Today’s magazines (Part 1 of 3)

So, eBay decides to celebrate coronavirus by giving me 50,000 free listings in March 2020. They do this for everyone with a “store” subscription of any kind. If you pay like $8 a month you get a starter store with 100 free listings every month, and if you pay $27 a month you get a store that allows up to 500 free listings (250 regular listings, and 250 more if they are auctions in specific categories).

I have two accounts so I ended up with the best deal of anyone. I have an $8 store and a $27 store. In March they gave 50,000 free listings to each, which is about the equivalent of $15,000 worth of listings, on each. Or $30,000 worth of free listings for the two accounts.

That’s extremely generous, but it was late March and I didn’t get a chance to use them except for about 1,000 re-listings on each store, most of which were repeats from old listings that didn’t sell. Some had been relisted so many times that the eBay pictures don’t show up anymore. So many of these are wasted listings.

But they offered it again in April, and this time I added about 500 more and fixed up some of the old listings without a picture and without a description. 500 out of 50,000 is barely 1 percent and I failed to eve fix up all the wasted listings, with nothing on the other. So now, I’m up to 1000 and 1500 between the two stores with about 500 still “wasted.”

But they offered it again, May through July, and this time I decided I would do something about it. I have nearly five free days a week now, and if I read it right they are offering another 50,000 over the three months from May through July, or possibly even 50k for each of the months. I may have missed the first two months, but I’m going to do all I can to get this fixed up for May through July. It’s May 5th now, and I’m just now trying to write this blog as a “planning tool.”

My guess is that I might have lost most of the first 200,000 (worth $50,000 dollars), but I will catch a lot more of the next 300,000 (worth $75,000).

Currently I sell about 40 items a month on 2,000 listings. (2 pct). 20,000 should give me 400 items a month, and all 100,000 in July, between the two accounts, would supposedly give me sales of about 2000 items a month, which is $20,000 dollars at my prices.

Of course, the big problem is that I can only put on a maximum of 20 items an hour. That’s a problem. I can work about 7.5 hours a day which is 150 items a day and I have less than 90 days, about 85, with 25 days I can’t work, due to other demands on my time. That’s 60 days at 150 items a day, or 9,000 items total. But even 9,000 is 180 items a month, or $1800, in addition to the $400 I get now. That’s a growth toward $2,200 in August and a ramp up like this:

March 1,500 items $300; April 2,000 $400; May 5,000 $1,000; June 8,000 $1,600; July 11,000 $2,200; August 11,000. $2,200 (This is higher since the ramp up is only 1,500 average because it’s 0 by first of month.)

So with the expectation that I could do a minimum of $7,200 over this time period of the next 4 months, I decided to ramp it up on a website for several reasons, which will be explained in the next post, along with more details of the plan.