I survived vacation--can I survive ebay vacation?

Whoo Hoo I'm back from vacation and it was fun...but it sure does take longer each year to recover. We left on Friday before Labor Day and were back Thursday Labor Day week. Traveled over 1300 miles and had lots of fun, ate too much, spent a conservative amount of money and stayed on schedule.

My daughter went to DragonCon and I went shopping and shopping and more shopping. This time we were more comfortable with the Atlanta traffic and how and where to go. If you aren't familiar with DragonCon it is like Halloween on steroids for adults or as I told my daughter---nerd heaven.

Each day I would drop her off at DragonCon and then I would go thrifting. Here, there, and all around town. Atlanta has a lot of Goodwills, Value Villages and some church thrift shops. I used  The Thriftshopper to locate all of my stops in Atlanta. Most were as good as the reviews that had been posted, but some were not so good. Still it was better than going down the list in the phone book!!

We rented a larger car since both of us have small, older cars. This time we had a Toyota Camry. A good ride with plenty of room for stuff!!!

SeeMy side of the car



Her side of the car
And a really packed trunk

I had 8 of the big blue IKEA bags packed with clothing and shoes, two garment bags with suits, jackets and coats. Packing all of this stuff is like a jig saw puzzle, with no pictures to guide you. But we made it back safely and with some money in our pockets. So it was a good trip.

I went to the Buckhead Goodwill twice. For those of you that don't know Atlanta, Buckhead is THE upscale place to be. The first time, there was a clerk going crazy over a pair of shoes. Not just any shoes, a pair of Christian Louboutin platform pumps!! He was all excited because they were genuine and were only $99. I saw them and they were, well just shoes, and nothing special. About a 6" heel with a 1.5" platform. Beige with lots of little straps and of course the trademark red leather soles. Not for me or my store. Of course they would probably sell for $700 or $800 or more. But I would be very nervous spending that much for a single piece of inventory. And I forgot to take a picture. I went back the next day and they had sold!!

I tried to be selective in inventory purchase and I hope I made some good purchases. All I know is that I have a lot of inventory to process.

I always dread getting back and taking my store off of vacation. So much to catch up on. New listing to get ready. Packages to ship. All of that inventory sitting there waiting to be cleaned, washed, sorted and lined up for photos.

I tried to keep up listings while I was on vacation. I scheduled 3 new items for every day while I was gone and I tried to get some of the expired listings relisted because I am trying to get everything over to Good Till Cancelled and get them spread out over the days so that everything doesn't renew on the same day.

That was where I made my mistake.

 In my haste to renew listings I made a very serious error. I duplicated some listings on ebay. Bad thing to do. I think if it had been one listing I would have been OK, but it was 10 listings. I did it because I was in a hurry, not paying attention and just plain didn't check. I had listed the 10 listings before and didn't delete them from the sold file. Very bad thing to do. So ebay  put me on "vacation" and restricted me from new listings for 7 days.

At first I panicked since we depend on my ebay income for bills and just getting the extras (food, gas, doctors visits, you know the "extras"). I called ebay to see if they could fix things. No way. I have to stay on restrictions until Thursday at 11:44 am. But then I stopped to think things through. I don't have the pressure to get things listed every day along with getting the new inventory ready. I have seven days to get organized. I can still list a bit here and there and just schedule it for when my "vacation" is over.

I was afraid that I wouldn't sell anything while I was restricted from listing new items and I had bunches of listings that would end during those 7 days. I will be down to about 500 listings by the end of the 7 days.
But so far I sold 7 items Saturday and Sunday and 2 items each day on Monday and Tuesday. I just hope that it keeps up for the rest of my "vacation" because the bills aren't on vacation.

I don't recommend that you get an ebay vacation this way, but I will make the most of my "vacation" and be ready at 11:45 on Thursday to jump in and get back in the ebay game. I've taken time to go through my listings and remove items that have been listed forever and are low profit items. I also plan to refresh my store categories and spruce up the store. Hopefully, I'll get it all done before "vacation" is over.