The Manual Grind
Before any of the automation, a normal batch was six to twelve items I'd never listed before, each one a fresh listing from scratch. Here's what that actually took.
I'd photograph every item, and photograph its barcode too. I ran the barcode through a little UPC scanner into eBay search, which showed me the active listings for that item. Then, and this is the part that matters, I'd look at the sold listings. Not what people are asking, what things actually sold for, and how many. There might be a hundred of something listed and only two or three sold. That tells me there's no real demand, no matter how many hopefuls are asking top dollar. The gap between the asking prices and the actual sold price gave me my bottom line: where the profit was, or what I'd have to source it for to make any.
I worked to a rough 30% margin to cover eBay fees, shipping, and taxes at break-even, and leaned on tools like eBay's profit calculator. Shipping estimates were the perennial trap; guess the box wrong and, since I usually eat the shipping, I'd just quietly lose money.
From there I'd pull product details off Amazon or Walmart to flesh out the listing. For a while I used a Mac app called GarageSale that made my listings genuinely handsome, better-looking than 99.9% of the competition, I'd say. I dropped it when the developer stopped supporting it, made a few of my own HTML templates instead (eBay lets you put HTML in the description), and watched those go stale fast.
The two pain points that never got easier
Item specifics. Size, color, SKU, manufacturer number, part number. Every listing, you hunt this down, because it's exactly what eBay lets buyers search by. More accurate detail, more chances someone finds you.
The business fields. Quantity, accept offers or not, the auto-accept floor, list price, item location, shipping weight, package dimensions, return policy. Sometimes eBay remembers these listing to listing. Sometimes it has total amnesia and you re-enter everything. Then you hit submit and either it sails through or it throws an error because you didn't mark the item "remanufactured" versus "recertified," or one specific out of a scrolling wall of them wasn't quite right.
You've got a choice: do it perfectly and spend 30 minutes a listing, or it's the end of the day, dinner needs cooking, there are kids and a spouse and a life, and you rush. I've lost count of the pricing mistakes I've made rushing: priced too high, priced too low, botched the auto-accept and sold something for less than I paid.
And it's not over at "sold"
You still ship, 50 or 60 packages on a busy day. Bulk-ship helps now; it didn't use to. Back then eBay handed you an 8.5×11 label you had to manually crop to 4×6 for a label printer. And picking, which I still get wrong sometimes: your eyes cross, item A goes to buyer B, and now two strangers think you're scamming them when it was an honest mix-up.
That was the grind. Every step of it was a candidate for automation, which is the rest of this series.
Next: Photos, and the metadata leak that scared me straight →