j4k3 OP , 5 hours ago

::: spoiler I’m in the USA. Southern California more specifically.

All shipping insurance offered by logistics carriers in the USA is from a 3rd party company. Read the fine print and you’ll discover this detail.

No, you do not use any kind of reserve price. The listing must clearly show that there are no catches or caveats whatsoever. You must have the confidence and nerve to make a fully transparent commitment. This is where my perspective as a Buyer is driving me to keep an overview mindset focused on the big picture statistics where anomalies are not relevant to overall results even when stuff is expensive and scary. Seriously, you probably have no idea how nerve-racking it is to spend millions of dollars on brick and mortar preseason orders knowing that, if you get it wrong, the whole business could easily fail. In those situations, you rely on your statistics and niche familiarity. I had a few items that did not perform as well as I would have liked, but not by more than 15%-20% at most. The majority of these were in February. February is by far the worst month for eBay auctions. The post holiday slump, Valentine’s day, and the Super bowl are massive killers of free cash on the shortest month too. Collectively, my experience and pattern recognition about the Sunday following the 15th of the month is largely from noting auction performance. I tried a ton of stuff to sell on different days and times. Like eBay will publish the traffic volume on the website as higher during different times, but no one is actually taking a $4k purchase seriously when they are screwing around in the office after 3 pm on a Thursday.

eBay does not keep sold data available for more than 60 days publicly. At the time, I brute force tracked all bicycle sales on eBay using a spreadsheet when I did research. So if I was given a bike to consign, I uses all of my available data to come up with an average sold history for similar items by age, wear, size, category, etc. I also tracked the seller and quality of the listing description and photos. Once I had a solid number for an established sold price, I subtracted 40% of that value for all eBay fees, then 40% of the remaining amount was for my effort. I promised or directly paid out/(shop credited) to the item owner for the remaining value. So the variability was actually coming out of my pocket and margin. When I said that a well documented and photographed listing was worth 10%-15% more than the average sold history, and how I did listings that were so detailed, - this was no joke and built into the business model as my primary motivator. Any margin I made above the sold history average went into my pocket.

Ultimately, eBay is charging too much overall to make this a viable consignment business to survive on its own. It works for something like the overburden losses for a retail chain at the scale we were running.

I also have a very deep understanding of the bicycle market, so I simply knew what would not sell with auctions based on the volume that the item represents inside the market. Like selling a high end velodrome track bike in a no reserve eBay auction would be insane. There are only a dozen or so velodromes in the USA and only one that is a world class indoor drome in Los Angeles from the 1984 Olympics. There are maybe 300-500 serious track riders in the country; of those maybe 60-100 that will fit the size; of those maybe 6-10 that need a new ride; of those maybe 1-2 that occasionally browse eBay. The odds of getting 3-5 serious bidders on that listing are pretty much nil, so that can only go up as a Buy it Now listing. It is simply the wrong market for the item. You would see this too as an artifact of no sold history for the item. My overall intuition and abstraction abilities play a role in my success in this area. If all of this is hard to follow, you’ll likely struggle with my techniques. I am always at this level of analysis and detail. I enjoy it, but it comes natural for me. I don’t have to focus to abstract and make sense of intuitive statistics that are ballpark enough to work out.

Hopefully that makes sense and helps with perspective.