On eBay’s website in Seller Hub, I am showing 1,101 active listings. GS is reporting 1,100 active listings. How do I easily find the missing listing in GS so I can import it from My eBay?
Thanks!
1 Like
Aaaah, I did not know that was an option! Thank you! Selecting that gives me about 100 listings - all but one are closed [I will close and relist items that have not sold for 90-120 days].
the item that was missing was one that the customer canceled within a few minutes of placing an order. I used the ebay website to approve the cancelation and do a free re-list. I then forgot to import that item back into GS after doing so.
Thank you!
2 Likes
Yes, this month is my Inventory check: I had to go through every item listed in my shelved inventory and make sure it was in GarageSale, and also make sure everything on eBay is somewhere in GS.
The latter is much easier, thanks to the “Import from My eBay” feature in GS.
Things end up uneven in the other direction (not running on eBay or GS but “in physical inventory”) over a few months because of cancellations, and also because of occasional weird failures to launch, those annoying buyers who say they will purchase 10 items but cancel after all, the fact that eBay sometimes labels things problematic (e.g., books that mention certain photographers by name), and so on. By the end of the inventory check this year (which I skipped last year), I had found about 3% of my shelved items were for some reason no longer being offered on eBay because they’d “fallen out” of GarageSale somehow.
Definitely worth the trouble finding them, since they almost always sold immediately when I created the listings.
1 Like
I run a smart group that has all running listings. During the year I check that number against what eBay says I have running to be sure they remain the same. That way sales don’t happen on listings that GS isn’t tracking. I haven’t figured a way to track inventory against what GS has to prevent “dead” items on the shelf that aren’t running. Since most of my items get relisted every couple months I sometimes see an item in a drawer and think “I haven’t seen that item on the relist items” and it ends up being a dead listing that failed to relist. I just had 1 today that an image failed to upload and if I missed it then it would have been dead in the drawer until I find it’s not on GS.
1 Like
The only practical way I’ve found to manage “dead items” is to have an ongoing process of inventory checks and location labeling.
Every item I have running has to have a UserProperty with a specific format, or it will fail to launch. These indicate the “box”, “drawer”, “rack” or “shelf” specifically by number, depending on the kind of object. Basically this approach only works because each box (of books) or rack (of magazines) has about 20-30 items in it, max.
The big improvement came when it finally sank in that I have to periodically check all of these containers. Instead of doing an over-all check of everything, with a separate script, I now schedule a manual check of one container once each day or two, making sure I look at every container in turn over the whole year. I can use GS to find listings with the User Property set to that container’s name (such as “box033”), and (1) do a manual count to see that the number of GS hits is the same as the number of items in the actual box, and if not (2) do a one-by-one check to see what the discrepancy is.
It adds no more than a few minutes to the process of picking and shipping, and I usually do it at the end of the shipping process as a sort of reward. The biggest win though is that now I have detailed information on the location of every item as soon as I print the packing slips (which I modified in GS to show the location), and it takes me seconds to find each item in its container of 20-ish items.
Anything I find that isn’t in GS, I move from the container into “make a new listing”, since for whatever reason the original listing has disappeared by then.
I think probably the main reason I found so many dead items in this last few weeks is that I made a foolish choice that I should re-photograph some older items that had embarrassing photos, set those listings aside, and eventually forgot that I’d done it and threw the group full of obviously Ended Unsuccessfully listings in the trash 
1 Like
Your system is a reasonable approach. I have a similar system where every location has a number and as I make new listings the number is assigned to the item and added to the listing. I added to the location the date listed so I have an idea how long since the item was originally listed since relisting dumps the original listing date. SO an item number for me looks like “3-16-25 A-1”. The date originally started, A is first item of the day ( seldom do I reach Z in a day, if I do it is AA, BB, so on) and the last number is location. I just have to implement your idea of checking a location for dead items to be sure they are running and if done regularly wouldn’t add too much time. Total inventory is such a time waster since I want to sell stuff and not look through my stock. I haven’t done inventory for 15 years because of the overwhelming thought of it.
This topic was automatically closed 10 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.