Low value listings
Hi,I am quite new here but been selling since 2000 on ebay & my local site.Question is how many of you look at or buy items for less than 25c as my lowest price is $4 & I have jist looked at 1 area (Australasia & Pacific) & nearly 20% of listings are 25c or less.The site cannot be making any money from these listings & they are a major pain when surfing through them.The other stamp sites are the same & really it turns buyers off.Any thoughts on this.
Comments
You have a nice stock and the few prices I checked were more than reasonable but unless someone is within your store it is doubtful they will be able to find what they are looking for through the customary search function. Not a criticism, just trying to be helpful.
You can ease the pain considerably by using the price filter on the left side of the screen. Simply put in the minimum stamp price you want to see listed, and all the low-priced "noise" will be filtered out.
Ted
https://www.hipstamp.com/store/tatyszka-stamps
https://www.hipstamp.com/store/stampsfirst-day-covers-and-curios
I am not sure if you are aware of it but on both the brown and red seahorses there are multiple copies of all of the different issues,they have come up in both the site's penny auctions and some of the sellers auctions often enough that the bidders can just wait till the next one comes up in auction. (I listed one red one and one of the brown brown ones and got the same results. I don't remember which issues off the top of my head as it's been about 6 months since I ran them)
As a general rule of thumb if an item is listed in auction too many times the prices will end up being depressed in the long run. Even though the cat values on these are fairly decent,they are also somewhat common. (On most of these there are close to 100 on the less common issue and well over 200 on the more common issues for sale both in auction and BIN)
I wonder how many "Michael's" we have here? We may have to change the name of the site to "TheMichaelsHipStamps"!
Michael A.
https://www.hipstamp.com/store/michaels-covers
Or Mike and Mike and Mike and Mike and Mike In the Morning.
There are, in my view, few solutions. Sell them in groups, broken sets, partial sets or complete sets. Or alternatively set up a system where a buyer can go through a large number of them (in chronological order preferably), and one-click pick a stamp after another, filling a basket with large numbers at low cost.
Faced with the same problem of too much clutter in the auctions, the on-line stamp club I belonged to (I will not mention the name here), developed a new approach to those pesky low cost stamps. It set up an Electronic Approval Books platform that focused precisely on it, and just did that. Surprise..it did not reduce the number of low cost stamps listed in Auctions (note..it does not offer stores, so that is the only other option)!
But it opened up a totally new way of selling and buying large quantities of low cost stamps. Selling one or a handful will never work, so why not look at selling a lot! This is the only way to spread the cost of shipping!
I doubt that any commercial site intent on making a profit for themselves or their sellers can really compete at the low end of the price scale, and it is a real turn off to buyer to see a per additional charge tacked on. But collectors, beginner collectors in particular, or collectors expanding into a new arena, need a simple platform to either dispose of their duplicates, and to acquire those pesky lower cost stamps. It is not perfect solution, but it does an amazing job!.
And it encourages collectors to get into new areas, without having to buy a whole new collection to get started. And expanding our hobby is badly needed!
But Jeff Bezos got uber-rich by not turning a profit. Why can't we?
1. Start out with two million dollars.
So IMHO, this is a super site and we all sell what we want to sell and we all feel we have treasures to sell. Please do not tell us we are selling JUNK, we aren't! That's YOUR opinion and please do not put the rest of us down because we do not have the same belief as you.
Off my soap box now
Thanks, Professor Luree; I want to use your soap box, now, if you don't mind.
Gotta love people who feel the need to blame their lack of success on other (successful) dealers. And then to claim that the intent of the top-listed dealer is to shut the site down to eliminate the competition?????????? I can't even fathom the reasoning behind this absurd statement.
I read the initial post on this thread over 3 hours ago; I downloaded a report of all of my sales dating back almost 10 years, analysed it to determine which were my best-selling countries, what were the sales percentiles of stamps of particular price ranges, etc; and my intent was, as Michael Generali did, to give you a well reasoned, thoughtful, response to your questions, and to help out a newcomer to our community.
I come back to this thread, now, to post some friendly advice, and I find that you have now joined the bitches-gripes-and-complaints squad in bad-mouthing the site and placing the blame for all of your (upcoming) lack of success, on this platform and its dealers.
If you don't think the HipStamp platform suits your needs, that's no cause for you to come onto the boards and start bloviating about silly plots to shut down the site and how the cards are stacked against non-North American sellers. Just find yourself a site more suitable for you. Try Apfelbaum. They're looking for consignments, and I'm sure you'll get every dear penny you're asking for your material.
Off Luree's soap box now.
Next!
"bloviating"