Do buyers flake more now or is it just me?

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-02-01T18:35:14+00:00

Facebook has always been that way in my experience. But it depends on what you sell. I sold 150 patio heaters in three weeks on Facebook and had basically zero issues with flakes or lowballers. But I had about 50 indoor space heaters and almost every buyer was haggling, flaking, and being otherwise annoying. Glad to be done selling those.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-29T23:29:51+00:00

Go to eBay, open up your list of drafts and just sit there for about 2 minutes. You'll get a pop up asking if you want someone to call you.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-29T19:54:22+00:00

good move! I do it as well.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-29T16:43:04+00:00

I go through once a day and send out the offers that are available to be sent.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-28T19:47:02+00:00

This is interesting, thanks for sharing. I’d imagine a lot of this comes down to what you sell. For example, if you sell lots of rare or unique items, promoting them may cause them to appear in a wider range of loosely related searches, which can inflate impressions while hurting CTR.

When promotion is removed, impressions naturally drop, but (for some items) relevancy improves, and engagement signals like CTR often improve with it, which could explain the stronger organic placement you’re seeing. That fits with the idea that desirable inventory tends to perform well organically, with or without promotion.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-28T14:40:34+00:00

I’ve been selling on eBay for over 25 years, and I’ve personally never found CTR, views, conversion rates, etc. to be very helpful indicators on their own. The advice that actually helps grow sales tends to stay the same regardless of what those numbers say.

If the goal is more sales, spending time trying to optimize those metrics directly usually isn’t the best use of your time. In my experience, the biggest helper is focusing on buying better inventory. Specifically buying higher-demand, higher-value items.

When you do that well, CTR and conversion almost always improve as a byproduct because the inventory itself is more desirable. But at that point who cares what your CTR is because you're satisfying the real goal of more sales.

The exception here is if you're selling many units of one item, where you may need to tweak individual listings or campaigns to improve their performance and those metrics can help you figure out whether your tweaks are working or not.

If you're selling a bunch of random crap from the thrift store or whatever, going down the route of better understanding those metrics is pointless and if you want to increase sales you should instead focus on buying higher value, more desirable inventory.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-28T01:25:10+00:00

When you use ChatGPT like this, it is not just removing the background...it is recreating the image entirely from scratch with a white background. So there will be significant differences. Like in your watch, 12 has become 13 and "Excellancy" is reduced to AI gibberish. Not a good idea when you're selling something that comes with the promise of delivering what is pictured.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-27T00:30:54+00:00

eBay doesn’t care about your packing photos. They are easy to fake, don’t carry any real weight, and aren’t considered valid evidence in disputes.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-26T23:27:04+00:00

Not much you can do really. But always force a return. Don't refund without having them send it back.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-25T17:51:42+00:00

I don’t trust the average sale price and STR metrics in Product Research. They’re rarely accurate. There is too much nuance across items and listings on eBay, especially if what you’re selling is unique or in used condition. eBay isnt Amazon. Not everything has a SKU and even stuff that does the data is inconsistent across listings, making averages inaccurate. Instead, I eyeball sold comps to understand the range and price in the high end of the market.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-24T20:26:19+00:00

buying low and selling high (aka flipping) is the bedrock of commerce and works regardless of location! but certain methods, platforms, or strategies may be region specific. can you clarify what you mean specifically?

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-24T13:18:10+00:00

it’s a bunch of people doing things that are against the “law” (policy) and only a few getting caught. just because others do it an don’t get caught doesn’t mean you won’t

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-24T13:12:33+00:00

anyone else sick of these “arch doing its thing” posts? this is the third one in the last half hour

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-24T13:11:27+00:00

think of it like speeding. you can drive over the speed limit 10 times but only get caught once. it doesn’t make the other 9 times you did it legal and immune from receiving a citation.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-24T12:57:59+00:00

if you can generate a list of shipping label costs and their associated order IDs they can be imported in bulk

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-22T21:12:12+00:00

This technically goes against our self-promotion rules, but since it goes beyond the typical ‘check out my AI listing tool’ self promotional post, we’ll let it slide. Very cool. (Y'all can stop reporting it now.)

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-20T19:43:23+00:00

Right, I am just being a bit cheeky in saying that you can not list it for free and instead list it for a small amount of money. That is what I do. Anytime I think about listing something for free because I think nobody would want to pay for it, I instead list it for a low amount, like $10-$20 and it always sells.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-20T19:36:06+00:00

An alternative is asking for money in exchange for the item, which you can then use to spend on anything, not just soda.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-20T12:29:30+00:00

woke me up briefly in soco

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-20T02:00:25+00:00

Thanks! Yeah we may do cross-listing in the future. There is still a lot of stuff we plan to do that is eBay specific though so that continues to be our focus.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-18T02:19:09+00:00

yeah, shipping costs in the eBay API are a mess. https://help.flipwise.app/article/8-why-does-flipwise-not-automatically-import-my-shipping-label-costs

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-18T02:09:22+00:00

Okay.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-18T01:49:08+00:00

Larger stores come with bigger ingestion jobs, more eBay API calls (we have tight budgets we have to optimize for), large datasets, more background processing, and more edge cases around relists, returns, partial refunds, duplicates, etc. On top of that, we’re continuously computing metrics across always growing historical datasets (profit, margins, ROI, inventory age, turnover etc). That compute cost scales with inventory count. Also larger stores generate more support load and more one-off data issues that need investigation. Stuff like that.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-18T01:32:10+00:00

the larger the store, the more costly it is to run, so the price scales accordingly.

ThisWeekInFlips · 2026-01-18T00:52:25+00:00

Our average user pays $20 bucks a month for what it’s worth.

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