Analysis of your sales on eBay

Here are some tips on how to analyze your eBay sales:

1. If you are plagued with many unsold items, you need to be systematic and do some analysis. Calculating your Direct Selling Rate (STR) is critical for all sellers. STR is the ratio of items offered for sale in a given period divided by the number of items actually sold. If you offered ten items on Sunday and four of them sold, your STR is 40 percent.

2. It is also important to calculate the average selling price (ASP) of the items sold. Add up the selling price of all the items that were sold in a given period: a day, a month, a year, etc. Don’t worry about end value fees or insertion fees. You are only concerned with the gross selling price. Divide the total by the number sold. If you sold five pairs of gloves for $15, $12, $9, $9, and $8, your total is $53 and your ASP is $10.60.

3. Once you’ve calculated your STR and ASP, ask yourself a few questions. Are some items just impossible to sell? Could you sell more if you included more photos or highlighted your sales?

4. Take note of the brands, colors, and types of items that have the highest STR. Focus on building your inventory of those items and don’t buy the ones with low STR.

5. Pay attention to STR not just for individual items but for the category you sell in most often. It can be tedious to analyze an entire category if you don’t have special software to do the work for you, but you can make a rough approximation. Count the number of sales on a page full of completed transactions in a category. Then count how many of the sale prices are presented in green: these are the ones that sold. The red ones are unsold items. Make several pages of results and calculate the relationship between sales and the number of completed transactions. The result is the direct sales rate.

By analyzing your eBay sales, you’ll be able to make better decisions in your business so you can make more profit in the long run.