The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

First, and most important, I want to give our best wishes to all the folks that have been affected by Sandy.  I lived on Long Island for most of my life and hope that everyone is okay, and everything gets back to normal as soon as possible.  I find it hard to stay focused on business with all that is happening, but go on we must.

The Good: Remember those rubber stamps Autumn scored for $2.00?  I have cleaned them up and listed 33 of them so far.  I still have about a dozen to list.  I have already sold 3 for $10.00, so the rest is gravy.

The Bad: This past week I have had 4 returns.  I accept returns for whatever reason, and have had very few to date.  Of the 4, I have gotten 2 and refunded the buyer's money and relisted the item.  The other 2 have not arrived yet.  In fact one left me positive feedback.  So who knows?  All the returns (3 pairs of shoes, 1 pet costume) were due to not fitting properly.

The Ugly: Sales are in the crapper.  June and July were terrible, August and September were great, October started okay, and finished dismally.  I averaged 3 items sold every day in August and September, October was less that 2. In the past 5 days I have made $19.96. I try very hard to implement whatever "suggestions" Ebay comes up with (large photos, Fast and Free shipping, optimized listing for mobile customers, 1 day handling, tracking uploading).  Now the new one, according to Tina at My Secret Ebay Diary, whom I trust very much, is "Inverse Document Length". I interpret this to mean that it is not good to have an overly long description, as the more words you use means the more keywords you have and this is known as "keyword stuffing" and is no good. I do have a long "fine print" section, which I am deleting mainly because it is covered elsewhere, and no one reads it anyway.

I am going to have a sale on Sunday to see if this helps, and I am making some tweaks here and there. Saturday is yard sale day, so until then, have a good one and happy Ebaying!