Why is it important to have a large inventory online?

[thewrightbiz]

In some of these messages and others, I always read that you should have at least 100-200 items online in inventory.
Why is that important?
What if you only have 50 items?

[SammysSupplies]

The more items, the better the chances of someone finding an item of yours. Unless of course, you sell very one unique, of kind pieces that are sought after.

[MoonwishesStore]

It is a question of mathematical probabilities. Someone with 50 listings trying to have their run of the mill products be found in a pool of say 1,000,000 on line listings of items for sale (there are actually more than that but hard to think in those big numbers. Or if you have 5000 listings, which would be the most likely to have anything found? The seller with 50 listings has a .00005% chance of a buyer finding them and the one with 5000 listings has a .5% chance. It is still a miracle and I am stunned by what and how much sells. Now I realize that I may have run the numbers wrong perhaps, but what you should be able to see, unless you are selling high demand one of a kind items, the less items you have up for sale the less chance of being found.

I just did a google search for women's shoes on Google and got 78 milion results! Google shopping had 22 pages and we all know that Google no longer shows all results. So if someone has 50 products for sale and only 5 of those products are shoes, what do you think the chance is that those shoes will be found. This is why it is essential to write great titles, great descriptions and have great photos and prices that are in the ballpark of what that type of shoe should cost. I've actually run into sellers here that are selling shoes and didn't even have 'shoe' in the title. What is the chance the search engines are going to grab that listing in search results for shoes? Slim to none.

[tigercreekgifts]

Because there are millions of online sellers and between all of us probably several billion, maybe even trillion, items online for sale. Think about it. If you list 50 items, how likely are you to get found when compared to another business that has 10,002 products and another one that has 54,399 products? Not very good odds. I can tell you from personal experience there were times when I had to start over from scratch and build my inventory up again from only a few products. I was lucky to get one sale per month when I had only 47 products or so. The more I list, the more frequent my sales become.

I'm sitting at a lil over 725 products right now between here and elsewhere, just what I have listed the moment, actually I have about 2,000 items but am still getting everything listed. Right now, I am back to 1-2 sales per week on ecrater, about 15-20 sales per month on ebay, and 2-3 custom orders per month that I get from the locals here. The more I add, the more sales I have. Every time my inventory is back up to 1,500 to 2,000 or more products. I start getting 11-17 sales per month on ecrater (more around holidays), about 22-27 orders on ebay per month, and so on.

That's also why many of us are trying so hard to promote, and are paying the higher bids to have our items sponsored in GS. It's more than just listing away until your fingers hurt WrightBiz. You have to promote and do whatever it takes to get found, and that's something hobby sellers like yourself don't do on a regular basis. You could list 5,000 products in the next 6 months and sure, you'll probably start getting some more sales but without promotion, you will find that you still only get about 5 sales per month. But with promotion, someone with 5,000 items could quickly find themselves getting 9-15 orders per day.

[elpereles]

[MoonwishesStore]

[elpereles]

Agree with MoonwishesStore. If you are interesting to continue getting sales. Never forget to build back the inventory.

For example. I had combine orders from items listed last week with items listed in my 1rst years in eCrater.

[tigercreekgifts]

Ah yes, the dreaded summer sales drop. For me, sales are best during the holidays (Halloween & Christmas) but they at least remain decently steady from October until April, and from May to Sept. sales slow down or come to a hault for some of us. The only way my sales remain steady in the summer is when I list summer outdoor toys and swim suits for sale, toys that are not gigantic or heavy.

Not going to lie, I have sold inflatable pools on ecrater. A few years back when one of the local K-marts went out of business they had boxed pools for 80% off so I bought 2 and resold them for $59.95 each and they were originally $89.95 normal retail price so they sold out within 3 weeks. Went back to get more to resell and they were out of stock. But in the summer people are on vacation or outdoors most of the time, in the winter we're stuck indoors so it makes more sense that sales slow down in summer. But selling giant boxed heavy items like pools, not fun! The shipping is sky high and they qualify for an extra USPS freight surcharge. Just not fun to box up.

[MoonwishesStore]

When my son called me for Mother's Day, our big conversation as usual was selling on line. He sells all sorts of stuff including patterns. While everything else he has is selling well, he has noted that his sales are down on the patterns. As hard as it is to face, this is our slow time of year. It is just always weird that we can be so busy for a couple of months and then go to what feels like nothing. Of course now with those new fees that we wanted to evaluate, it is hard to know what is happening with that when sales take their regular nose dive.

[tigercreekgifts]

My 8.9% sales are coming in waves. I'll have no sales for 8.9% at all for 5-6 days then I wake up to 3 orders, all for the higher fee amount. Like I said before it's odd that I used to have sales from a variety of sources then when the 2.9% default fee came around 100% of my orders were marketplace 2.9. Like it was fixed or something because I am promoting now more than I ever have been, so why suddenly with increased promotion efforts did sales start being marketplace only when before with very little promotion I had sales from all over.

But if I suddenly find that 100% of my future sales become 8.9 sales, that will be really odd like something really is fixed. I just don't know what happened because according to GA, I am getting WAY more hits from store direct, store google, and pinterest sources than I am from the marketplace. The numbers are like, for every 300 hits I get between pinterest, google, and store direct, I get 21 hits from the marketplace so how in the heck is that small percentage of marketplace viewers the only ones buying? I have even had buyers tell me they came to my store from whatever site from a pin or post I made, but their sales counted as marketplace 2.9 sales and they should not have because I only pin or post links directly to my store not the marketplace, so if they came to my store via a pin or FB post then It would've been a store direct sale. Something is still amiss.

[MoonwishesStore]

Well my two hour nap today produced a 5.9% sale. The first paid order I had in 5 days so I didn't care where it had come from and then realized it was one of my cheapest patterns. Oh well. Out of my 7 paid ecrater orders this month, 3 are the 5.9%. Had some regular marketplace and a google. I also had a Bing non-order. Kind of weird this month. I had someone buy the same pattern two minutes apart and paid for it twice, so that was a refund and then the next order was the Bing one that was international and never got paid via PP.

But with sales being down I am listing a lot and at the same time trying to stay out of the office after a certain point. Some things I can do like visit the forum and watch TV at the same time. But I really do want to get back to doing some more house stuff and working on my own crafts. So to do that I have to keep trying to work smarter not harder. I always have tried to be efficient, but it is strange how you can always find ways to improve. For years I have been trying to get up to 10,000 listings here, but selling over 1000 things a year means a lot of listing to keep the count up from sales and then even more to get the inventory amounts even higher. I sure have the inventory to do this and I would rather have it listed than inventory sitting un-listed each year at tax time.

[universalcomputers]

It doesnt matter how many products you have. The question is do you have the right products. Whether is 10 or 10,000 thats the question to ask. Obviously, the more products and the more devirsified you are, your chances increase, and thats only what it is chances. The more you use reasearch tools like TerraPeak, or look on Ebay at closed sales, your going to get a "general" idea of what people are buying for that time frame. But anything you put online all comes down to percentages and chances.

You can have all the right products, but if your pricing is way to high, your chances decrease, and if your products prices are too low, your going to get more traffic, but not making alot of profits, so its a question of balancing the two sides of the equation and finding out what amount of profits you can settle for. But dont undermine yourself because you want more sales. Because when the smoke clears all that work and nothing to show for it, is a reality.

Usually when you start seeing a slow down in sales, it comes down to market demand. Your competition has lowered their prices, so its time to lower yours. So you have to see what your competition is selling it for and make the product more enticing to the buyer.

Another thing you can do is look at your hit rates next to the products and place Analytics into your store to see who's visited. But the hits arent reliable because they may include crawls from search engines that will record a hit, but dont count as a customer actually going to your site to check that product out.

You have to have the right product, then have the right price, and a reason of why that buyer should buy from you. Price and what product to sell is your decision, the buyer buying it from you is their decision.