Our eBay Month - March 2011

There's so many ways of looking at things.  I have no idea which the best way is.  Maybe I should have eschewed graduate studies in history and got that MBA after all, but I have no idea what insights a person with an MBA would bring to bear on our little eBay business.   Well I can think of one, perhaps.

Suffice it to say, we made a bit more money in March, than in February, but a little less than January.  So far January has been the year's high point.  Also, the only reason we made more money in March than in February is because March has more days in it.  The average per day of sales in March was actually a little less than previous month.   And this is scary - over 1/3 of the total income for the month came on ony 3 days of sales.  Without those 3 very good days, or if those 3 days had just been normal sales days, the month would have been a disaster, sales wise.

I keep track of a lot of things, but I can't always make sense of them.  For example, our busiest sales day in January was Monday, in February it was Tuesday, and in March it was Saturday.  I have no idea what to read into that.  It was the same way last year.  I'd hope over a long period of time I'd begin to see a pattern, then see if I could use it to increase sales somewhat.  So far, nothing absolute. 

I know that on average the number of items we sell daily has remained virtually the same during the 3 months of the year.  March & Feb were exactly the same (but again, March had more days than Feb) and both were just a touch higher than January. 

The thing that has made the difference so far this year, the thing that made January the best month so far was the sale of antique photos.   We ask more for them on average than we do the postcards, and for some reason we sold a lot more in January than we did in Feb or March.  Our postcard sales are still steady, actually increasing modestly, but the photo sales are more erratic.

Maybe the photos are the key. 

At any rate our little business churns along, producing money we otherwise would not have.