Another retail “holiday” is here, and you know what that means!
Actually it means a lot of things, but for some of us online hobby sellers it means something very specific:
We can’t sell our stuff!
If you’re trying to sell products on Amazon, particularly anything they class as a “toy,” their policy is very specific for the holiday season:
- You must have processed and shipped at least 25 orders from September 1 through October 31. The orders do not need to be specific to the Toys store.
- Your pre-fulfillment cancel rate must be no greater than 1.75% from October 1 through October 31.
- Your late shipment rate must be no greater than 4% from October 1 through October 31.
- Your order defect rate must be no greater than 1% short term as of November 1.
Now, if you’re doing your job shipping things out right away, most of those bullet points won’t be a problem.
But if you’re a “hobby” seller like me–selling personal belongings you no longer want rather than making a business out of buying and selling–there’s a very good chance you won’t meet that first requirement.
eBay has no such restrictions that I’ve ever seen, and sellers of my sort could easily migrate the “toy” listings from Amazon to eBay for the holidays…
But they have another limitation that Amazon doesn’t have–you can only have 50 listings for a given month before you have to start paying for them, listings expire, and re-listing something that didn’t sell counts towards that monthly total.
I generally only have eleven or twelve items on eBay at a time and I just keep relisting things until they sell… or until I get fed up with holding on to certain items and just donate them to the local thrift shop. But that means it’s going to be a while before I can migrate my Amazon listings, long enough that the holiday restrictions might be over with for the year before I need to bother.
But I’d really, really like to get rid of this stuff and make some money while I’m at it. Especially for the holidays.
So to paraphrase Jay Sherman….
Buy my stuff! Buy my stuff!
Pretty please? 😀
Related articles
- Seven Happy Holiday Money Tips (turbotax.intuit.com)
- The Guide to Last Minute Christmas & Holiday Shopping (pcrichard.com)
- Shop ’til you drop at these upcoming bazaars (rappler.com)
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