As of EOD 30th April
Target: £330
Actual: £213.26

In an earlier post I said my best month recently, may be ever, was March when I turned over about £150 worth of items.  Well, now I have smashed my best ever month and beaten it by over £60.  So although I didn’t reach my target figure, my challenge was still a success.

I am not going to give up.  I will attempt the challenge in May, so now I have a May eBay challenge where I will attempt to do the same again, and as I go along, I will share my journey with you and tell you what I am doing and what tactics I am employing to increase my revenue on eBay.

There isn’t really much to report since my last post on this two days ago.

I have steadily been adding more items to my eBay shop, but that’s it really.

I will give you an end of the month update at the end of the week.

So how have I been getting on? I suppose you are wondering.  Well, here are the latest figures:

As of EOD 25th April
Target: £275
Actual: £140.51

It does not seem that I will make up my target, however it still looks as though it will be a good month, considering when setting my target, I not taken into account Easter, which meant many evenings were tied up with the Church, and was ill for a few days.  In a previous post, I mentioned that my best month recently was last month (March) making about £150 worth of sales.  So it looks like I will better or equal that, which I think is pretty good going.   Had I not set myself the target, I would not have put in the extra effort.  Had I not put in the extra effort, I would not have done as well as I have.  I will attempt the target again next month.

This does not mean I have given up.  There are still 5 days to go including today, and anything can happen.  Just yesterday I made a new video for the ecover creator software I am selling on eBay, showing how to use it.  I have posted this on youtube.  Here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcmKFqcyPMY.  I will be making a seperate blog post for this though.  Now that I have made this video and uploaded it to youtube, I can now embed this in the listing, which should help to increase sales of this product.

Another update will be along in a couple of days.

Now, I haven’t actually done much since my last update, as I have been very busy this week with other things I am involved in outside of my normal 9-5 job.  I wont bore you with them, as it’s not relevant. but lets just say I could have chosen a better month to set myself my first ever challenge.

Anyway, I have not done nothing at all.  I have still further increased my inventory, which has been my focus, but over the last couple of days I have been thinking what I can do to increase sales of my existing items, mainly my CD ROM based products.  The majority of them are £1.99, and I already have one strategy in place whereby I give free postage for 3 or more items sold in the same transaction.  This does result in some extra sales which I might not otherwise get, but I wanted to do something extra just to help out with this target.

I also have many CD ROM products priced at £9.99.  These are mainly video tutorials and some software.  I have done a couple of posts based on the software products including a video on how the software works.

If you have an eBay shop, you have a ‘sale’ facility called ‘mark down manager’.  I thought I would use this tool and  have a sale on these higher priced CD ROM products.  I have set up the sale to last two weeks with a 35% discount.  To see how these sale listings look, click HERE to see the video tutorial products, and HERE to see the software products.

Now, I don’t know if this strategy will help to increase sales over the next two weeks, but I will share the results with you.

It is Sunday evening as I write this on 5th April.

Since my post from yesterday I thought first things first is get extra stock in my eBay shop.  After all, surely the best way to increase sales is to increase inventory.  This will also help to drive extra visitors to my other listings.

One tactic I recently have implemented, was on all of my non CD ROM based products, at the top of the listing ask the visitor to browse my eBay store and put a link which will open up the home page of my eBay shop in a new window.  See my non CD ROM based products by clicking HERE and take a look at the listings to see what I mean.  The important thing here is that it opens up in a new window as I don’t want to take by visitor away from the listing that drove them to me in the first place.

Yesterday I went through some old stuff I have that I don’t ever use, or have never used.  I have gone through some old games and software and listed those that I never play or use.

That was yesterday (Saturday 3rd April) but today I have not done anything.  It has been such a beautiful day today, I thought I would give the garden some much needed attention.  Now I have done that, it’s back to work.

I will post another update in a day or two, so keep watching.

Well, if not, please do read it.  I sincerely believe in the points I raised in this post.

Now, I must be totally honest, I have not got off to the best start with this challenge.  The reason I say that is because I intended to make a post about it before I started the challenge, this post you are reading now, but I am a few days late with it.

The point of this series of posts, is to put myself in the public eye while I attempt to meet the goal that I have set myself this month.  My goal is to clear £300 on eBay after eBay fees.  This means, because of eBay’s greedy 10% commissions, I need to sell £330 worth of products.  This equals on average to £11 a day.

Now this may not seem a lot, but with the way things are at the moment, people are reluctant to part with their money plus also I have never cleared £330 in one month on eBay.  But then saying that, I have never set myself any monthly targets, and in order to succeed you must have a target to work towards.   So can I have my best ever month on eBay during a recession?  I believe I can.

This means I need to do more work on eBay than I have been doing up until now.  I need to increase the stock in my eBay shop and if possible, increase sales on my existing products that I am selling.

As I go through this month, I will be telling you how I am getting on and what exactly I am doing different and extra on eBay to make this extra money.

To put this into context, in March, I sold just over £150 of stock.  This means I need to sell more than double what I sold last month.

I have already quite heavily implemented one tactic I wrote about some time ago.  And that is this one, ‘How I increased my eBay store traffic by 27%’.    View my eBay store by clicking HERE, and you will see many auctions I am currently running starting at 1p with free postage.

By the way, so far my eBay sales for April have not averaged £11 a day.  Each post, I will tell you how much I have sold on eBay since 1st April.  The start of each post I make this month will look something like this:

As of EOD (End of Day) 3rd April:
Target: £33
Actual: £5.14

I am way off where I want to be, so I need to get my skates on.  I will check back with you in a day or two with an update.

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