Erratic daily sales

[genesis_furniture]

Coming from a blue chip retail background and now working hard to make an online furniture retailer grow it's sales on eBay I'm permanently dumbfounded by one thing - why sales are so inconsistent on a daily level even when you hold a consistent level of stock.

Example, and old Gap clothing store I used to run back in the day would take roughly £5k every day, Mon - Sat and with a lower sales figure on Sunday, A typical week might be:

Mon £4300

Tue £4700

Wed £4500

Thu £4650

Fri £5000

Sat £7000

Sun £3000

You can see a fairly set pattern of daily sales being around £4.5k which trends like this throughout the whole year and inflation adjusted all the previous years, and of course you get the odd exceptionally bad or good day.

However with eBay I've experienced the opposite and it's maddening and I don't understand with a national audience instead of just a local one why it happens (these are example figures not my real turnover) 

Mon: £2000

Tue: £50

Wed: £140

Thu: £1700

Fri: £0

Sat: £25

Sun: £350

There's absolutely no consistency, no pattern, no trend - absolutely nothing that you can analyse data from to work through what is happening. Instead of being able to budget and plan sales like proper retailers can it just seems to be a game of 'hope for the best' each day.

The full week figures are just as bad with fluctuations of 25-100% from week to week.

With a consistent level of stock, consistent pricing, consistent frequency of listings why are sales extremely erratic? It doesn't make sense.

[superchallenge]

I guess it must depend on the niche, but I've been tracking my daily sales since Jan 1st.

My averages are:-

Mon: £143 (5.46 sales per day)

Tue: £100 (4.46 sales)

Wed: £137 (6.08 sales)

Thurs: £147 (6.46 sales)

Fri: £154 (6.36 sales)

Sat: £145 (6.08 sales)

Sun: £124 (5.85 sales)

That seems relatively consistent to me, with Tuesday being a consistently worse day than the others for some reason. My stock level has remained the same up until this week when I culled most of my lowest-value items to the tune of 50% of my store. Interestingly enough, I've had two incredibly good sales days in a row since then...

[magpiecorner1]

Clothing is always an ongoing sale, people buy for the seasons and come out to buy every week.  I've worked in retail (Miss Selfridge) eons ago and you would get the same quantity of people at the same time into the store every day, every month and every season, but much higher sales on a Friday and especially Saturday, as we closed Sundays.  I once did a project overhauling the stockrooms in all GAP shops in Scotland and all the GAP shops around Paris (27 in Paris, just a few in the rest of France).  Turnover of Stock was phenomenal!  And yet Gap failed.

I haven't worked in retail furniture, but spent many years selling office furniture.  My take is that it is generally big money items, people only have one sofa at a time and buy new every few years, my son owns well over 60 tee shirts which he wears and umpteen jeans.  M&S and Next are big players in this marketplace because furniture is an add on.  The likes of SCS do constant sales and online furniture dealers do well directly to the public, but you can search around their websites more easily than eBay.  Office furniture is a whole different ballgame, always driven by individual monthly sales with decent rewards for sales people, and if course multi thousand and even multi million contracts.  Even working self employed in that industry meant no rhyme of reason for sales figures, except the desire - hope- to reach a monthly target.  Needing to pay one's bills every month makes one very hopeful and very hardworking.

You need to know your market.  If it's staggered sales, you need to bring in other selling streams.  You need to work out a promotion budget, and use it.  You need to find a niche.  And, if possible, you need to have 'names' in your stock.  And amazing titles on your listings, and be very very good at delivery and quality when folk are buying from a photo.

EBay isn't 'build it and they will come ' but it often is an ebb and flow site, oftentimes depending on month end monies, weather and the time of year.

I'm searching for a simple hall cupboard and some drawers for the bedroom, search returns many listings that are not even furniture and very few listings given me the confidence that they are not poor quality, so worth checking if your listings are appearing, especially as promoted listings are rotated.

Best of luck.

[genesis_furniture]

Thankyou Magpie for the very welcome advice. If you see anything you like on our site let us know - we'll deliver too.

[genesis_furniture]

Thanks for the reply superchallenge - Yes, we did this a while ago -  we culled everything under £60 and then set a new benchmark of the products need to have a value of at least £80. It worked well just like it did for you but then we have plateaued ever since. 

[magpiecorner1]

A big plus, so little nearby when you live in Scotland.  If you have any cherry cupboards or drawers similar to Grange give me a shout and I'll keep an eye on you listing for my hall cabinet.  I do wish you luck, you could do really well if you crack it.

[technthread]

Your listings are a little more unusual than the norm in the sense that the initial impression is that all items are collection only, therefore some buyers will scroll past. I can see in the description that you do offer delivery but it is restricted from the South up to the Midlands, so your buyer base is reduced. 

I am reaching a bit here but naturally some interested buyers will see no postage option at checkout, maybe aren't familiar with eBay so they don't know how to message you to organise delivery and may give up and buy elsewhere. How much that will explain erratic sales is debatable. 

It doesn't mean your frustration over inconsistent sales is unfounded as sellers who sell UK wide and internationally have reported similar issues but I think you would be more prone to this happening than the average eBay seller is. 

[blueskystore777]

Everything you've stated as a variable, is stuff you control, ie. 'With a consistent level of stock, consistent pricing, consistent frequency of listings'.  I suspect the problem is with what you don't control. This is ebay's train set. Imagine a group of people were standing by the doors of that Gap store and only letting a few people in one day, none the next and then free entry the next. 

[genesis_furniture]

You are bang on the money with this - we've been thinking of the collection only status as an issue for a while  - next month we're launching free delivery on everything as like you say even though we do offer delivery it's not set up on the eBay template buyer screen - the reason being is we run our own van and eBay won't allow you to charge variable amounts of delivery fee to different counties of the UK. So to go 30 miles we'd have to charge the same as going 300 miles. eBay seems likes it's managed by people who have never ran or operated a shop in their lives. 

[genesis_furniture]

This is exactly what scares me about eBay - the control they have over where and how frequent  you're really in the search listings.

[genesis_furniture]

Thankyou very much - certainly will look out for you

[supsef7890]

Beacause the visibility of items is clearly being turned on or off. Why- and according to what criteria is a different question altogether. But the fact that visability is artificially controled is I think now undesputable?