Mind you, compo/marketing/give away was the preferred disposal choice…

We do try to make sure EVERYTHING is listed within 2 weeks of purchase. Otherwise money is sitting there doing nothing

Philomena is very good on cash flow.

Mark

Admittedly eBay have chosen a simple implementation which uses the eBay item number as the identifier rather than the actual item, but then I tend to think if sellers could fiddle this one, they probably would.

What is the oldest bit of stock you are sitting on then??

Looking at my stock take sheet, I have a small piece of Troika that I bought in February 2004… I paid too much for it, so I am waiting for the price to go back up again…

Perhaps I might be able to list it in 2014….

The holy grail for all retailers is a turn of twelve, which means that by the time the invoice (assuming terms of thirty days) is due, the stock has been sold and the next thirty day cycle has begun.”

Gosh, wouldn’t that be something! (she says with some things still in boxes from the middle of last year….. )

I think the reason most sellers are dubious about it is because they don’t understand how the law works wrt “sales” – and because eBay’s system makes them adhere to the 28 day rule but doesn’t tell them what it’s doing, it looks like it doesn’t work correctly.

Maybe there could be something like second chance bidder, – but called one chance offer – which just the one person who has made you the offer ,who you have revised the listing for could bid
But there again – tis open to abuse by fee dodging sellers

shrugs
Crawls back under rock
Suz x

You list on maybe a 10 day auction and some one wins. You wait a week before you can open a UPI. You wait a further week before you can close the UPI and then relist on another 10 day auction. Your stock has now been sitting on the shelf for 34 days minimum assuming you listed it the day it arrived.

If the NPB had paid the day the auction ended you’d have shipped maybe on the 11th day and could have reinvested the money. That means every NPB costs you at least two rounds of churning your money, that’s two lots of profit lost because of a time waster.

Forget about not getting paid and the nuisance value, think of the churn and turn costs. Or maybe don’t or you’ll detest NPBs as much as I do

Having said that I have a rule that if stock is available at a ridiculously cheap price I bulk buy as much inventory as possible. So long as I can get the entire stock cost back in a week the rest is effectively free stock and some that I’ve bought I’ve dribbled out in sales over as long as two years. If it’s paid for in the first few sales and you have enough storage space it can be a smart way to work, but make sure you get your money back in the first few sales so that you can turn and churn your cash many times over.

Making your cash work harder is one of the fundamentals to profitability, the more times you spend it on new stock (for which recouping it from sales is a pre-requisite) the more profit you can ultimately make.

Even if this means lowering your price slightly (or having a Markdown Manager sale) to shift it more speedily churning your investment starts to pay dividends.

Norf: I agree with the theory, but practice can be a bit more tricky.

Lynne: absolutely!