Small Craft Sellers – Navigation Tip for eBay

Selling Craft Items Online – Tips

In my previous post on selling your crafts, I posted about selling at craft markets and fairs. But of course many crafters sell online as well as or instead of selling at craft fairs.

The following post is about selling online, but mainly about selling on one particular site – eBay.

There are many different outlets for selling your craft items online.
Etsy is the huge site for selling handmade items. Craftsy is big too. Amazon also has a growing section for home crafters. And there are others; some suitable for crafters from a particular country; others for particular crafts. And of course you can always sell from your own website, hoping to bring in purchasers with promotions on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

However, the reason for concentrating this post on eBay is because I have found something on eBay’s selling interface that some sellers may have missed…

To all Ebay Small Sellers. Watch Out For the ‘Allow Offers’ Box – it isn’t that easy to find….

eBay is still a choice for many small sellers, particularly because it has such a huge market and is a household name for many. And many buyers looking for a variety of goods, may simply choose to browse the 2 big names – Amazon and eBay, with eBay usually winning if they want ‘a bargain’.

The ‘bargain’ tag with eBay can be a bit of a drawback for crafters. This means that the items they sell will have to have quite small profit margins. But many crafters decide to take that risk, allowing for the size and reach of eBay’s platform and the perceived selling opportunities that go with this..

However, that small profit margin can disappear if the craft seller is not careful with pricing their items.

eBay is not my main online sales outlet, but I do still sell a few craft items there. Like many small sellers on eBay, I sell most of my handmade items as ‘Buy it Now‘ so that I can control the price.

Also like most Ebay sellers, my prices are very reasonable and if I sell items for any lower than my chosen listing price, I would not only lose any small profit, I could end up actually paying to make and sell the items in the first place.

But of course, that isn’t eBay’s concern. They are in the business to make money. So, as long as a listed items sells, eBay have done their job. And they of course will take their commission.

This is understandable. We use the platform. It costs eBay money to keep the platform going, not to mention processing costs, etc. Therefore we have to abide by their terms.

However, I do find it a bit of a ‘gotcha’ for small sellers, when eBay appears to make it quite difficult for sellers to sell their items at the price they have chosen to sell at.

The ‘Allow Offers’ listing ‘option’.

When you list as item as ‘Buy it Now’ on eBay, at first view the listing page has no mention of ‘Allow Offers’.

And that’s because ‘Allow Offers’ is hidden below a click-to-open tab called ‘more options’.

I found this out by accident in two ways:
The first was actually clicking on that drop down to find an ‘Allow Offers’ box which was already ticked. And as I had already decided the bottom price for the item was the one listed, I unticked it.

But the second way was with a couple of items I had listed earlier. I suddenly received emails saying that these items were now allowing offers.
So I had to go back and edit the listings and click the link to open the ‘more options’ bit, to untick the ‘Allow Offers’ box.

I’m usually adept at recognising and unticking any already-ticked boxes (all those ‘download chrome and make it your default browser’ ticked boxes which come with many app updates for example). But those ‘download chrome’ tick boxes are in plain sight (however tiny…), unlike eBay’s ticked box which is below a ‘more options’ click (note: this isn’t ‘options’ – it is ‘more options’ – in other words, it doesn’t appear compulsory to click on the link).

But I guess I wouldn’t mind so much, if I hadn’t then discovered that the ‘offer price’ which would be suggested to customers was half the price I had listed!
In the case of the items listed, my profit margins on these were so small I would definitely have lost money on making the item and then would have had to pay to post it!

As I said at the beginning, I know there are other selling platforms out there for crafters who want to sell their makes and perhaps eBay isn’t the best choice for small craft sellers if they want to have good profit margins.

But eBay is still used by small craft sellers. So, for those, like me, who are still using eBay occasionally, while you are there, you need to know exactly how the eBay sellers interface works, otherwise you could end up selling your item for half the price you need, simply because you missed a partly-hidden tick in a box!

So, to reiterate, this post is saying, use eBay to sell your craft makes if you choose to, but when you list an item, do check all those click ‘options’.
You might be happy with the setting you discover beneath the click, but it would be nice to know it’s there in the first place.

Happy selling 🙂