’m not sure Mercari has kept up either but then that’s on them.  Most of my Mercari listings are Fed Ex Economy.

So heads-up, eBay’s Calculated Shipping tool is still messed up on the rural zip codes. When a rural buyer checks out, eBay continues to charge them based on the actual light ounce weight (like 4 oz). But when we print the label, the USPS back-end forces the maximum 15.99 oz rate, leaving us sellers to swallow a $ loss per package. eBay owes us a fix on this.

Check your shipping metrics closely because eBay is still quietly draining our profit margins on these lightweight orders.

To make matters worse, keep an eye on your heavier packages this week. On Saturday, July 25, USPS quietly rolled out another Ground Advantage rate hike, adding a $0.10 surcharge specifically to all 3-to-5-pound packages. Make sure to adjust your listings manually, because eBay’s calculator seems to be failing us right now.

Since a large portion of eBay buyers live in rural areas, look out for your margins. I’ll definitely be lowering the custom discounts I offer to buyers after this.

Watch out for USPS Ground Advantage under 1 pound. USPS just unified ounce-based pricing for these light packages sent to rural Zip codes, matching recent hikes to non-contiguous and military destinations.

The hit is real. On June 15, I shipped a 4 oz package to APO 09114 for $5.72. Today, 30 days later, that exact same label costs $7.46—a massive 30.4% spike.

With non-contiguous, rural and military rates getting this aggressive, flat-rate shipping is risky. Double-check your listings or switch to calculated shipping to avoid these surprise costs.

Hope everyone is having a very good summer.  I’m settling in after taking a big break.  My inventory is down to low 700s listing from a high of 1200.

I wanted to share that I am getting more Ebay sales after changing my software to refresh listings every 30 days instead of 90 or more days.  This is while not really listing many new listings at all.

Poshmark is now 1/3 of my sales dollarwise, with Ebay 2/3.  Mercari is pretty dead but I get a sale now and again.  I have some low dollar stuff going on over there.  They do run special deals from time to time so I’m hoping to sell off old things.   My 2025 profit was the same as the year prior, though I thought I worked more.  A bit disappointing but I am having to discount and take lower offers to make sales plus I am paying for software.  One more bit about Poshmark – fees are higher but I’ve had two packages not track at USPS (I’m going to the counter daily now) and Posh stepped up for refunding both myself and the buyer.  I’d rather Ebay charge a little more and do this.

I’ve had to update shipping on some lower dollar larger items in Ebay due to the USPS dim weight divisor change.  You are still ok 12 x 12 x 12 but I do have some larger platters and bowls that could get me in trouble.  So far I have changed them to Fed Ex or Fed Ex Economy.  I heard on a podcast that Fed Ex had matched the old USPS DIM weight divisor but I don’t know if they will continue to do so in the future.   Shipping costs are such a big factor these days.

The thrift stores lately are just poor selection, which is ok since I have lots of death piles still.  I am letting myself go to the small local weekly flea market.  For the second half of 2026 I will be working to get the piles down.  Had a big yard sale and cleared a bunch of stuff out.  After that I really haven’t done anything but ship for a month or so.

For the rest of the year I have a ton of used linens, good profit china, and decor items to sell.  At our citywide yard sale I didn’t buy much but bought a bunch of Johnny Was tops from a lady who lost weight on GLP1.  They were too big for me but they sold really well and I got to thinking maybe a few high dollar clothing items wouldn’t be so bad to add to the mix.  So easy to ship.

I’m on a calorie deficit (no drug) weight loss journey after neglecting things for a while.  I’m about 15% to my goal weight.  At my age it’s easier to change what I am eating and not eating but also trying to get more exercise as well.

https://www.valueaddedresource.net/surprise-usps-ground-advantage-rate-drop/

https://www.valueaddedresource.net/usps-july-2026-competitive-rates/

I think this may be in preparation for the DIM weight changes. I tried running some calculations and the new dim weight divisor of 139 makes the 12 12 12 safety net obsolete.  Also if I am doing this right, even a 7 7 7 package is DIM 3 pounds, while I usually use that size for a two pound package, or even less than 1 pound.  They are also getting rid of the ounces under a pound so might as well put all on flat rate shipping up to a pound (I already did this on some items).  I hope Ebay is negotiating a good deal with all of this stuff coming down the pike.  I have a variety of items including lightweight stuff, lots of things from 1-3 pounds.  Some are large.

For this interim period before 7/12 I’ve changed my business policies to pass on the discount to the buyer and I’ve put on a $1.50 handling charge to pay for packaging materials.  I’m hoping I get a sales boost with more competitive shipping.  I realize I’ll be sucking up the fees during this period but hoping to get rid of some  stale stuff.  I’ll reassess in July.

i

My impressions are WAY down in the last three months.  Ebay is 63% of my sales for the year, and surprisingly that is the same percentage as for the last three months.  So that would suggest that my lack of listing and other economic factors /pricing is perhaps lot of the issue.  I have had to make much better discounts to get the sales I am making on Ebay, pulling all the strings. I’m TRS, have flat rate shipping under a pound, running my weekly permasale, making offers (sometimes 33% if an old listing).   Looking back through my sales it does not seem as though the extra photos needed on my listing quality report are a dealbreaker.  Overall, I am selling less stale inventory (even with a deep offer) on Ebay but some is selling off on Poshmark.  Mercari is pretty dead overall.

I am definitely getting fewer promoted clicks since the attribution change in January but more promoted sales.   If that’s true to most sellers who kept the same rate then I wonder if someone could successfully challenge the fee structure.  It’s smart to not promote at first and then do it when you end and sell similar but I kind of just like keeping it simple.  Should change this since it would be simple to add after the software refreshes.

I read that Ebay sales overall are doing better than a lot of small sellers like me are reporting.  It’s focus categories so maybe the live sales are providing a boost?  The notifications are annoying.  I saw a commercial on HBO (10 seconds) and it was almost nonsensical.

@mycottage we don’t have a seller circle here either.  I’ve been looking at Facebook groups, which is 90% of the people with soft sales and 10% of the people lashing them. Not many people looking at their traffic reports but some anecdotal evidence that Cassini likely changed in January along with the promoted fee change.

I had back-to-back-to-back bad months (March/April/May) after a great start to the year sales-wise. I’ll accept some “blame” for needing to step back for a bit earlier this year to focus on something else, but a little time off can’t explain the kind of drop I saw. I’m not selling in categories that benefit from posting to other sites, unfortunately, so it was a matter of doubling down and continuing to “list through it.”

June feels better, but I’m in the same boat of still of it being sluggish and inconsistent. I don’t mind if a week is “bad” then gets saved by a sudden jump one day, but obviously would prefer it to be more spread out and reliable. Slower times of the year give me opportunities to look into ways of speeding up different parts of the sourcing/listing process, so I can’t complain too much about that.

Curiously, I jumped on eBay’s offsite promotions offer they were running to see if that aided sales. The rough numbers are 2:1, which is apparently the average ROAS for pay-by-click ads, LOL. Can I dump in $1k and make $2k? Hmm…

Also, the whole eBay Live thing is so crazy. Meanwhile, eBay’s other advertising efforts all seem to be focusing on finding “unique” items (the kind of stuff some of you are probably selling!) but if you load up the app you’d think it’s all Pokemon/Magic/etc. Maybe that’s just my algorithm but that’s a common thing I’ve seen across different sites where people talk about eBay.

I find economical factors affecting sales interesting. Largely I think it helps sales of my kind of inventory, but I do like to split the items I list between “wants” and “needs.” A buyer “wants” a DVD copy of their favorite movie for their collection, while another buyer “needs” a part for their vacuum, etc. That’s just my approach, though.

Since the beginning of February I’m averaging 25 sales for $600 each week combined on Depop, Poshmark, and Mercari using Nifty… even though less than half my items are cross listed. That number is trending up the more I cross list. I do all my new listings and I try to do 100 old ebay items each week.

For the year I’m averaging 51 sales a week, which means ebay is only accounting for 50% of my sales and that percent is trending down. I currently have 4100 ebay listings and less than half of those listings are cross listed.

Another rough project I took on at the beginning of April was switching to business policies and flat rate shipping on ebay. The goal was to sell more items based on reasonable shipping costs. I modeled my rates based on Depop’s rates, so $5.99, $7.99, $9.99, and $12.99 for anything other than huge items.

I was hoping that business policies would get my shoe sales weekly average up, but it didn’t. I was still only selling about 12 pair a week. So 5 weeks ago I started a concentrated effort to cross list shoes – at least 20 pair a day. Over the last 4 weeks my shoe sales have doubled to an average of 24 pair a week.

So I say all this to say that ebay…is not good. I have fixed my shipping. I have refreshed my entire store so no stale listings. I am listing more than I ever have before in the first half of the year -averaging 51 new listings a week so far. Something has changed, something is wrong.

I do all that and I’m selling just as much stuff off ebay. Even worse, stuff that has sat for years on ebay sells like hot cakes on the other platforms.

My sales are trending up in alignment with my increased efforts everywhere else. Why is ebay flat?

Anyways, I’ve laid all the groundwork in the first half of this year to make a real run at $100k gross sales (sale price only – not including shipping) this year. Hopefully ebay starts to pick up as well so I can get there. My second half sales are always much stronger than the first half.

One last note, I shipped 66 items last week and I am on track to ship 70+ this week for the first time ever. That is ALOT of shipping and ALOT of work for a part time gig.

I am finding that being part of a community helps my morale—-just like back in the day here as trash elves—-there are no local ebay groups (now called “circles”) for me, but I am part of the RVA circle which is based around Richmond VA, but has members all over the country (and international, too, if I’m not mistaken. Most of their meetings are online, with one at the leader’s home that is for the locals, but is also streamed live, so anyone can attend even that one.

I recommend it….

I feel like my lead photos and titles are pretty good.  AI suggested changing the brightness a little bit, changing the prince slightly, etc.  I’m going to focus on listing new items for a bit and then test that out.

I tried to look at my traffic report but it won’t let you go back more than 90 days.  I’d be curious to see what it looked like compared to last year.

I’m ending this mid-day Sunday so still a little room to run.  Ebay has been pretty dead.  I haven’t listed much now for  about a month.  I’m certainly hopeful that sales pick up again on Ebay once I get going on listing.

I did a lot of cleaning out and had a big garage sale netting about $500.  I had a whole rack of items I bought a little damaged, damaged in storage, or no longer want to sell (with a cord).  Boy did it feel good to get rid of that stuff.  I’ve been running donations all week in chunks to get the 25% off Goodwill coupons.  Just one or two more small loads to go.  The goal here is to get a car back into our two car garage.  I got a great deal on my Costco rolling storage racks so I hope to be able to keep both of them.  My son has a giant item in the garage that he is not ready to let go of yet unfortunately.  My husband will be quite happy if we get the car in this week.

I’m down to about 775 listings with some multiples.  I did create a clearance category and should probably go ahead and do mark downs and move some items over there.  I knocked a bunch of prices down on Mercari since the fees are lowest but none of those items sold unfortunately.  Mercari is pretty dead.

Poshmark had been dead while they were making some changes, but it has been better in the last week or so.   I didn’t realize that Nifty AI software was no longer relisting on Posh for a while.  Once I fixed that setting, sales picked up again.  Posh does not want items over 60 days old.  They also don’t want you selling on other platforms.  I pretty much just ignore their nonsense changes and I haven’t been suspended yet for ending “excessive” items early that sell elsewhere.  I’m super top rated on Poshmark – it’s easier to be there than on Ebay.  Even if you have some out of stock issues it goes away within 90 days.  And I ship very quickly for them.

So I’m at the tail end of my big clean out.  There is much to list.

In my neck of the woods, thrift prices have all gone up substantially while the stores are more picked over than ever.  When I do take a look I hardly buy anything.  I’m poised to make good progress on my death piles now and it’s all organized.

Overall I feel like a seasoned reseller but still need to work my backlog for a while before I start going to estate sales (and maybe garage sales).  I find myself taking lower offers to try to stimulate my account and say goodbye to old listings.  The rest of the year will largely be about trying to get rid of the piles.  I do let myself go to our local flea market, which is pretty much self limiting.

I’m still waiting to hear about the new retail location downtown, but word on the street is that the rent will be super steep.

Hope all is well and you had/are having a great holiday weekend.  R&J – I haven’t been shopping as much but will send a box your way soon.  Take care.

PS. If anyone is familiar with the gulf coast area, let me know.  We might be taking a trip down South in October.  The East Coast is crazy expensive.

I have created a sale category in eBay but haven’t done anything with it yet.

Definitely glad I ran my numbers.  Hard to believe Ebay sales were this much.  It was very very dead this past weekend.  Poshmark came up with new listing metrics and my sales have pretty much died on there.  They are making a bunch of changes, including making unpopular listings older than 60 days inactive.  Not getting a lot of offers from buyers either so I feel like maybe my listings aren’t being shown a lot?  I realized that for some reason my Nifty AI had not been refreshing my listings on Poshmark so I got the email from them last week about inactive listings.

I haven’t been listing a lot while I had some family and friend time plus the giant garage sale prep and unlisted sort.  Still a ton of work to do but it feels really good.  Probably sales won’t be great until I get through this big clean out.

Poshmark has really dropped off for me.  Interestingly, Posh has revamped their site and are now offering specific insight about activity for each listing.  I’m not changing anything for now but I did update my auto-offer % by 5% on Poshmark.

Ebay sales were pretty much on the weekend when I was running a sale and listing new items.  I seem to need to be doing both of those things to “wake up my store”.

I’m in clean out mode and doing garage sale prep.  Hope to purge a bunch of unworthy unlisted stuff.  It will feel good to get more organized and pare down a bit.  Still many things to list.  I haven’t been sourcing much, which I also feel good about.

I had another package go missing at USPS this week.  I do have a receipt this time but tracking shows no scan.  It’s frustrating but wasn’t valuable.

The service issues began on Sunday afternoon, April 26, 2026, starting around 3:30 p.m. ET. Over the rest of the day, the site became increasingly difficult to use as thousands of people reported problems. These glitches lasted all through Monday and didn’t fully clear up until late Tuesday night, April 28. During this three-day stretch, the main problems involved the search bar not working, pages loading very slowly, and buyers getting stuck at the checkout screen when they tried to pay.

As a buyer, I saw problems with my watchlist and with making offers.

Much of the trouble was caused by issues with the eBay API, which is the system that connects the site to external apps and tools. This meant that many sellers who use outside software to manage their listings or shipping were locked out, often seeing messages that looked like they were being blocked by the site.

By late Tuesday evening, most of the site was back to normal, though a few people saw minor bugs hanging around until Wednesday morning. To help sellers who were hurt by the downtime, the company is automatically removing any negative feedback or late shipping marks for orders that happened after 12:01 p.m. PT on Sunday. The marketplace has been stable since Wednesday, April 29, and things should be back to business as usual.

Luckily I was out of town for the technical outages.  I was on vacation mode with sales on for the first part of this week.  I did get a couple of sales on Ebay.  Lots going on, but hope things pick up if I start listing more.  I’m also getting some long messages asking for deeper discounts and mentioning shipping costs.  I swear margins are just getting hammered from all sides – shipping increases, shoppers being cost conscious and fees going up.  I refuse to raise my promoted fees.

I hope the big push is because American sellers are pushing back on promoted campaigns.  https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-suggested-ad-rates/

We have no seller circle here in my small city.  What are they saying about promoted listings?  I don’t see people citing their traffic pages, just an overall complaint that things are slow on ebay.  They must have figured out how to have Cassini distinguish actual new listings from recycled ones.  The software has been keeping my store fresh but I haven’t been changing those listings when they get redone.

So I still listen to Pure Hustle Podcast.  Orlando is a big fan of SL and wanted to try to get Jay and Ryanne on for the PHP 500th episode.  I hope he succeeds.  🙂

I definitely find that listing new stuff on ebay triggers sales better than most anything else I’ve tried. I’m trying to get on some sort of schedule, so I list “x” every day that isn’t an “away” day—away days are days we go sourcing, grocery shopping, etc, and are gone much of the day. In my younger days, I would have said “Well, list wehn you get home!” but I’m at a point when it’s much more likely to be “Take a nap when you get home” LOL

I’m on a CPAP for sleeping, and frankly, would much prefer medicine….what are you taking, if you don’t mind me asking?

I don’t know if anyone here uses Auctiva, but tonight they are hosting a free online webinar with ebay about collectibles. I’m sure it will also be a pitch for Auctiva, and ebay’s definition of collectibles tends to be “trading cards and comics”, but I’m going to give it a try (the webinar, not necessarily Auctiva) Details and sign up here: https://www.auctiva.com/webinar.aspx

And it looks like they are having another one in June all about ebay Lives….

Also, I’ve been attending an ebay “Circle” (they used to call them “Meet Ups”—this one is based in Northern Virginia, but they are virtual as well, so you can be from anywhere to attend the virtual.) I’m finding this to be great fun: informative, great people, and very casual….drop in for a few minutes or stay for a few hours. You can either treat it like a Zoom call, and have your camera and/or mic on, or—like me for now—just type in the chat area. Very welcoming to new folks. Next session is tomorrow 5 to 9PM (ET). You can sign up here: https://sellerevents.ebay.com/events/details/ebay-rva-seller-circle-presents-rva-seller-circle-co-working-session-33/

Any Trash Elves here who might be interested, come check it out…And that includes our original Trash Elves, if you two are still reading this!

Mercari
$58.65
Poshmark
$83.00
eBay
$524.63
Total $666.28

I took a few days off after the pop up markets and then started listing toward the end of the week.  Sales were quite flat until (1) I started listing again; and (2) I started my weekly sale (usually W or Th-Sun pm).  That seems to be the formula to kick start my Ebay store into any sales whatsoever.  Promoted clicks and sales are still down since whatever changes they made in January to Cassini.

Since October I have sold about $5k on Poshmark, well above the price I paid for the Nifty software.  Probably had a few extra Mercari sales as well.  I tried a few things on the AI listing tool and again it failed to recognize items appropriately, both a brand new Target item I am flipping as well as vintage sheets.  It seems like it’s better for now to start the listing in Ebay with sell similar and use Terapeak to price, then cross posting is very quick in Nifty.  Nifty is adding Whatnot, which I don’t sell on.  I wish they would have added Etsy instead.  I suppose Whatnot could be another Mercari-like place to unload low dollar stuff but I don’t know anything about static listings or how well they move there.

I have also returned to starting to organize my unlisted inventory and will be getting ready for our garage sale in Mid-May.  Hope to get rid of a ton of stuff.  Will also try to be listing at least a few items each day.  Overall I’ve gone from about 1100 items online to more like 800.  Time to get stuff posted!  It’s generally a quiet time without travel for us.

I’ve started a medicine that helps me sleep better and I realize now that I just spent the last 11 months in a coma practically.  Should be able to dedicate much more time to the business now.

Finally, since we are just a small group of friends in here, I’m celebrating that I’ve paid off my business visa and now all sold is profit.  I miss sourcing but it’s time to get the inventory locked in tight.  I look forward to bringing in better quality stuff when I need to source again.

Wildcard is the pending application to the new vintage store in my downtown.  I’d love to just dip my toe in with a small space, or even a case / bookshelf.  There isn’t a lot of info yet on what is going on with them.

– Be careful listing to Poshmark if you have items that weigh more than 5 pounds!
Poshmark’s shipping system in not like eBay’s, and does not offer UPS or FedEx. Even if you buy the ‘max weight USPS label’ they offer (which is 15 pounds), there is no official way of shipping of any item that weighs more than that as Poshmark does not let you use your own shipping service. I suppose you could ship however you want & message a tracking number to the buyer, but Poshmark offers no way to make that the actual shipping tracking number for your package.

– Depop does not currently seem to allow any electronics on their platform (except cameras), and will send warning messages about possible account suspension if you try to list electronics. “Copying” listings over from eBay to the other platforms can be pretty fast via Nifty, which is how I discovered Depop doesn’t like electronics (after I had tried a few in quick succession).

Now for the good (hopefully there will be a couple of images embedded below as I cover some points).

Part of this Nifty experiment forced me to finally create accounts for Etsy & Depop, so I could see what they were all about. I have only listed a portion of my eBay store on each target store, here’s quick breakdown of my current inventory count for each store:

eBay – 1271 (My main focus. It feeds the other stores).
Etsy – 402 (they only allow appear to allow manufactured items that are over 20 years old. Still have more to list there).
Poshmark – 308 (their shipping policies aren’t compatible with some of my inventory, and clothes seem to be a big thing over there)
Mercari – 273 (I have not yet had a sale there yet).
Depop – 8 (I just don’t sell many clothes. No sales there yet either.)

Nifty dashboard screenshot:

The time span is exactly one month from when I started, to now (today).  I am paying for (the maximum?) plan- Bundle Plus- at $69.99 a month.

It’s fair to say that I had $768 of sales on new platforms directly because of this Nifty test. For eBay, some of the $2.4k number includes a few hundred dollars of sales that happened because Nifty automated some (10%) offers.

It’s worth mentioning that:

– Nifty handles offers on the platforms that offer it. I never really dealt with automated offers before, so sales were definitely made because of that (even though I made 10% less on those since they were offers).

– Nifty does all manner of following, sharing, etc. on Poshmark (and maybe other platforms). I really don’t have any desire to understand Nifty’s automated ‘self-shares’, ‘community shares’, etc. It’s not something I’d ever want to do myself, but if it’s helping, great.

– Crosslisting requires manual intervention for every listing, but I don’t really mind having to pull the trigger for each listing to go live. You can move through doing a crosslist of a single listing to a target platform in a matter of seconds once you get the hang of it.

– Nifty’s “sell somewhere & it gets de-listed everywhere else” capability has been mostly good. In the past week I have noticed some glitches (it didn’t catch eBay sales a few times). That’s not great, but it does make it easy to manually sync sales from other platforms, and always corrected itself after I did that manually.

I’m going to continue on with Nifty for now. For what it does (enabling cross-listing, offers, de-listing, decent reporting & overviews, etc.), it seems to be worth paying for.  I am someone who is not a fan of subscriptions or otherwise ‘renting’ software in general, for what it’s worth.

So I had a huge market at the farm and sold a ton of stuff at $2300 gross.  It feels so good to have a big day like that. Now I’m taking a pop up market break and turning my attention to the yard sale prep and death pile sorting again.  There is a lot a lot but I haven’t been shopping much and I feel good about that.  I may take my leftover yard sale stuff to our local flea if I think it might be worth it.

The new vintage collab store on our main street is finally approaching opening this summer.   I’ve updated my application.  They are charging 18% – fine with that – but I still don’t know what they will charge for rent.  I’d like to get in on the ground floor but maybe with a small but visible space.  I’m a bit nervous about finding out the rent.  Fingers crossed.   It would be weird to have a booth and feel pressure to source for it.  What a change that would be.

Meanwhile I haven’t listed online for a week and sales are nonexistent.

Total listings: 702
New listings this week: 0 (yikes!)
Items sold: 3
Gross sales: $133.25
Cost of items: $33.00
Ebay fees: $29.46
Gross Profit: $70.79
Average sales price: $23.59

My best sale for this week was a desk top model airplane. I got this one and about 10 others at an estate sale and have done really well with them as a group.  https://www.ebay.com/itm/198203478532

Happy to say that I have reached a milestone this morning.  I got out in front of my skis and bought too much inventory, some on a business credit card.  It took a while but I have paid that off and now it’s all profit. I’ve been shopping a lot less and listing more, though I did take a break the last two weeks to do two pop up live markets and sales are down.  Each morning I try to grab a few items from the wire shelves and list them by mid-morning.  Our neighborhood garage sale is coming up mid-May and I will be doing a lot of prep work for that but also trying to list more as well.  I will be sorting all of the unlisted stuff between the next pop ups, garage sale and online. We will be purging some household goods as well.

I did a pop up market last weekend at a farm vintage market and it was insanely good.  I had a strategy of bringing a lot of smalls and art and sales were brisk.  All of that added up to a great haul and I came home with a few totally empty bins.  The smaller pop up I did before that downtown was not good.  I’ve figured out that it’s only worth it if it’s a vintage event that people are coming to to buy and not just rando people on foot.

Over on Ebay I had a false INAD.  I had a lot of trouble with 3 phone reps but did an appeal by email and overnight they said they are granting my appeal.  It was an awkward response from overseas so hopefully they will actually pay me the fees and shipping I asked for.  At least I have it in writing.

This summer the new antique/makers/vintage market downtown is due to open.  I’m trying to find out what the rent will be.  I’d like to get in with a case or small space and then maybe grow.  Our oldest and most affordable malls is going out of business at the end of the year due to retirement so it will be competitive getting in.

I hope everyone still reading has a great week.

Wasn’t listing and had the stores on vacation most of last week. I also turned off my automated Poshmark offers.  I did run a sale over the weekend with mid results.

I had a false INAD (and attempt to extort a partial refund).  Buyer is also a small time seller on Ebay.  It was a very clear cut issue of buyer’s remorse on color.  Three phone calls to Ebay later and I found out that they have an early refund program for certain customers (she is not a big player but got one).  I will only get a refund for one of the $25 shipping labels for being TRS.  I reported her and nothing will happen to her.  I will get a ding for escalating the case after the second phone call because Ebay’s system had me saying it was returned broken, which I did NOT click online.  A mess, basically. I will appeal any defect but it’s very frustrating.  Hopefully since she got the early refund and knows she worked the system then she will not leave feedback.  And what goes around comes around you know I suppose.

Pop up market sales seem to be soft.  Apparently the actor Elijah Wood was at my last one but sadly did not come down my row.  Next one is a fun affair on a farm but the weather is iffy.  Definitely more profitable to sell online but not as fun and interesting.

Much, much work to do.  After the market I will be preparing to liquidate a lot of unlisted and household stuff a at a mid-May yard sale.

Total listings: 693
New listings this week: 5
Items sold: 5
Gross sales: $289.00
Cost of items: $65.00
Ebay fees: $61.13
Gross Profit: $162.87
Average sales price: $57.80

Got this SMEG coffee maker at a garage sale for $10.00 and sold for $125.00.  I was hoping to sell it locally on FB but was only receiving lowball offers. Ironically, I had just sent a $100 offer to someone before they could buy it sold at full price.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/198192608313

I was on vacation half of last week and I’m getting ready for two markets back to back.  Not much listing. Had a fun stop at a new Goodwill bins in Central California.  Traffic on Ebay seems to be down this week.

On eBay and Etsy, I have the full ability to create new listings, edit or end existing listings, and schedule listings. I can print a pick list or have it available from my phone when it’s time to ship out. All photos are stored and attached to each listing. I’ve also built in the ability to do an inventory reconciliation. I even have some of the views data flowing in from eBay and Etsy (via google analytics for the latter), so I can see trends and such.

I’ve incorporated some AI tools so Gemini can give me an audit of my listings/main photo and find instances where I messed up. In the first test, it noticed where I had put the wrong model number on something (probably a sell-similar item where I didn’t notice). It compared the picture to what I had in the title and spotted the mismatch.

A feature I’m really excited about is that I’m using the database to power my own webstore. This obviously syncs to eBay/Etsy as well, so no risk of overselling. I had tried Shopify a couple years ago and it was both expensive and didn’t really lead to many sales, at least for my products. This way I have my own store built in (hosted on a cheap VPS service). Then I have it set up to create files to feed to google shopping, which in turn can feed into google ads. I’m currently experimenting with google ads to see if I get results. I had used Truegether’s Google ads previously and did have a small but decent sales boost, so I’m hoping a google ads budget I can actually control will have better luck.

I’ve been using this daily on my own business for months now, but I’m thinking I could maybe offer this tool to others once it is ready. It would be affordable, but not free. This type of tool is not cheap to maintain, with various API infrastructures, so it would have to be worth my time. Would anyone else here find something like this useful?

Here’s a link to the store my software is powering: Browse | Obsolete Treasures

Total listings: 696
New listings this week: 2
Items sold: 1
Gross sales: $55.00
Cost of items: $2.00
Ebay fees: $13.84
Gross Profit: $39.16
Average sales price: n/a

My only sale for this week was a Houston TX Livestock and Rodeo show jacket. https://www.ebay.com/itm/197606720893

Even with that, I recently had an item get completely lost deep in the system. My buyer reached out to me first, and since I had an identical replacement in stock, I shipped it out promptly. The buyer was so happy they left great feedback!

I filed the USPS insurance claim online right away, and it was approved in just 2 or 3 days. Now I’m just awaiting the check. It’s a great reminder that even when the system fails, a quick recovery can still result in a win.

According to the notice, this is an 8 percent across-the-board ‘temporary’ surcharge on their core package services. This includes Priority Mail, Priority Mail Express, USPS Ground Advantage, and Parcel Select. The increase is intended to remain in place until January 17, 2027, to help the agency manage rising ‘transportation and fuel costs.’

For those of us on eBay, this means shipping costs will likely rise by 8 percent next month. If you use ‘calculated shipping,’ the platform usually updates the rates automatically once they go live. However, if you use ‘flat rate shipping’ or have older listings with fixed costs, you may want to review your pricing soon so you are not hit by the margin decrease.

You can find the full details and the official announcement on the USPS Newsroom website. It is currently awaiting ‘final approval’ from the PRC, but these filings typically go through as requested.

Traffic report.  Well, Ebay seems to need for a sale to run and posting new listings.  Luckily my sales picked up after I did both of these things.  I had several days without a sale.  I went back to just promoting at 2.6% for everything.  I was seeing too few views and decided to take that small hit.  I’m still only promoted hits in the low 10s to teens %.  It seems like I am getting more clicks than I would expect from outside sources.  I think flat rate shipping really probably helped with that.  Still contemplating switching my 1-2 pound packages to flat rate but I need to look at my recent costs first.  A lot of the items I have are in that weight range.  A lot of sellers are talking about slow sales but not many are reporting on their traffic analytics.

There are some health issues in my family and it’s both taking time but also making me less compelled to shop and more focused on getting down my death pile.  I had two Garfield items sell right away.  I bought them in 2015!  Perfect sale for online and the thrift prices were so cheap back then.  I guess the upside of death piles is that you bought things at better prices and I can see cash flow coming without spending a lot for a while.

Ouch!  All of my 800 listings had 27 views total yesterday, ebay sent a whopping total of 10 of those from search.  Zero sales for 3 days.  ugh.

Ebay did finally pick up after I started running my weekly perma-sale.  I was super busy taking care of some non-Ebay business last week and views and sales were poor until weekend. Yesterday and today I am listing more.

Auto-relist on Ebay is starting to phase out my general promotion campaign.  About 75% of my listings are not promoted, the rest are at 2.6%.  So far it hasn’t made much of a difference on my promoted clicks percentage.  On Saturday I had over 40% external source clicks (Google and Pinterest).  I’m contemplating about starting to use flat rate shipping for 2 pound packages.  I think it has been helpful to use the flat rate on under a pound (I’ve set at 6.99).

There is some question being raised on Facebook about Nifty changing your entered Ebay package dimensions.  I need to investigate that as I have received a couple of messages lately about the high calculated price of shipping on Ebay @ 2 pounds and I noticed it has 12 12 12 in some places.  Nifty does have shipping default settings but it’s not really like business policies.

I haven’t been sourcing much but made it to one of our three big rummage sales.  I bought some framed vintage crate labels and some small pottery.  It was fun to look but not as big or good as it used to be.  Since I have not been to one in a while, it was like giving a cracker to a starving man.

We have some family time this week but I should be able to list and need to wrap up my 2025 COGS bookkeeping.  The garage sale is May and I have two pop up markets in April.  I had to stop in the middle of sorting my unlisted inventory and it waits for me in the garage to get back to it.  Have a great week!

Nifty | Pricing

They integrate with eBay, Poshmark, Mercari, Depop & Etsy.  My store is mostly vintage tech & computing items, so I’m starting on Poshmark & Mercari and may get to Etsy eventually (but probably not Depop as they seem to really focus on clothes).

I’ve only just started with cross-listing (no sales, but I’ve moved less than 50 items so far).   The cross-listing process is reasonably straightforward but definitely not ‘automatic’.  From what I’ve seen so far, you need to click through each listing individually when pushing it to a new site, and mind/modify the shipping options in particular (for Poshmark/Mercari in my case) since they both have their own ideas & rules about shipping costs.  From what I’ve seen, the shipping options that nifty exposes in their ‘copy listing to x site’ form are pretty limited (vs. eBay’s multitude of shipping options).

I’ve only just started & hope/expect there are things I will discover that could be set up (like shipping policies) in nifty’s configuration to help move through the cross-listing process quickly.  I don’t mind suffering a bit through this process if it improves sales.

I’ll probably extend my ‘free week’s trial’ to a couple months, since I’d like to list at least 1,000 items on at least 2 additional sites and it’s going to take time to approve/move through the listings… and then time to wait & see if anything good happens!

Total listings: 690
New listings this week: 16
Items sold: 6
Gross sales: $141.35
Cost of items: $5.00
Ebay fees: $32.26
Gross Profit: $104.09
Average sales price: $23.55

I had a tie for my highest seller this week. Two items, each for $35.00

First is this Vice Presidents Christmas Ornament. Listed at $45 and took an offer $35.00. At an estate sale I came across about 12 of these govt related ornaments, all still in the box. I paid $1 each and have sold 8 so far for a total of $250.00 before fees. https://www.ebay.com/itm/197659223860

Second is this 1985 Texas Prison Rodeo Program. This came in a box of about 30 items total.  I paid $20 for all of it. Sold this one right away for $35.00.  Always nice to get that money back quickly.  https://www.ebay.com/itm/198161356197

here’s my email  jsmithbull@yahoo.com

Cost of Goods Sold
$113.44
–

Operating Expenses
$4.76
=

Net Profit
$510.00
Revenue
Mercari
$46.40
Poshmark
$289.00
eBay
$292.80
Total $628.20

Ran a sale this weekend and updated every country of origin I was able to update (about 60 missing).  Sales were horrible on Ebay.  I’m going ahead with the phase out of promoted general.  My traffic is down overall and I’m also getting feedback from potential buyers that shipping is high over a pound.  I have flat rate on for under a pound but I don’t want to risk losing West Coast buyers with a high 2 pound flat rate.  Ugh.

Hope you are all having good sales.

The automation only is $22 a month. That will auto relist your items and auto send offers. $22 is worth it to keep your 10k item store fresh. Implementing a price reduction when relisting is optional. I have implemented a 5% reduction and only end/sell similar after 180 days. Once my whole store is within 6 months I’ll reduce my end/sell similar daily cap from 100 to 50, just to spead everything  out a bit more. I have no desire to relist every month, and with a 10k item store I think ebay would penalize you for that much turnover without sales. Having a fresh 6 month store is, in my opinion, the sweet spot. I was working to get to a 1 year rotation manually but it was alot of work.

Since I let Nifty take over I only have about 700 listings that are older than 6 months. All of those will filter into the relist cycle over the next 60 days.

There’s nothing wrong with having long tail items, but it is definitely a different era now. It will only get worse the more AI is integrated. List it and forget it is no more. You have to have some kind of refresh activity or you’ll be buried.

I would even recommend you run 10-20 old listings through an AI tool each week just to get some fresh keywords and refresh the title and item description and item specifics.

You can train ChatGPT and create a custom GPT where you can feed in a few listing URL’s each day and it will spit out revisions in whatever format you want that you can cut/paste into the listing. Refining the custom GPT to just spit out the actionable items and leave out the fluff is very helpful. I made a tool a while back to use when sourcing where I set all the paramters to the point I can upload a photo of an item while scavenging and the tool will just say “yes” or “No” if I should buy it. Then I say if I bought it or not. Then when I’m done shopping it will spit out a formatted file with all the listing info for the items I buy. It’s a great tool for shopping commodity stuff like clothing, shoes, toys, and games.

As a matter of fact, this  listing refresher tool was a good idea so I started doing this for myself.