When eBay restricted Fixed Price listings to only use the “Good Til Canceled” duration earlier this year, several people requested an “Auto-Cancelation” feature in GarageSale. This feature would cancel GTC listings shortly before eBay would renew it, thus sparing the seller the re-listing fees.
We had such a feature prototyped, but other stuff got in the way, so it didn’t make it into the GarageSale 8 release.
We are wondering if this feature is still needed, or if you got used to the new GTC situation? If you have an opinion, please let us know:
I’d use an ‘Auto Cancelation’ feature, if available in GarageSale
I’m fine with eBay’s auto-renewal for GTC listings, please spend your development resources elsewhere
I’m listing auctions, so I don’t have use for this feature
I voted for the auto-cancelation feature, and here’s why. For those of us who sell one of a kind items, we generally used to list something, and if it ended without a sale drop the price and relist. Now I have to manage this manually, which takes way more time. For those who don’t need it, don’t use it, but if you have it prototyped, I would like to see it. My two cents.
It would be nice to set the relist feature after a variable time, say 2 months or 3 months. I let listings run depending on sales and the number of watchers before ending them and restarting them. A single button to end and relist would be handy. It now is a 4 click process to end and relist in GS 7.
Hard choice, especially because there are many other feature I would need, but finally I said yes for the auto-relist feature. From months my GTC sales visibly dropped due to this new policy. One of a kind items, especially paper ones like photos and postcards with millions of similar listings, are particularly disadvantaged by this policy. I had to choose for GTC also before eBay restriction because it was actually impossible to manage 10000 and more listings to relist, so keep it in consideration if you will ever develop a solution. This should work also with large numbers and should somehow let me switch off my laptop also if there are tons of items to be relisted.
All this explains why I am gradually switching to auction listings, they let me sell items, also for slower prices, but at least they sold. The other solution is promoted listings. They partially work, but your eBay billing hits the roof…
I have been giving this some more thought - always a dangerous thing.
I am now not certain that this is the best way to go - especially if it means a lot of work for you guys.
Realistically, I think I will always cancel in Ebay (so very fast & 200 items at once) rather than in GS.
My reasoning is below.
There is no guarantee that GS will actually cancel the items - PC switched off, a problem with GS. (I am aware that a sync system may overcome this but not necessarily so).
Speed
Time spent in developing and testing.
I only need one failure and the relist of 5000 items at $1.65 each to send me broke.
Can I propose another option.
How about an alert from GS to advise that items are due to relist in X number of hours. A turn off repeat alert would be useful at this point as well.
Stop all listings directly in Ebay. Can be done on any device, PC, iPad, phone from anywhere in the world.
Hello,
Just like [fedege96] I need to manage a lot of single items. The new policy drove the sales to the ground.
The auto-relist feature is an absolute need for me.
I’d like to vote, but the button doesn’t show up…
Best regards
You can have a look at the eBay Forums, they are full of similar complaints / observations.
The longer an item is listed, the more uninteresting it is supposed to be and it will not be “prominently” displayed in the search results or under “also interesting” or not found at all if the search terms are not a complete hit.
What holds true for electronics or clothes isn’t at all correct for collectibles.
Also, with no sense of urgency, people don’t pull the trigger. Even with BIN’s, probably 75% of my sales were right before it ended, even though they could have bought it sooner.
Sorry, this seems to be some kind of bug in the forum software. It’s supposed to be open for another 2 days. Anyway, we noted that seems to be sufficient demand to bring that feature into GS at some point.
Absolutely. I have 30,000 items in my GS Database and 4 eBay Accounts. Three of the Four are non-stores and one is an Anchor Store. eBay periodically runs promotions in the Non-Store accounts to list as many as 500 free BIN listings. Just yesterday, I remembered that the 30 days was about up and had to manually cancel 1,500 listings. If I had failed to do so, it would have cost me $525US when they renewed. I have 7,500 items in the Anchor Store that renew automatically and another 2,500 that I manually cancel so as to rotate my listings. The “Auto Cancelation” feature is ESSENTIAL. PLEASE IMPLEMENT ASAP. We would need a field in the items record to indicate that auto-cancelation applies to this item. Furthermore, I suggest you allow the user to specify an overall system parameter as to how many days / hours in advance listings should be canceled… Those of us with thousands of listings to cancel monthly want to provide enough time for the cancelation to take place.
Hi @davidelliott ,
there are only two way to let your GTC listings raise between literally millions of similar tag listings. The first one is promoted listings, but to obtain a good visibility you have to at least double the fee, and it’s a lot, if you accept offers lower than original price. Other possibility is to regularly stop and relist, and this is the reason of auto-cancelation feature. Am I wrong or are you use to stop and bulk relist from eBay your items? This surely happens and might explain why you didn’t notice difference… My eBay plan gives me unlimited GTC listings, but it costs 180€/month. To cover this, you have to list and list and list again new items, but when you do this, older ones literally buries and sporadically sold. I cannot afford to follow bulk relist…
Hope this might be a good explanation of my (our) situation…
As you said Federico, we use different methods. I do not have a store but rely on free listing offers which now seem a regular feature on a monthly basis. I obviously notice a spike when I list and a smaller one just before GTC finishes but that does not seem to have significantly changed. I just worry about getting caught with re-listings that I forgot to manually finish. It would be veery expensive.
