New Seller - No sales yet - Are my listing OK?
Hi all - I am a new seller to this site and I am wondering if my listings are OK for this market place as I have not had any sales yet?
It is almost a month now without one sale. Hipstamp have transfered over all my buy-it-now stamp listings (over 300) from ebay UK. I was hoping that a long standing member could check 1 or 2 listings for me to see if they are OK.
I have not listed any auctions yet. Is this site like ebay where I find that auction listings help to "drag-along" your shop BIN listings?
I also have a good selling reputation on ebay - is there any way of bringing over my Feedback?
Any tips will be appreciated.
It is almost a month now without one sale. Hipstamp have transfered over all my buy-it-now stamp listings (over 300) from ebay UK. I was hoping that a long standing member could check 1 or 2 listings for me to see if they are OK.
I have not listed any auctions yet. Is this site like ebay where I find that auction listings help to "drag-along" your shop BIN listings?
I also have a good selling reputation on ebay - is there any way of bringing over my Feedback?
Any tips will be appreciated.
Comments
https://www.hipstamp.com/store/stampsfirst-day-covers-and-curios
One shipped only to the UK so you're excluding everyone else in the world.
Two shipped to the USA (I pretended I was in the USA since that is where the bulk of the buyers are located).
Both were covers for 2.5 pounds or less. The shipping was 8.25 pounds or more, making the cover cost to someone in the USA about $15 for each cover as well, the "with another item was an additional 8.25 pounds so if I bought 2 covers for 5 pounds, I would be paying 17 pounds of shipping.....which probably translates to why you're not seeing any sales.....
Are you saying that hipstamp customers are more "trustworthy"? - and it is OK to post international hipstamp orders by ordinary Air Mail?
I don't mind doing that if it is the case and if it will produce orders for me?
However, I am not prepared to ship orders (including multipul items) with a value of £25 or over without sending it tracked and signed. Is that fair to histamp buyers?
I also sell on ebay and delcampe, and I track very little.
Never assume anyone reads the listing.
The buyers have no idea why you're charging 8.50 so you're (in my opinion) pushing them away before they become a buyer the first time.
The buyer decides what they think is fair, things you want to do to protect yourself are not their concern other than they won't buy if it costs them more than they think is fair/appropriate.
I sell 1000s of lots per year across the sites I sell on, my package loss rate is less than 1/2 of one percent.
Generally GB stuff is weaker here, at least in my experience, and you're competing with people who will be sending this stuff "free shipping" which will put you at a disadvantage....
So mainly USA buyers then? I will try some United states and Canada stock listings.
With respect to no sales at this stage, it really comes down to a numbers game. Think 1/50th of whatever you are achieving on eBay as a realistic expectation, especially early in the game. And yes, the bulk of the buyers and sellers here are US based. A good clue is the HipStamp main page which is a US showpiece (well, apart from Mark's great penny black giveaway each month). Cheers, Rod
https://www.hipstamp.com/forums/discussion/1075/my-experience-regarding-lost-package-rate-over-time#latest
I completely agree with pricing in US$, I price using the currency of my "target" market, and I price in US$ here.
https://www.hipstamp.com/store/roncarmichaelstamps
1. For existing listings? (looks like I will have to edit each listing?)
2. For new listings?
Please?
This is Mark with HipStamp. I've taken a quick look at your items, and would agree with the comments from other Sellers that your shipping costs are quite high compared to other Sellers - and it likely impacting your sales.
Having your items listed in GBP shouldn't be an issue. In fact, I believe over 10% of the items we currently sell each month are in GBP. Since your currently syncing from ebay, to update your shipping prices, what you would want to do is go to the Members Area > Selling > Seller Tools > Ebay Sync page and check of the option to "Use Default Shipping Only". This will ignore your shipping information from Ebay, and allow you to use your Default Shipping settings.
To then set your Default Shipping settings, go to the Members Area > Selling > Seller Tools > Default Listing Settings and set your default shipping rates for both the first item, and each additional item. You'll then be given the option to additionally update all of your current listings as well (which you will want to do).
All that being said, I'll ask one of our Seller Account Managers to reach out to you to help you set up competitive shipping rates, and discuss a few options we have available to you to help increase your sales.
You need to manually adjust the postage on individual items to reflect the £8.25.
Unfortunately there is no way to accommodate a total order over £25 made up of several items. This is a critical shortcoming of setting up postage on HipStamp and Mark does not want to accept the rationale for the need. I have had to cop the extra postage on several large valued orders now because of this.
I hope you are reading this Mark.
If you wanted to update the postage on all individual items over 25, you could easily do this at once. There's no need to do this manually per item.
That being said, we wouldn't recommend 8.25 shipping on items over 25, as this would be quite high compared to other Sellers. If we haven't already reached out to you to discuss shipping options further, we will shortly. We can then follow-up in more detail with regards to your specific items.
Tania, there is a price filter in Member Listings which *SHOULD* be able to filter all items priced at £25 and over, and then you could use the BULK EDIT function to change the postage for the filtered items in one easy move.
EXCEPT it only works for listings in $US. It DOES NOT WORK for you with listings in UK£ and it doesn't work for me with listings in AU$.
Again, Mark does not see this as a problem as it works for the majority US user base, but rather views this as a future feature (that the price filter will support multiple currencies, for users of currencies other than $US). In the meantime we are stuck with a crippled implementation of the price filter which is as useless as 'tits on a bull' unless your listings are in $US. There is a real US bias in the software implementation to date (albeit unintentional?) that the likes of you and I have to get our heads around (rant over).
So to ease the pain, first sort your listings by price (highest to lowest), tick the select box for the listings over £25, and then select BULK EDIT (which is hidden - you need to scroll to the bottom of the screen and it will then be revealed bottom left), then scroll down the Bulk Edit options and choose the Shipping > Postage > Edit selection.
With respect to the £8.25 shipping charge (to cover for tracking with signature) on orders over £25, as Mark, Ron and I have indicated, this may be seen as prohibitive to respective buyers.
You would be far better off if you set your limit for tracking/signature somewhat higher until you have some sort of selling history to determine which is the best price point to introduce it.
For me the threshold is orders over AU$80 (about £50) and my registration/insurance charge of AU$15.90 is actually higher than your £8.25. I offset this by offering free registration/insurance on orders over AU$200.
I've just confirmed that one of our Seller Account Managers has reached out to you to follow-up on this matter. We'll discuss the different options available to you, including when you're syncing from ebay - and a few different options and recommendations we believe we help you to increase sales.
Please follow-up with your Seller Account Manager if you need further assistance on this.
https://www.hipstamp.com/store/the-online-stamp-shop
Thanks for highlighting that the Price Filter which is found in both the Browse / Search Results and the Members Area currently filters based on USD. As you've also noted, this is a feature we plan to enhance in the future, and allow any currency to be used. This is a helpful note to avoid any confusion.
With specific regards to if you're a Seller looking to make a Bulk Update on your listings which are over a specific price, this is still something you can currently do. You would just need to convert the amount/currency to USD first. So for example, if you wanted to make a bulk update on all listings which were over $25 AUD, you could just type "25 AUD to USD" into Google, which would give you $18.96 USD
So if you then typed in 18.96 into the Price Filter, you would see all listings $25.00 AUD and over. ie:
https://www.hipstamp.com/members/selling/browse/open/?price[from]=18.96&sort=price_asc
Again, we're planning to update how our Price Filter works in the future, but in the interim that's a quick workaround for any Seller looking to bulk update listings in this way. Since our internal currency exchange rates are updated on a daily basis, this should generally be accurate within a cent or two.
One other quick note, the Price Filter works based upon the current price of your listings. So if you placed an item on sale, it will be filtering based upon the Sale Price.
(I thought you were going to say it took you 2.5 years to understand how ebay works....I've been there since 1999 and I'm still trying to figure it out!)
" Mighty Oaks from Little Acorns Grow!"