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Client Case Study: Helping an eBay Seller Increase Sales

Location: Queens, New York

Of all the platforms you could possibly sell on, Amazon is probably the easiest. The main problem with it is that if the product doesn’t exist in the existing inventory, creating a new listing is a huge pain in the butt. You fill out countless fields loaded with information you may not have and then you publish it only to hear crickets. New products take time to gain traction, which is why many sellers opt to sell on eBay instead.

Sure, on eBay you have to fill out tons of details for each product you have, take pictures, and attempt to price it in line with other sellers, but the overall process is more smooth. eBay has a wide range of sellers from the newbies with a couple items they’re selling from home like a blanket and a new pair of shoes to the pro eBay sellers that list thousands of products a day. The client we worked with was Raven46, a seller of pillowcases and bed sheets from Bed Bath and Beyond. This type of inventory comes from truckload liquidations, which resellers can buy for $8-10k from liquidation companies. The great part about buying a truckload of merchandise is the overall value of what you get. Spending $10,000 on merchandise may not sound very appealing until you learn that the retail value of what you received is upwards of $80,000. Even if you threw out half of the products, you can still triple the money you invested.

Anyways, Raven46 ordered a new liquidation truckload from Bed Bath and Beyond and began listing products. The problem he was having was that he maxes out at a certain number per hour. At 5 minutes a listing, he can only list 12 items in an hour as one person doing it. So, we stepped in to help find him some new listing employees. The obvious solution here was Craigslist, a site where you can find just about anything for a cheap price. In just under 3 days, we received more than 174 emails from people looking to help list products on eBay. Now obviously we don’t want to waste time calling every single one of those people, so we had to narrow the list down somehow. We started by asking their pay requirements and allowing people to self-select out of the process by demanding ridiculous fees for this simple task. 134 people provided absurd numbers in requested salaries, so we removed them and were down to 40. From those 40, we checked for people local to Queens, New York that also owned a laptop. Surprisingly, that only dropped the number to 20. From there, we called each person to discuss the role. 2 of the candidates did not sound qualified and were then removed. With 18 people left, we scheduled 2 people each day for the next week and half for trial runs. Essentially, the candidates would come in and list for a couple hours so we could see if they’re worth the money. 3 of the candidates passed and were hired on the spot.

Raven46 has now ordered another return truckload and is listing at 4 times the speed he was before. That allows his overall sales metrics to skyrocket because as the overall number of listings increases, eBay boosts visibility. Basically, if you list more, you sell more.

Our team of skilled employees can provide an array of small business services, it just depends what you need. In this case, we helped with finding quality talent, but we can help in other areas too. Reach out if you have any questions.