Ebay: 30 days or Good Till Cancelled

In several of the eBay / reselling groups on Facebook that I belong to there is an ongoing debate as to whether it is important to refresh your listings every 30 days or whether leaving them listed as Good Till Cancelled is better.

Initially I had all of my listings on Good Till Cancelled, until recently when I was convinced by another eBayer to try listing my items 30 days at a time. The theory is that Cassini, eBay's search engine algorithm, looks favorably on freshly listed items, at least for the first couple of days, and again for the last couple of days.

I agreed to try it August through December of this year, but here it is November 7th and we are well into the 4th quarter, and I have decided that results do not support the need to refresh listings every 30 days. In fact, the time it has taken me every day to relist my items as Sell Similar (to ensure they get a fresh item number allocated and therefore make them appear to be newly listed items) has been detrimental to my overall productivity.

Some might say that a little over 3 months testing is not long enough to get an accurate reading or results, but given that this is the busiest time of the year sales-wise, and my sales numbers are falling, financially I cannot afford to continue with the experiment. To that end, today I have taken down every single listing and relisted them as Sell Similar. While it might make more sense to list them as Good Till Cancelled right now, I received a notification from eBay yesterday advising that through February 2016 they have allocated 2000 more free listings per month. I don't know if this is for everyone, but as a Premium store owner I get 500 free listings anyway, and usually only maintain around 400 listings.

As a result of the additional free listings I have decided to put all of my listings on 7 day duration. Why? I have calculated that I can relist all of my listings at least 4 times a month while I have the 2000 additional free listings, and along with the original 500 I get as a store owner, I will not have to pay insertion fees on any of them. So the plan is to relist every 7 days for the next few weeks and see if that improves my sales. It may be difficult to get an accurate reading given that it is Q4, but I need to do something to try and increase sales, and this seems like the best time to do this.

It is important to understand that I am relisting as Sell Similar, and not simply relisting. If you just relist, your listings are not allocated a new item number and therefore do not benefit from appearing to be newly listed items by Cassini. I will be doing this via the Bulk Editing Tool so that I can do them all in a very short time. Tip: If you choose to use the Bulk Editing Tool in this way, change the number of items you view to 200 per page. The other alternative is to relist them all Sell Similar, and then do a Bulk Edit of ALL of your listings at once in order to change to 7 day duration.

One of the drawbacks to doing this is that anyone who had placed an item of mine of their Watch List will no longer see it as available, however I have found that the majority of items that have watchers do not sell anyway. I also believe that many of the 'watchers' are actually other sellers watching to see if mine sells and what it sells for, so that they can price theirs accordingly.

Because Cassini boosts new listings up in the search results for the first couple of days I will be leaving my listings priced as-is but adding the Best Offer option for the first 3 days, and then I will run a 2 day sale at 10% off for the next two days, and then the last 2 days will be return to as-is pricing and Best Offer. It appears from all I have been told and read, that listings get boosted in search results for the first 24 - 48 hours, and again in the last 24 -48 hours, so hopefully this 3 - 2 - 2 system will further boost my listings, and therby increase sales.

I will keep you posted over the next few months of the results of this current experiment. I am hoping that it will be beneficial.

#Ebay