Blue sky feature: Archived listings?

[Vaguery]

This is not so much a feature request as an insight from some recent threads here. Several people have recently (~ 6 months; didn’t check) mentioned that they have over 50000 listings in their GarageSale databases, and/or have discussed archiving strategies by which they offload their completed listings (sold or not) to long-term storage.

In my case, I would love to be able to use GS’s Inventory/Item table to manage the tracking of costs and fees accumulated over many listings of the same physical object, but as far as I understand it GS only saves that information in the individual Listing records associated with the Item. Some of the items I have listed have been running since 2018, and get stopped and re-launched every 2-3 weeks, and so I’ve never really been able to justify accumulating all those Listings (with duplicated images and all ?) just to do the bookkeeping.

Instead, I’ve made do for many years now just using the Listing record, and custom User Properties fields, to keep track of locations, costs, numbers of listings, and so on. To be honest, it’s not my favorite thing, either. But at least I can empty the Deleted Listings folder whenever it gets more than 1000 items in it, and not worry about it.

But I understand the motivation for the folks who keep tens of thousands of stopped listings in Deleted Listings. They can contain useful information, or information in their fields that needs to be aggregated for reports.

So I wonder whether there might be a sort of internal (“internal”) archiving of Listing records—successful and unsuccessful—that would save a lot of space. Maybe something that

1. removed (or offloaded? thumbnailed?) images
2. recorded only fees, price, start/stop dates, user properties, and so on
3. could still be referenced by Reports and Item records

I run between 3000 and 5000 active listings all the time, all unique. I manually stop and re-start most of them more than once a month as part of my workflow. And I would like to be able to keep track of cumulative information about fees, costs, maybe the timeline of when they were listed and for what prices and so on, but also don’t want a huge folder full of Deleted Listings.

I also try to keep my Sold folder ~1000 items, and offload anything more than that by archiving the Listings to disk. In 10 years, I confess I have never once had to look at an archived listing.

And to be clear: yes, part of why I’m thinking about this is the “slow interface” complaints I’m hearing from folks. I definitely learned to work around those by deleting excess trash long ago, but I know it’s not for everybody.

From what I hear from other larger sellers, you maintain a more traditional inventory, with variations and multiple copies of each item? At what point does the collection of Deleted Listings items become important to your workflows? Do you use them for record-keeping or reports, or do they just pile up?

[davidelliott]

I operate in a similar way to you. I let GS stop my BIN listings but manually restart them. I know GS can auto restart. The items I sell are mostly cigarette and gum cards. Even if I have multiple copies, the age of the item means I need to keep a record, including image, of every single sale. I too keep a SOLD folder but generally just keep the sold items in the folder they were listed from.
I can also sell many items outside of EBay and use GS to manage it. I would like to be able to mark listings as sold privately. This has been requested previously. David