# EBAY, your experiences wanted.



## lincolnapparel (Nov 21, 2009)

Is it worth it trying to sell T-shirts on eBay? I'm trying to get the word out about my T-shirts, so I posted a couple there as a test. (I have an old eBay account I used to buy things a few years ago). In the listing I put a link to my "about me" page on my website, hoping that people will click on it and see more of my designs on my website. Since eBay is well known and gets so much traffic, I am thinking of using it to "advertise" my T-shirts (but not as the main online venue for my shirts).

I already sell on Etsy but at least right now, it feels just as hard to get traffic there as my own website (in fact, I've sold more shirts off of my own site than on Etsy).

What are your experiences with eBay? Is it at all effective trying to sell or advertise T-shirts there?


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## cerithomas (Jan 22, 2010)

Hi, ebay is all about appealing to the mass market, have multiple designs and loads of auctions listed at 1 time from my experience on monitoring successful sales of any item, I have sold allot on ebay in the past but not clothing, I have monitored clothign sellers as I intend to do this myself shortly and most succesful t-shirt sellers list around 100 + items of different designs in a buyitnow dutch format (offering multiple of the same item per auction) with a profit margin of around £5 each approx $8 and they tend to sell approx 1 of each design per week, dependent on designs, appeal and time of year some designs will always sell better (for example you would expect to sell loads of "I love Chritsmas," t-shirts on the run up to christmas and next to none afterwards).

If you managed to sell 1 of each t-shirt per week and listed 100 tshirts with £5 or $9 profit you would expect to make £500 or $800 before ebay and paypal fees.

To list an item in a normal category (not business, mobile, motor or property) each auction would cost you £0.40p to list, not sure what U.S fees are to list but this would work out to be approx $0.64 and final value fees for a t-shirt costing upto £49.99 is 9.9% not including postage, so for the sale of a £7.99 or $12.88 t-shirt you would make approx £7.19 -0.40p listing fee= £6.79 or $10.94 

Then you would need to take off the PayPal receiving fees of which for the U.K are 3.4 % + 0.20p 
leaving you with £6.36 or $10.25 so selling 100 t-shirts per week would make you £636 or $1025 minus the t-shirt and print cost each for which I will allow £3 or $4.83 meaning your true profit after all expenses for the sale of 100 t-shirts per week would be £336 or $542

Note: This model is based upon a basic auction with no subtitle and 1 free picture and charging the customer an additional fee for the postage, this amount would change if being sold in a ebay shop and is worked out using the UK ebay and payapal fees, other countries will differ slightly.

I already had these numbers worked out so thought I would share, you can monitor sales on ebay by visting a buyitnow auction and clicking a link to the right hand of the auction named history, here you will find all the sales made including dates. you can also monitor this using a great tool provided by Goofbay - eBay Tools, eBay Misspellings, eBay Typos, eBay Sniper, eBay Bargains under > ebay tools > most popular, put in a term, search and it will show you amount of sales made for any item including watch count which is very useful and usually hidden.

Oh and if you want to save on the cost of listing multiple pictures in a ebay auction and the use of nice templates I suggest Use - Free image hosting and photo sharing from Use.com which is completely free method to create nice looking ebay auctions.

You have a niche market with your lincoln t-shirts but I feel you would need to offer more variety in terms of theme and designs to truely make a living off selling t-shirts on ebay, it all falls down to how much you want to make, hope my findings help you in some way and good luck,

Ceri.


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## sgood (Oct 17, 2009)

Thanks for sharing that Ceri! We are looking at setting up an eBay store at the moment and this information is really helpful. 

Cheers.


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## lincolnapparel (Nov 21, 2009)

Ceri,

Thanks for the helpful post! Is eBay only good for cheaper, mass market/bargain type stuff or would you be able to get decent prices for higher quality items?

I'm worried about having to list T-shirts at a starting price below what it cost to make them plus the eBay fees. Doing some searches on eBay it seems most of the T-shirts listed are at around $10 which is incredibly cheap for a T-shirt.

I used the free insertion fees (eBay gives you 5 per month) to list my T-shirts so it didn't cost me anything to list them. They didn't attract any bids (though they did attract questions). I listed them at $14.99 (I don't want to have to possibly pay to sell it if it sold).

I don't really plan to use eBay as my main venue (that's what my website is for), just as a way to "advertise" my T-shirts.


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## Steph (Jan 26, 2008)

I sold on Ebay for a few months, and found that I really had to lower my prices before anyone would buy. There are so many other printed shirts on there, and it seems that the customers didn't care so much about the particular design as getting a 'good deal'. As well, I found the customers on Ebay to be very different from customers to my own site or my Etsy shop. I had a way higher rate of customers claiming they did not get their shirts and asking for their money back, and found I was getting more emails from these customers than I did from my site/Etsy (asking when it would be delivered, changing their minds on color/size etc.). 

It could just be that I was selling to a different demographic based on the super low prices I had to list at, or it could be a different demographic that shops on Ebay altogether. 

Either way, between lowering my prices and the added time I was spending writing back and forth to customers, I found it was not worth it for me.


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## cerithomas (Jan 22, 2010)

Chris, I would unfortunately say ebay is better for the mass market sale of items, everyone goes to ebay for a bargain it appears from past experience even when offering high end brand items the customer expects to get it far below rrp, it's just the way of ebay, large sales lesser profit margin.

Finding a niche on ebay is the best idea and you do have a niche with your lincoln tshirts but the unfotunate thing is few people are searching for them and there is so much competition why would they choose you? the reason usually boils down to cost and if there are more commercial items on ebay at equal or lesser pricing they will unfortunately choose the commercial option.

Last month abraham lincoln was searched for 65 times on ebay (according to keyworddiscovery.com) which is very little and not necessarily targeted towards t-shirts.

If I was you I would stick to website sales and put all your resources into optimizing your website for lincoln related search terms, create internal pages for your website based around commonly search terms related to lincoln for example something you could do is create t-shirts targeted towards lincoln quotes which is highly searched on google - last month on google "abraham lincoln quotes," was searched for 33,100 times, now once again these may not be targeted searches towards tshirts but the volume is so high it gives a good chance for a return. 

Best way to do this would be to create a internal page of your website for example http://lincolnapparel.com/abraham-lincoln-quotes-html write a 200+ word article about lincoln quotes and advertise your tshirts within this page, ensure abraham lincoln quotes is detailed in the title, description and keywords of the page and ideally in <H1> html tags (search on google if not sure of this) Optimal Word Count & Web Page Copy Length | SEO Book.com is a good article on how to write good web copy. Then link to this page from a sitemap on your website so it can be found by the search engines, submit your website to dmoz if you haven't already (this is a online directly and takes ages to get listed but once you have it has a great impact on your rankings) and get other lincoln related website to link to your website by offering link swaps (google counts links to a website like votes, the more the better but they have to be acquired gradually as a website grows otherwise this rings alarm bells, a couple of links a week is realistic and achievable) using these techniques over and over again for different search terms related to lincoln creating different pages brings more visitors and more potential for sales, simply read up on google about seo to get a better idea.

To find more keywords to target on your website use - google keyword tool: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal which displays global searches from the month prior and other related synonyms to any keyword entered.

Let me no if you have any further questions, good luck!


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## custeez (May 23, 2009)

I have one design that I sell on ebay. I sell it for 19.99. I have received every payment within a week, about 95% instantly. I have 100% positive feedback. No one ever claimed to not have received it. Some guy in China stole my design and is selling it in his ebay store and has sold some but....what can you do? Someone could just as easily steal it from my website. I sell with buy it now only, and can list all of the sizes in one listing. I would have some up there now, but I am sold out. 

The only thing I don't like is that ebay takes 12% of the sale price, which is way too much.

I don't know how someone can claim to know someone else's profit margin, either.


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## cerithomas (Jan 22, 2010)

Hi Drew, I like the look of your designs and websites, shame your designs have been stolen on ebay, this has happened to me many times but not in the clothing area. What I decided to do was create a trademark logo with the ® symbol and use it in all my designs (only in small print so it doesn't effect the appearance of the design) and then you have intellectual rights to that design and wont need to register a trademark against each individual design, if someone then copies your design and simply removes the trademark ® you can take them to court or simply put on ebay easily get the listing removed, I noticed others were selling your cactus t-shirt on ebay, was this the t-shirt that was stolen? If you were the first to list this item you could get the copycats auctions removed by reporting them to vero - Reporting Intellectual Property Infringements (VeRO) as ebay can trace your listing history.

It does cost to register a trademark and if I was you I would trademark a logo to use within your designs, thats what I intend to do when I go into the clothing area, it does take a while to get a trademark registered but in the mean time you can use TM which means unregistered trademark but if anyone still copies your work you can file against them as you have put an application in to register the trademark.

Heres is a similar case where someones logo was stolen by a departent store and put on their t-shirts with advice - Stopping a Department Store from Using your Logo

Hope this helps!


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## custeez (May 23, 2009)

Yes that is the design. Some guy from China is selling it. I am not going to be able to sue him. I contacted ebay but they really didn't seem to care.


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## greyhorsewoman (Jul 19, 2007)

Ebay just announced a new store pricing system that may not be advantageous for smaller stores.

eBay.com : 2010 Spring Seller Update


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## lincolnapparel (Nov 21, 2009)

Thanks for all the replies!



> I sold on Ebay for a few months, and found that I really had to lower my prices before anyone would buy. There are so many other printed shirts on there, and it seems that the customers didn't care so much about the particular design as getting a 'good deal'. As well, I found the customers on Ebay to be very different from customers to my own site or my Etsy shop. I had a way higher rate of customers claiming they did not get their shirts and asking for their money back, and found I was getting more emails from these customers than I did from my site/Etsy (asking when it would be delivered, changing their minds on color/size etc.).


I've always wondered about the "fleabay" bargain-bin aspect of eBay, and whether that would hurt me. Maybe 10 years ago eBay was a great place to sell T-shirts like mine, but maybe not now (especially with the direction they've taken the past few years). I've always worried about their policies (too many fees, no negative feedback for buyers, etc.). It's just that it gets so much more traffic (and is so much more widely known) than Etsy, eCrater, and other sites (too bad it's basically a monopoly). Are there any sites like this just for T-shirts? (not Cafepress, Zazzle, etc. - sites where you can sell/promote T-shirts you've already made).

Thanks for the advice Ceri. I'm already working on SEO for my website (little bits at a time). Apparently it's already on page 2 of Google and page 1 of Yahoo for "abraham lincoln shirt", which was searched for 590 times last month. "lincoln shirt" was searched for 2900 times, I'm thinking of optimizing for that. How many searches should some keywords get for it to be worth it for me to optimize my site for them?



> Best way to do this would be to create a internal page of your website for example http://lincolnapparel.com/abraham-lincoln-quotes-html write a 200+ word article about lincoln quotes and advertise your tshirts within this page, ensure abraham lincoln quotes is detailed in the title, description and keywords of the page and ideally in <H1> html tags (search on google if not sure of this)


Aren't making pages like that unrelated to your site "keyword spamming"? Perhaps it works, but can't you be penalized in the SERPs for this? I've noticed some sites like CustomInk and Broken Arrow do this with "local" searches so that they come up when you do a search for, say, "screen printing springfield illinois" (even though they're not based anywhere around here).

In any case I'd love to get the attention of other Lincoln bloggers/site owners - I think this would help with my T-shirts. I also plan to sell locally at events this year, and try to get my T-shirts in more local shops. 

Wow Drew, that's one of the concerns I've always had about eBay - there's a lot of IP infringement there. Sorry to hear that one of your designs was stolen - that's a shame.

I always put a © copyright statement on my shirts (in small print in the corner of the design), but I'm not sure how much that would stop counterfeiters (particularly in China). I've heard about this happening on Etsy too, but not as much.


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## RSWORDS (Jan 30, 2010)

custeez said:


> I have one design that I sell on ebay. I sell it for 19.99. I have received every payment within a week, about 95% instantly. I have 100% positive feedback. No one ever claimed to not have received it. Some guy in China stole my design and is selling it in his ebay store and has sold some but....what can you do? Someone could just as easily steal it from my website. I sell with buy it now only, and can list all of the sizes in one listing. I would have some up there now, but I am sold out.
> 
> The only thing I don't like is that ebay takes 12% of the sale price, which is way too much.
> 
> I don't know how someone can claim to know someone else's profit margin, either.


If you report him to EBAY they shoudl do something about it.


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## CherokeeDesign (Jan 31, 2010)

I've been selling on there about 9 months. I've run maybe 10 different designs. I do them all as heat press, so I make them to order. My experience is that it's all in finding your niche. I have been selling military type shirts, anywhere from 5-20 a week. 

I don't make a great deal of profit since I heat press them, and then the shipping, ebay/PayPal fees, but it's a nice little something extra. Heat pressing is good because I only sell 2 colors of shirts, and don't have a lot of money tied up in a lot of finished shirts. Designs that don't sell, I just stop listing and don't have a pile of unsold ones. I just keep my 2 colors of shirts, and print them as orders come in. I also only list them as "Buy it Now", I have them listed at what I think is a good price ($16/shipped), any less and it's not even worth doing. I profit maybe $5-$6 a shirt after shipping and the ebay/PayPal fees.


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## SHIROINEKO (Mar 31, 2010)

Yeah ebay is for cheap products. not for good products.


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