eBay Listing Schedules – Can They be Intelligent?
My business partners and I often sit back and look at our business and find ways to streamline and add efficiency.
Automation using technology is very important for us and makes the best use of our skill sets. One of the reasons we switched to ChannelAdvisor was because of one of their listing schedule types, but more on that in a minute.
Here is the background to my quest for intelligent listing scheduling…
We used to use our own database of SKUs and eBay’s API to launch products, and retrieve sale data. Using this system we also created and managed all of our listing schedules. We built in our own logic to analyse past SKU performance using preset critieria such as listing and final value fees, and item costs to work out how many items we should be launching each day.
Our schedules were fairly simple though. Number of items, length of auction, start times etc. But we needed more.
What happened over time though was demand for products changed. For our fishing gear, winter saw a decline in some product demand, and a rise in others. And there were various fishing ‘seasons’ for particular types of fish during the year which saw the rise and fall of different groups of products (with some cross over).
So this meant (and still does to a degree) constant evaluation of listing performance and updating of listing schedules to reflect these changes in demand.
ChannelAdvisor seemed to offer a neat solution. One of their listing schedules is called a ‘maintain’ schedule.
How does it work?
It is very clever in that it can be configured to make listing decisions, based on demand, for you. How does it do it?
Well, for starters you assign how many items you want to list in each auction (typically one at a time for us), then choose how you want the logic to operate. You can base the listing performance logic on :
- % of starting price reached
- % of BIN (buy it now) price reached
- % of seller cost recovered
- % of retail price recovered
We use % of seller cost recovered.
After you choose the method of calculation you simply fill out a table to enable your ‘logic’.
For example, you can tell the scheduler to list
- 1 item per day if markup is 100 – 150% of cost
- 2 items per day markup is 151 – 200% of cost
- 3 items per day markup is 201 – 250% of cost
and so on. Neat!
Is it all roses?
This is an effective schedule, and we do use it for some items, but we also find it is not always suitable, here’s why.
On occasion you may be selling into a market that has high demand for a product. This is great, but in every market there is a price that buyers may not go beyond, so there is a ceiling in place. How do you find that ceiling?
Say the marketplace is happy to pay $10 for your widgets. You start selling a widget into this market place using your performance based listing schedule and you are selling 2 per day at $10, because your cost is $5 and your schedule allows 2 products to be listed per day when you historical selling markup has been 100%.
What you may not realise is that there is still more demand for your widgets! Its just people don’t want to pay more than $10 for them!
I know this situation well as it exists for a number of my products and I couldn’t use this intelligent scheduling. instead, I have had to set up different schedules (3 auctions per day, 4, 5 and so on) and adjust them every now and again based on sales performance.
But all in all, the performance based scheduling is good. It saves you time, makes some decisions for you and is one less thing to develop yourself.
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