The Plan (Part 2 of 3)

So, we left off where I was planning to do a lot better over the next three months, so that I don’t let so many dollars worth of free listings go unused. The first two months could be considered a loss of 200,000 listings or $50,000. If I had been completely prepared for it I could have instantly moved 200,000 listings and, selling at 2 pct @ $10 each, that would have been $40,000, with another $40,000 (approx) in April, May, June, July, August. (The promotion ends in July, but these can all be timed to repeat from July 31 to August 31, for the extra month. 6 mos x $40,000 is $240,000.)

Of course, this infers that I have 100,000 items to list on eBay. Oddly, I do.

I bought cases and cases of magazines from a used magazine store on 40th street in NYC way back in 2002. It went out of business just as 9-11, and it auctioned off nearly the entire stock of about 500,000 magazines, and I bought 100,000 of them. Many of mine are duplicates, which might mean I have only 50,000 magazines, which is my actual goal anyway.

In our last installment, I admitted that I can only manage 60 days of the next 85, listing 150 a day, 5 days a week. And there will no doubt be interruptions taking up two weeks, I’m guessing.

And here’s the biggest problem. Even if f I build up a maximum of 9,000 magazines in the next 3 months, 3000 a month, what happens at the end of August, when I can’t relist and they relist automatically, ‘Good Til Cancelled, they call it. You can’t list any other way any more. Those 9,000 listings will produce a bill for $3,000. I’ll have to cancel them at that point.

That’s the reason for this plan. If I put the pictures of the magazines on a website, I can cancel them from eBay and sell them from this site.

In fact, if the pictures are on a site, then I can probably also use a File Transfer facility that can load up listings to ebay in bulk through a CSV file. A little manipulation of that same file can load up listings to Spotify, which is also running a special for 90 days, and which I started in late April.

I would still have to pay for listings above the normal promotions, but it allows for an easier swap to different sets of listings. It allows for taking advantage of new promotions, which sometimes include up to 500 or 1000. And who knows if these current promotions might not get extended again if eBay finds the promotion internally profitable to eBay.

Promoting the site, is often an expensive endeavor, but I will have the advantage of being able to send a link to the site with every magazine. I can even print over the ebay logo on the mailers.

So here are the details of the plan:

• Buy a site named either manymags.com or lotsofissues.com.
  • I bought manymags.com through Google domains, $12 a year, with free privacy.
  • When I came looking for a host, it seemed hostgator was the best price among the larger hosts, and it offered a free domain in one of the options. (It’s not really free because they charge more per year for the privacy than google charges for both domain AND privacy.)
    • I got the “Baby” shared hosting package to allow for multiple domains, a shared https, and a couple extra features you don’t get with hatchling. The salesperson also said there were 40 Gigabytes worth of storage for images, although you must “use” the images on the site, and can’t just use the space to host images. Buying this package for 3 years, I was able to get all of it for about $50 a year. I’ll have to pay for the domain next year, but by then I should be down to 1 domain.
• So, now that I have the domains and a site, I just need to start putting stuff on it, I pushed 222 pictures to a directory using FTP from the Control Panel. Worked fast.
• I then decided that, even though I’m a pretty good website coder and developer, that I would get up and running more efficiently with WordPress.
• I chose a theme, and might later choose from plug-ins that work well with it. I also chose to install the ability to manage multiple wp sites and themes from this one. That might get me into trouble.
  • Find out more about this multiple site platform
• I tried adding some of the pictures to a blog post, but the Gallery forces file sizes to be under 1 Megabyte. Most of my pictures were from an iPhone, and are therefore about 1.5 to 2.5 Megabytes
  • Look for ways to override this, or use a different method of creating Galleries.
• MAIN THING: Then try to find ways to manage the WP Media into multiple folders so they don’t clog up the whole thing at once.
• NEXT MAIN THING: Test the eBay File Transfer template, using one for books. Keep track of all the ins and outs of getting this to work with the pictures on this site. There are many questions about how it would keep the pictures on eBay. Perhaps pics in description links are links, but the pictures from links in the picture field might be absorbed into the Gallery pic + 11 more potential pics. Find out. But either way we have the ability (we think) to move pics up there more easily because of this site.
• With File Transfer, use a faster editing method to cut and paste multiple fields at once, faster descriptions to get them up there at higher prices. Then drop as descriptions get better. Find out how edit works. Does it need the entire list again in order or does it find through an index and therefore a small file can edit several random listings among thousands already listed, instead of a big file for all.
• If this works, start a test on Shopify, too. They are also running a 90 day thing.