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.

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.