Solo seller · home & kitchen
A busy month that made less money. Here’s where it went.
A one-person eBay shop selling about 350 orders a month found that ad fees and four quiet loss-makers were eating the profit from its best sellers.
Illustrative example. This story is built from how SellerDesk works, to show what using it looks like. The seller and the figures are examples, not a customer’s results.
- Marketplace
- eBay UK
- Stores
- 1
- Team
- Just the owner
- Orders a month
- About 350
Where they started
Sales were up on the month, but the money in the bank wasn’t. Seller Hub showed the sales, payouts showed the deposits, and the Promoted Listings report showed the ad fees, but nothing put them together per listing.
Product costs lived in a spreadsheet that hadn’t been updated since a supplier put prices up. Working out which listings actually made money would have taken an evening nobody had.
What they did
- 1
Connected the store and synced 90 days
One click through eBay’s own sign-in. SellerDesk read orders, listings and the finance ledger: sale price, eBay fees, ad fees, postage labels and refunds.
- 2
Imported costs from the old spreadsheet
Exported the product list, pasted in unit cost and packaging, and uploaded it back. The preview showed what would change before anything was saved.
- 3
Sorted Products by ‘losing money’
Four listings lost money on every sale once fees, ads and labels were counted. One was a top-ten seller by units.
- 4
Worked through the weekly profit plan
The plan led with the ad rate on the best seller: nearly every sale was already paying an ad fee, so it suggested halving the rate. Next came new prices for the loss-makers, worked out for a 10% margin.
- 5
Applied the moves, one click each
Each line went to eBay only when the owner pressed Apply. The plan page kept a running estimate of what the applied moves were saving.
The sales were never the problem. The leaks were small and spread over five places, so nobody saw them until they were in one list, in order.
More stories
Illustrative- Kettle & CrumbIllustrativeTwo-person reseller · kitchenware
Listing three times faster, without copying a supplier’s page.
A two-person team buying kitchenware wholesale went from about 25 minutes per listing to about 9, and stopped publishing listings eBay would later pull.
- minutes per new listing
- 25 → 9
- listings published in the first month
- 70
- listings removed since the checks went in
- 0
- HarbourlineIllustrativeAgency · 9 client stores
Nine client stores, five people, no shared passwords.
An agency running nine clients’ eBay stores moved them into one organisation with roles and store-level access, so nobody holds a client’s password and every “who changed that?” has an answer.
- client stores in one login
- 9
- eBay passwords shared with the team
- 0
- place to answer “who changed that?”
- 1
See where your profit is leaking this week.
Connect your eBay store, add what your products cost, and get a plan of what to fix first.
Nothing changes on eBay until you approve it.