What is the most beneficial way to list my multiple items on eBay?

Question

I have 16 items I sell for a $5.95 fixed price listing. Initially I thought I would run 1 listing with a quantity of 16 for ten days, at a listing fee of $2.40. I would set up an automation rule to relist continuously until the entire inventory sells.

Would it be more beneficial to run two concurrent listings, same as above, with a quantity of 8 each instead? The listing fee would come to $1.40 X 2.

My thoughts on this is that two listings would increase my exposure, allowing me to sell my items faster, and only cost me an additional .40 cents.

Is this correct, or am I falsely assuming or overlooking something?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You are right that two (or more) listings would increase your exposure.

You need to find the sweet spot between number of listings and fees. You can do that by figuring out the fees under different scenarios. The number of items sold per listing is relevant, because you should split the listing fee between the items sold: if you sell one item from your 16-item listing that cost you $2.40 per item; but if you sell one from each of your 8-item listings that costs you only $1.40 per item. So running multiple listings could actually work out cheaper because of the additional exposure.

You really need to experiment. Try different tactics, for example:

1. Start five listings at the same time. That will give you a block in the search results that could attract buyers.

2. Start one listing every day. That will give you a regular appearance as buyers scroll through the results.

3. Try different durations, this will place you higher in the results if they are sorted by end time.

By the way, you could use a fee calculator like eBCalc to quickly determine the fees for different scenarios: http://ebcalc.com/

Good luck!

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Edit: Something to watch out for is the changes coming to eBay search. For example, removing identical listings in results and limiting sellers to ten listings per page of search results. More info: http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_str...