Round 1, Fight!

I’m starting to run out of 2013 and with my goal to at least break even this year, it’s time to get serious about my sales.

I’ve made stabs at getting a listing rotation done before, but that was primarily looking at the Model Horse Sales Pages and after looking at the traffic results I’ve moved away from that venue.

Which leaves me with just Etsy and eBay to build my scheduling around.

I’ve built up a nice little herd on Etsy and since the main page can only display 24 horses (6 x 4), anything beyond that isn’t going to catch the eye. I’d still like to keep most of the horses in the store, but it’s time to start up an eBay rotation to get the old horses moving out as the new horses move in.

The 127 Day Rotation

Listings Braindump

So I pulled out the markers and did a braindump on my whiteboard — a slightly off-kilter one since I forgot that Etsy listings are a four month rotation and not three, but the basic idea is there.

When a horse is first finished it will do one round (4 months) on Etsy at the normal price. Then it will go for a 7 day run on eBay at a set price point ($9.99 for stablemates, $4.99 for micros) and then roll back onto Etsy.

From that rough outline I created a spreadsheet in Google Docs to figure out just how many horses I needed in order to create a listing cycle that started with the first horse being listed to eBay and ended when it expired on Etsy.

It turns out a 127 day rotation requires a minimum of 18 horses to complete and since I have 29 horses in the store right now, that’s a perfect fit.

Sea Changes and Reorgs

The Model Horse Shuffle

The last things I need to do is find a way to roll the listing into the new pattern, The Etsy listings aren’t staggered the way I’d need them to be to line up with the new rotations (I got in the habit of renewing a bunch of listings all on the same day). So there will be a bit of Tetris involved in the transition.

After a bit of finagling I got everyone to fit into three rotations. There are still a lot of empty slots, but I didn’t want to pull any of the horses out of the online spotlight for more than two weeks. Right now the plan is to post all three rotations on Mondays, but I might shift things around to a M-W-F. *pokes lists*

*rolls up sleeves* Time to start writing the eBay listings and getting some new photos of the folks about to roll off Etsy! 😀