– 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.

Promoted listings clicks are still down in the teens.  I don’t want to pay extra for lousy placement so I will probably phase out promoting via nifty as an experiment and see what happens.

I had a customer let me know their package was missing (never got a scan).  When I looked at my metrics I had another one the previous month that never got a scan.  Unfortunately, they went missing from the bin on separate days.  It then occurred to me that now that they don’t do a scan until it leaves regional, it would be harder for the PO to figure out who was taking packages.  There could be some reasonable explanation for it but I just wanted to share.  Luckily neither were valuable items.  For the most part I have been waiting in line for a scan due to Christmas and weather delays.  I guess I will have to go back to doing that regularly.

I’ve also had two customers basically not believe me that I dropped it off.

Definitely not a good week on Ebay for me.   Poshmark picked up a little bit this weekend.  There is a lot of Facebook chatter about Ebay glitches and (once again) the at least temporary disappearance of items delisted for end and sell similar.  I have to check out mine this morning since its automated.

I’m in the middle of my COGS bookkeeping – trying desperately to be done before I am scheduled to meet with the CPA tomorrow.  It takes SO long.  I am feeling pretty motivated to start regularly putting it into the software at listing.  I hate to take the time when I finally sit and list to do it but it’s much faster at that point and I won’t be having to sit for a couple of days and do it in the spring.

Unfortunately won’t get back to listing until at least tomorrow or Wednesday.  The yard sale will be early May and I should have my unlisted all sorted by then.  A realtor has scheduled the annual community sale in my neighborhood and dealers don’t linger but it should create a bigger turn out to participate (and keep me from shopping it :)).   There is so much stuff still but I definitely should make pretty good progress in 2026 on the remaining piles.  I have not been sourcing a lot at thrift stores but once in a while I need to get out. Really have not found much when I do go and I’m out of there much faster.  I remember seeing the pros coast in and out when I first started and I’ve reached that level.  You get to the point where you just realize there is SO MUCH STUFF out there.  Better to be super choosy.  There are also higher thrift prices and more competition.

Sales are dreadful this week for me on all accounts. I haven’t been listing much but still.

My sales over all have been pretty good this past month but I do think that was due to find and listing some good stuff. During Feb so far I’ve had 13 sales. I’ve only had one item sell that had been listed longer than a year. two other items had been listed for almost a year and the rest were within 30days.

For promoted listings I’m now using 3.1 as my rate. Saw another reseller talk about it in a video and giving it a shot.

Total listings: 671
New listings this week: 12
Items sold: 3
Gross sales: $210.75
Cost of items: $12.00
Ebay fees: $40.23
Gross Profit: $158.52
Average sales price: $70.25

My highest priced sale was this vintage college duffle bag. It reminds me of an old bowling bag. Seems the company that made it made them for numerous schools, assume it was not licensed.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/198071772594

I’ve been impressed with Poshmark. The fee is hefty but I started crossposting by category in October and have sold 166 items on there so far.  OLD things have sold, cross stitch kits, decor, kitchenware, all kinds of things.  The shipping rate they have going at USPS for under 5 pounds is really great.  I hope it lasts a while.  My average sale price on Posh is lower than Ebay, as is the profit but I’m looking to move things, so that’s ok.

Regarding the dragging down of your store by old listings theory, it can only help your Ebay store to get rid of that old stuff on another platform.  They do keep records of the original list date per Ebay staff.

and my Scavenge of the week. Mine was several desktop model airplanes I picked up from an estate sale. I rarely find them at a large 1/48 scale but got two for $15 each and have already sold both at $125 and $75.  Now I’m hoping they arrive without the propellers broken off   😛

https://www.ebay.com/itm/198130783218

eBay seems to prefer gentle pruning rather than plowing everything down.

I sell old stale items regularly after relisting. They do even better on posh and Depop. Mercari is doing better but it has been slow since they only allow 100 more listings for every sale I make. In 2 months I only have 6 sales on Mercari. I have to be selective as to what I cross post there for now. I’ve sold over 100 items between posh and Depop so far even though I’ve been slow to cross list.

no I haven’t used the listing tool yet as I don’t have business policies. That is a requirement to use the AI tool. I’m at a point I could use them, but I don’t have the time to deal with that conversion headache at the moment.

I have used it to create some draft listings to sell some baseball bats. Worked great. I copied the titles and descriptions into eBay as drafts. Sold several of those bats already.

I do pay my oldest kid to list my clothing backlog  and she does a good job. Kids her age HATE AI. She don’t want anything to do with it. She does occasionally use google to reverse image search at least.

I am a bit surprised that after the recent change in attribution rules, I’m getting less promoted clicks while promoting at the same rate.  This is espeically true considering how many sellers said they quit promoting.  It suggests they tweaked the algorithm.  I can’t imagine that it’s because a good number of my competitors upped their rates after that policy change.

I also kind of feel like we are in a transition period with a number of long time sellers reporting that sales are off.  Ebay wouldn’t want to have lower sales overall so perhaps it’s just a ball pit and the ones willing to pay ball are going to get shown.  Ebay wants to show investors revenue growth on our backs so they would be willing to play hardball with the objectors.  Of course if you have amazing sell through items at competitive prices or make great discount offers, that would likely get you sold too.  Personally, my items are a mix.  I still have a lot of old piles I am working through and I’m down to one RA supplier but those items have good velocity.

@retro are you listing with Nifty AI yet?

My slow process of ending promoted listings over the last year has resulted in zero drop in sales. I’m still growing year over year. I’m meeting my goal of 40 sales a week on ebay with the added benefit of an extra 15+ sales a week on depop/posh/mercari. I’ve broke my all time weekly record of sales twice this year already. I’m only up to about 1500 cross listed items as it is a manual process, but so far the sales I’m getting from cross listing are well beyond my expectations. I’m gunning for $100k in sales (sale price only – not including shipping) this year.

Listing quality items with good STR trumps promoted listings all day long. As I’ve been saying for a while now you have to phase them out slowly so ebay don’t crush your store. I did that experiment a few years ago and the sales ban hammer was REAL.

Nifty will slowly remove the PL  for you and even apply a price reduction for you for your stale items. I recommend you give it a try. It’s worth it for that feature alone. If you just want ebay automation (auto end/sell similar, auto offers, price reductions, etc) that is only $22 a month.

Wow it felt so much slower than this, especially on ebay.  I’m having days with no sales for sure on there. Mercari is really slow and they had 2 promos running last weekend.  Poshmark has slowed for sure as well, with more lowballers and offer decliners.

So I’m looking at the traffic for the past 7 days and seeing a worsening trend of promoted vs organic clicks on my listings in the teens but sales at 100% promoted now on most days.  Promoted impressions are still at 40-50%.  So this seems to be saying that my cheapo promo rate is only getting me to a crazy low placement in search results that is not resulting in many clicks, while of course I’m paying for any non-buyer to click on my listing at any time.  I would be inclined to stop promoting except for the fear that Ebay would punish me.  I don’t really want to lose those 10-20% of “extra clicks”, or worse if Ebay has some sort of Cassini ding.  At my store review I explained my approach to the employee and he said it was wise, in a way that made me think the ding might be a real thing.  Any thoughts?

Meanwhile, I’ve been horrible about listing for several weeks due to outside stuff going on.  I’m sure that is not helping matters.  My store is down to about 700 + listings now.  I also haven’t gotten back to my big garage sort for a while and I’m on call for jury duty.  Need to work on my COGS for 2025.  Much to do!

Hang in there to anyone with crazy weather!

Here is a demo of the AI lister I use.  It’s not quite this quick and accurate for me, and I still need to get back to listing and customize my preferences.  But, as you can see, it’s pretty awesome.

I looked at my shipping policy and there were a lot of disallowed places.  I thought I had on International Shipping to most places but it seems like just North America was not clicked.  Did anyone notice a change? It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at it.

Ebay was really down this week for me.  Pretty grateful for Poshmark.  Others are definitely talking about that on social media as well.  Some had stopped promoting due to the attribution change and were wondering if that was the issue.  I kept promoting everything at 2.6%.

Looking at my traffic report, I am noticing a little bit of changes since the 1/13/2026 policy change.  I am getting about the same % of organic vs promoted impressions as before the change.  Listing views percent from promoted have gone down though from the 20s to teens %.  Promoted sales promotion has gone way up though, from the 50s to the 70s or even 80s.  I guess this means I’m getting on the results about the same number of times, but fewer buyers are clicking on my listing in those results (lower rank placement?), and then someone has clicked on most of them at some point so most of the sales are now counted as promoted.  Not really loving those results but what are you going to do?  I’m not willing to raise my percentage and I sort of knew the fees are coming.  This is very consistent with what the European sellers said happened.

I started on my taxes this week, and was disappointed that I made about the same money as last year.  I sold significantly more items but had to be more flexible on price.  I still have to do my cost of goods.  I really need to make myself be disciplined and put my COGS into the software this year so I don’t have to take two days out of my life to work it in February or March.  It will easy to go back and add it for recent listings if I can stomach it after the coming hours of inputting last year’s into the sales spreadsheets.

Overall, I’m making some get-your-stuff-together changes in my little life and business.  I was making good progress on the unlisted piles, but took a break for a market and then had a lazy week last week.  I really haven’t been listing a lot so I guess I deserve the slower sales.  We have a number of things coming up on the horizon this Spring so I hope to finish that sort as well before my next two markets in April.

Happy selling.  Justin resells has a video about listing.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s2pTh55o5M&t=315s  Great advice if you can take it.

I don’t have another good forum but would love to hear if someone does.  I listen to a couple of podcasts to try to keep up on the news – the selling on Ebay podcast, pure hustle podcast.  There are some others but there is too much banter or off topic stuff for my taste.  I sure miss Scavenger Life.  I also follow a few selling groups on Facebook that are not attached to influencers but there is not a lot of great information on those.

I figured I’d post this here as it looks like this forum is essentially moribund.

Thanks Christine for being so consistent posting here. I stopped doing ebay maybe five years ago and I’m just about to get back into it, hopefully in a decently serious way. It’s seems generally the same, but what should I know about what has changed? What are some other good (or hopefully great) forums and sources of information people are going to these days?

– Cheers to everyone keeping this place alive. 😉

Shipping is going to be annoying today as these are a bunch of hard goods sales, some lower dollar.  But I’m grateful for them since (1) I basically didn’t list at all this week due to a pop up market; and (2) this time of year is usually DREADFUL for me.  I’m 100% convinced that using this cross posting software and having it end an sell similar is helping all of my items get seen more often and in some cases sold.  My Ebay items are possibly also being helped by the liquidation of some old stale stuff on the other two platforms.

The market I tried was students at the local UC, and it was pretty good with many small sales.  I still have a ton to get rid of.  I’ve filled up my Costco racks and now it’s time to do a futher sort and find a weekend to do a garage sale on some things.  We also need to go through our family clothing before I have it.  On the other rack, I need to sort what I want to focus on listing and put the rest back in bins by type of item.  My original plan is to list linens this time of year and I ought to get back to that and get just the handful of Easter items I have up.  I have until April until I do another pop up market, then I have two in a row.  So I will be able to focus on lisitng.

Regarding AI listing, it seems to be actively in progress on the software.  They have been tweaking some of the things I didn’t like about the description it was producing.  I will be giving that a try again this week.   I’m following posts on a seller group on Facebook to see what’s going on with that.

Last week I read an article that your general promotional Ebay campaign does not get you seen if they sort by lowest price.  That kind of sucks to know.  I’m staying the course at 2.6% for now.

Mercari is starting a temporary campaign soon for $4.99 shipping on new and updated listings.

<h4>$4.99 UPS/FedEx Promotional Rate</h4>

During the Promotional Period, Qualifying Listings that use a Mercari UPS or FedEx prepaid shipping label (<b>Mercari Best Rates: UPS Ground Saver or FedEx Economy</b>) in the 1–5 lb weight classes for shipments 1 cu ft / 22″ longest side or smaller may receive a $4.99 promotional shipping rate per label. This promotional rate applies only to the specified 1–5 lb weight classes and only where these Mercari Best Rates labels are available as a shipping option on Mercari. <b>Promo pricing does not apply to UPS Ground or FedEx Home Delivery labels.</b> Where available, the $4.99 rate may apply to both buyer-paid and seller-paid shipping, subject to Mercari’s standard shipping options and configuration at the time of listing and shipment.”

Very unfortunately Mercari does not allow for bulk editing of shipping methods, and their shipping relationships with the 3 carriers has changed from time to time.  It’s probably not worth it to go through all of my listings but thought I would mention it.  A fair number of my listings do have Smartpost.

The big death pile sort is making me realize how much stuff I have here.  I continue to cut deals to move stuff that is already listed and my Ebay store is down to about 850 items now.  Out with the old!

eBay is required to share the name and full physical address of high-volume sellers—those exceeding $20,000 in annual revenue—directly with buyers. By default, eBay uses your primary registered address for these disclosures, which is the same address they have verified against your banking information for payouts and tax reporting.

If you have not opted out or requested a formal exception, your home residence could be sent to every customer in their order confirmation emails and displayed online in their order details. Because your home address is tied to your payout verification, simply having a separate business shipping address is not enough to protect your privacy.

To see the “worst-case” address that eBay currently has on file to send to buyers, go to ‘Account Settings’, click ‘Personal Information’, and look for the ‘Owner name, address’ details in the ‘Personal Info’ section.

SOLUTION: Double-lock your residential privacy with these two steps.

First, set a separate business address for product returns. Under the law, if you provide a specific physical address for returns, eBay is permitted to display that address instead of your registered home address. You can update this by going to ‘Account Settings’ and selecting ‘Addresses’ to ensure your return address is a business location or PO Box.

Second, you must proactively request a formal exception to hide your residential street address entirely. To do this, login to your eBay account and visit the eBay INFORM Consumers Act resource page and scroll well down the page to find and click the link to ‘request an exception’. By certifying that you operate from a primary residence, you trigger a provision that allows eBay to only disclose your state and country to the buyer, rather than your full street address.

Compliance is an ongoing responsibility. Federal law requires you to electronically re-certify that your information is still accurate at least once every 12 months. eBay will send a notification for this review, and you must respond within 10 days to avoid account holds or suspension of your selling activity.

More info here:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/Announcing-the-eBay-for-Sellers-Webinar/ba-p/35460427

I wanted to bring this topic back up because I recently noticed the full name and physical address of the seller displayed right in the order details and the order confirmation email for a few purchases I made. Back when the INFORM Act was first announced a couple of years ago, there was some discussion about our contact info being shared, but seeing it appear clearly in these recent transactions caught my attention.

Interestingly, this was not the case for every order I placed, which made me think this might be a new or updated rollout. As a reminder, eBay officially began exposing this info on June 27, 2023, to comply with the federal INFORM Consumers Act. The law requires marketplaces to provide this data for high-volume sellers—those reaching twenty thousand dollars in annual revenue—to increase transparency. While eBay used to keep our contact details private, it is now standard for this information to be included in order details and confirmation emails once you hit that threshold.

When I went to check my own account, I was frustrated by how difficult it is to find these specific settings. I know for a fact that I had previously opted out of this disclosure and requested the residential exception to keep my home address private. It feels like the settings are buried so deep in the sub-menus that it is almost impossible for a regular seller to verify if they are still protected.

We should all double-check our status on these residential address exceptions.

Great find on those Costco racks. Professional pickers know that the best deals don’t just land in your lap; you have to put in the time and sort through a lot of junk to find the real winners.

Poshmark really fell off last week.  While I had the automatic 10% on Posh going I didn’t get many sales.  I switched back for now in case some really stale stuff comes up that I want to do lower.

On Ebay it was uneven, with some really slow days.  I was running a sale all week because of the weather and sending offers.  I started a coupon toward the end of the week and that seemed to help.  I also sold a few larger items on Facebook marketplace and my mom’s vintage handbags and fur collar. Not items I want to deal with selling online.

Interestingly on the traffic page, after the new attribution rules kicked in it looks like I’m still getting a lot of organic hits.  Maybe around 10% more are considered promoted. However, 80% of this week’s sales were promoted, where it used to be more like 50 something. So that’s pretty much in line with what Europe said would happen with the new anyone clicks rules.  I’m going to stay the course with my 2.6% on everything. I’m curious about what all of the other sellers did.  At least on social media, a lot of people said they quit promoting.  I’m sure a  lot of others lowered their percentages.

Always nice to get sales on Mercari with their low 10% rate.  I still really like Mercari and hope they can turn things around.

I posted a few items yesterday using Nifty AI.  It struggled to identify a Pyrex pattern and another vintage item.  I will try it with more easily recognizable stuff. Someone on a Facebook group mentioned it gets better as you do more on it.  I hope that is true.  For most of the vintage items it was a little bit slower than starting on Ebay with sell similar.

I’m in the middle of a giant sort in my garage. Those Costco racks I mentioned are amazing and hold a ton.  I definitely have some unworthy stuff hanging around and may have a little garage sale.   It feels super good to be dealing with all of the piles.  I’m organizing what I will bring to the big Farm market in April.  I don’t feel like I’ll be ready but I’m doing a market at the University where everything is under $30.  I hope to unload some medium sized art and lower dollar stuff. It’s supposed to be well attended and there are mostly clothing sellers so fingers crossed.   Should be kind of fun I hope but I wish I had more time to prepare.  For both of these events I will just have my small SUV this time so I’m trying to get really prepared.

Have a great week to anyone who is still reading.

The results were pretty good so far!  I’m not sure yet if it’s any faster but it is not notably longer than sell similar and I could skip the Google lens step to ID.  I do need to go into Terapeak to get comps still on my desktop – I wish Ebay would put a link in the listing page to research and let you set your preferences or – better yet fix their suggested pricing.  I need to go into the listing and check it afterward on all three platforms, which is easy to do on the Nifty inventory page because there are links to each of the listings.

Overall, a lot of things were filled out correctly and Ebay auto-populated some missing item specifics correctly.  I did tweak the title but faster than typing it all out.  I tweak the titles of most sell similars also.  It did generate keywords in my description which I would never ever take time to do manually.  Ebay supposedly uses your description in their search so thumbs up on that.

A con is that there was some other description and condition notes that were AI goobbly gook and needed to be deleted, including a measurement that was incorrect.  I’ll post a sample below soon.  All in all, pretty exciting.  AI listing will be most valuable and faster than sell similar when you can get really good comp suggestions if we ever get there.  Next time I will take pictures with a ruler to see if that auto-populates measurements.

Also in news this week on Ebay, Ebay and others are threatened by agentic AI shopping because they will lose their leverage to make us pay extra for listing placement.  So they are blocking that traffic.   https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-bans-ai-agents-updates-arbitration-user-agreement-feb-2026/

Your summary

Nov 01, 2025 – Jan 30, 2026
868

Total reach
46.43%

Open rate
1.5%

That is probably me opening it.  LOL.  Unfortunately it sent this multiple times for some reason.  I manually went in and canceled it.

</div>
</div>

As to my store: eBay is pushing visitors there so my intent is to make sure they have a better chance to find an item to purchase.

I followed your lead and knocked out some store category updates, switching the whole storefront over to my custom categories. I also took the time to refresh the billboard image, my About me statement, and the marketing banner along with all the category images. I decided to skip the video for now too. So, it is still a work in progress, but the plan is to jump back in and review everything periodically to keep it from getting stale.

Paraphrasing: eBay recommends regularly updating store content for relevance and search visibility, even if the core brand story remains consistent. This includes refreshing branding and descriptive elements such as seasonal store descriptions to reflect current inventory or promotions. Reviewing the About tab and the first 160 characters of the store description periodically ensures the use of current keywords, as this content is indexed by Google. Updating the billboard and logo is also suggested if they no longer align with the brand or current items being sold.

Wow, not sure exactly why but had a great weekend on Ebay.  Normally it’s already terrible through February.  I started a sale as usual on Wed-Sun.  I sent a newsletter to absolutely all groups – followers, past buyers broadcasting the sale.  I did clean up my store categories as well.  According to my traffic page after the newsletter my store received 20-40 more hits per day vs. 8 the day before, so maybe that helped create sales? I revised a few titles and none of my listings are over 90 days at this point on Ebay.  I also started automating a 90 end and relist on Poshmark with the software.

Posh was also good so I figure weather might have people online more.  I don’t usually run a sale until Wednesday but I am going to start a new one today.  I hope all are ok with the weather out there.  It’s above 70 degrees here and the post office is open.

I’m in the middle of a gigantic sort and clean out of my unlisted piles and shipping supplies.  It’s a huge project.  I bought 2 of these awesome Costco racks for $100 at a garage sale (they delivered assembled!) https://www.costco.com/p/-/trinity-5-tier-heavy-duty-wire-shelving-rack-60-x-24-x-72-nsf-includes-wheels/100709272?DM_PersistentCookieCreated=true&langId=-1  (they cost less at the store than online).  The rack shelving is pretty dense so I can just put items directly on the racks to sort them and I think I may even save one for a garage sale – I can just roll it out the morning of the sale and bulk price items per shelf.   I went through about 5-7 boxes yesterday and some is great stuff, many other things I’m not so excited about.  Too much glass stuff and kitchen / serveware that’s not worth enough that I want to put it in the listing pile or take it to a market.  The largest items and a few lots I’m listing on Facebook marketplace.  Much, much work to be done.

I need to try to fit in a few listings while I do this major project and today I have about 15 items to ship out.

On the agenda after this big sort will be (1) listing this sorted stuff; (2) I want to try the AI listing tool that comes with my software subscription; (3) revising old recycled titles and adding photos; and (4) add items to my clearance section I just created in my Ebay store.  #3 I hate to go back and do rather than getting new listings up.

Poshmark seems to have a lot of lowballers these days, but I’m not getting many counteroffers on my automated 10% off offers to buyers.  So, I might rethink that and go back to manual offers since I would like to get rid of some stale stuff, especially if they make a bundle.

Stay warm, take care out there.

I’m making the most of the downtime by creating new custom categories to give my store front a more curated feel. My stats showed 50 visitors on Friday, and I need to take advantage of this traffic and turn those views into sales. It’s definitely time to take things up a notch!

Has anyone else found that better category organization helped boost your sales?

“We believe in fairness and accuracy when it comes to feedback, and we understand how important that is to sellers. That’s why we automatically remove certain feedback for you within 72 hours. But we’re here for you—if you ever think something was missed, don’t hesitate to reach out.”

I think you can have up to 300 categories.  I have just made the number that makes sense for my types of items, about 14 categories for 850 unique listings.  I feel like it may have been better to create subcategories under vintage vs modern but I’m not going to get into that.  I’m not sure how that would look on a phone.

Interestingly, the Ebay reviewer could not see my traffic page.  He had me look and tell him. I was surprised how many hits if it was just 30 days.  It is super rare for people to use the shopping cart and buy multiple items.

The feedback comment read: ‘Arrived early class on time as described’—which doesn’t make much sense.

Good news:
I used the reporting link I shared previously to flag the feedback to eBay, noting that it appeared to be an error and would be confusing to potential customers. eBay removed it within an hour and sent an email confirming that the comment ‘doesn’t follow our feedback policy.’

31 days is a drop down. You can also see last week, this month, this quarter and this year…although ,this early in the year, some of those aren’t going to be very useful.

Some of is had been asking ebay to give us store traffic reports for a long time, but they only gave them to us when they started ebay Store Ads….since those ads are Pay Per Click, they needed a way to show us view numbers (ads and non ads).

We’ve also been asking for more granularity for store traffic (where is it coming from? Off ebay?, ebay?, etc, and what are they looking at? How many click on a store video, for example?)

But since none of that actually ties in with ad campaigns, I suspect we will never see that kind of reporting.

ebay announced changes to Store Ads on Jan 14th, with a link to try the changes, but the link still goes to the old page, and it appears none of the changes have actually been released, even though it is now ten days since the announcement. I’ve asked about this on the Selling Board, and my questions were forwarded to the Ads Team by the Community Team, but so far, The Ads team hasn’t seen fit to explain why nothing has been released.

The interesting things is, buried in the announcement are hints that ebay may be making some changes to stores, but it is completely unclear.

I’m hoping to get an answer sooner or later, but “later” seems more likely. LOL

To check your store traffic, go to ‘My eBay’, find ‘Store’ at the top, and select ‘Traffic’ from the dropdown.

A quick look at my traffic report showed some surprisingly good numbers—about 50+ views per week. It’s a bit of a bummer that the history only goes back 31 days; hopefully, eBay improves that and offers more history soon.

With those numbers in mind, it might be time to put some work into the storefront instead of just doing the bare minimum. Switching from standard eBay categories to custom store categories would make sense too. I wonder how many categories we can use that way?

Does anyone have a link or a name for a fantastic-looking store? Some high-quality examples would be great to review for inspiration.

I also have my shipping policies all cleaned up.   I sent out a newsletter to all of my groups with a sale announcement.  Hard to tell if that helped or not but I had a few sales since then.   I also listed too.

Working on sorting unlisted inventory today.

Looking at my numbers, he mentioned that the items I had on flat rate shipping under a pound had started moving better.  We discussed going in and changing more stale things under a pound to that shipping policy.   I’m a bit nervous about using a flat rate 2 pound – if it’s high enough to cover me, then I feel like I might lose West Coast buyers.

He suggested not putting vintage 70s until the end of the title.  He was stronger on that today than at the last meeting.  That will be an easy way to refresh old listings as I often put it at the front.  Again, the 6-7 photos thing – I didn’t spend much time going back over old listings.

He liked that I tried the coupon, though I had not done the newsletter.  They recommend doing the newsletter every 30-45 days and a coupon every 30-60 days.   He suggested freshening my store displays every 30 days – traffic page shows I had over 300 visits to the store in the last 90 days.  I will likely keep that seasonal though.  Over on the social media page, he showed me you can create Instagram posts there.  My Pinterest link had also broken.  He reports that after 8-10 social media posts sellers see results.

I didn’t use his clearance category suggestion.  Even though some old stuff had sold on other platforms (which really may have helped my velocity, though he didn’t confirm that), he still wants me to try refreshing a few old items and putting them in a clearance category.  I would then change the view from Ebay categories to my homemade store categories.   I tried to get him to reveal something about stale items dragging down your store, but he didn’t really latch onto that.

I also talked with him about the new promoted attribution rules.  He said he wished they would have done a more gradual rollout of that. He said I was smart to keep promoting. I told him I would consider on some older used items using the 6-7% but I wasn’t sure that would really give me much more exposure.  Without directly confirming this, he basically said keep as is.

I also told him that I was going to set the software to refresh listings every 90 days once the oldest ones are caught up.  He stuck with the party line and said Ebay doesn’t want you to do that, and the party line is that 90 days is the “sweet spot” for selling a listing.  The Vegas rep was much more direct though.

Also this week I listed 7 items on Facebook marketplace and 5 of them sold right away.  This was stuff from my booth decor and large art work.  One I got free at the curb.  I will definitely list the large art on Facebook as I work on the garage and I’m no longer picking that up.  Maybe even the medium size art as well.

Purchased some RA clearance but that will be done soon.  Have not been out sourcing much and it was not good when I did look.  So that’s helpful.  Plenty of stuff around here.  This week I am listing my grandma’s mardi gras stuff in lots that has been here forever and a day under our bed.  Got sidetracked from the linens.