I thank all those of you who replied to this thread I posted (both here and on Movie Poster Talk). There were lots of thoughtful intelligent replies, and they make for good reading.
I was not trying to be cute in posting this. I do NOT in any way think I have any personal cause in this lessening of the number of sellers, and the number of sellers listing quality items. Why?
Because most sellers sell in a completely different way than I do. There ARE one or two sellers who list lots of items with low opening bids as I do, but their results are lackluster at best, and they keep with it for reasons best known to themselves. I know they would net more money if they consigned those same posters to me and saved all the overhead they currently have.
But with the exception of those sellers, most sellers list five or ten or twenty items, and they list them with an opening bid that is the lowest they can bear to take for that item, and they hope they will get at least one bidder, and maybe two.
I don't see that I am in competition with those dealers at all. I might have the same items as them once or twice a year, and if I get a lower price than they want, they can dismiss it as an oddity, but if I get a high price they can use it to justify the price they are asking (often dealers reference prices I have realized, unattributed, in their auctions).
I did not give my opinion as to why so many of these dealers are offering less on eBay when I first posted, because I wanted to hear what all of you thought first. But now I have and I want to give my opinion.
I think the biggest reason is that eBay is as "seller-unfriendly" as a site can be! They have a jillion policies that make it hard to sell items, and they do ZERO to screen out bad bidders who wreck auctions. Worse yet, they keep making unwanted changes, and I think it is this that causes so many sellers each week and month and year to suddenly say, "Why bother?" and find another way to sell.
But I am surprised more of you have not found the best solution under the current rules (a very few of you have, but not many, although lots of rare book dealers, comic book dealers, etc, have, which makes me think it is a matter of time).
Here's all you have to do. Open an eBay store. Get TurboLister (it is free) and create auctions for every item in your inventory (using a stock template, it is not that hard to do) LISTING THE RETAIL PRICES YOU WANT TO GET. Put all of them on eBay in your store at 5 cents per item per month, and put them as "good until cancelled" so you have nothing to do until they sell.
Now comes the tricky part. How do you get people to see these items, since store items don't show up in the basic search? One way is to list a FEW items as regular items with major promos on each one telling those looking about all your great store items. Another way is to post to Internet sites like this one, or to put links from your website to your store items.
The most important part of this is that eBay has a free listing day every couple of months, and when they do, you list all the store items as REGULAR items, and it is free and for those seven days your items DO show up in searches.
Is it worth it? Say you list 1,000 items. It costs you $50 a month, and if you can't sell a few hundred dollars worth of items out of 1,000 listed, then your prices are way too high! And your only expense is the 5 cents an item store fee, and the seller's percentage after items sell, so your overhead is pretty low.
A side benefit to this is that if every dealer did this, there would be tens of thousands of quality items in the stores at all times, and that would give customers a lot more incentive to go looking, which would result in more sales for everyone.
Of course, that's just my opinion.
Bruce
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