I don't know what everyone else thinks but where are all the buyers.

So far not even one buy. I have tried cutting prices as much as I can but no luck not one sell yet.... One postcard I have has already sold here for 22 Euros earlier, yet I cannot sell it for 3 EUROS!!!

Also I think the prices achieved on this site seem very low like .50 E for many items. I don't know what other people here think?

How is everyone else doing at selling in October?

I must admit ordinary things seem to sell better on average on *bay

Postcardshop

Hello,

The total postcards sold on Delcampe in October was 151.646, that's quite a lot, isn't it?
You may want to read Scview posting on "how to sell for USA-sellers'".
A large part from what he tells applies to UK-sellers too.
And it's definately not true that only cheap PC's sell. I'm a small seller (yes, there's PRO next to my name, but it's not my core business) and currently I have 10 cards with bids (none of them real top cards) with an average starting bid around 6 Euros.
My impression (as opposed to the E. site) is that Delcampe-buyers are willing to pay more here than buyers on the E.site)
There's one thing though: because of the high quantity of pc's here and because there are no insertion fees, you need quantity first. So if you really want to make it here you'll need to put loads and loads of PC's on.
Has I said, I consider myself a small seller, and I have currently around 6500 postcards on, which is, in Delcampe terms, in no means a big store.
I see that you have currently 54 items on, that's the problem, not the pc's, neither their price.

So Postcardshop has 0 bids on 54 offerings for a 0% success rate and Aapshop has 10 bids on 6500 offerings for a 0.16% success rate...............am I missing something??.........was your entry meant to be encouraging?Both your failure rates are in the same ball park.Obviously the more items you list,the percentage of bids are likely to increase and since Delcampe allows free listing it is to one's advantage to list as many items as possible..good,bad and ugly.On Ebay one would be bankrupted with this strategy but that is why we are all gathered together on Delcampe.Hope your luck improves!!!!!!!!

The 10 bids were merely mentioned because of their average opening bid. (because postcardshop thought that only cards for 0,50 Euros were sold).
I didn't mention (because this wasn't relevant in this discussion) that over 90% of the PC's in my shop have a fixed price, and do get sold on a daily basis.
I've sold 850 items here in little over a year, and I repeat, this is by far not my core business.
So your 0,16% rate is not right. Further more, Delcampe is growing at a rate of 300 members a day, and a large part of them do buy. In fact a lot of the cards I sell recently are on Delcampe for 6 months to a year and sold to new members (this can easily be checked by looking at the date they became a member or at their member number).
I encourage Original Poster again to read Stefano's (Scview) posting a couple of lines below this one, and especially how much he
a) sold here in little over a year
b) saved in comparison to eBay.
I hope I made myself clear now.

For another comparison, I've listed 1136 cards in the past year and sold 317.

I'm even more 'small-time' than others here--but still a lot more cards than the OP--and have a 28% sell rate. (Some cards have sold after 40 weeks, it's true, but hey--it's free to list and fun!) 25-35% was my rate at *bay, too, at a much higher cost, so Delcampe is where I do my seller and most of my buying.

Hi,

Let me offer you a little bit more encouragement. Here are more recent numbers comparing "MY" experiences of Ebay to Delcampe.

As with any job, it will take hard work, smart planning and constant thinking to make Delcampe work for you.

My background; I do this postcard business full time and have been the sales volume leader on ebay for five years in a row . I have over 100,000+ net positive feedbacks there and have sold close to 1.7 million dollars worth of postcards there. So I will judge that my opinion on ebay has some (A tiny bit?) of merit.

When I first analyzed my sale numbers on Delcampe for items listed, sales made and dollars per sale, AND then compared those numbers to my established Ebay storefront & auctions numbers, I was shocked to discover two ratios that made my decision to pull many of my my sales off of ebay and onto Delcampe very easy.


FIRST: Profit

My sales return per item on eBay is~ $11.14/sale and my sales on Delcampe is ~$11.22/sale. I also make more profit on Delcampe per sale because I do not have to pay the insertion fee .35, or the higher Final value fee (another 3% in savings); That adds up to an extra .65 cents profit per sale, more so if you factor in re listing fees and an items turn around to sale time.

For me that turn around time line averages 5.7 months. at .10 a month re listing fees on Ebay that is another .60 cents/item I save in fees.

For me... I save an extra $1.25 more per sale and make an extra .08 per sale for a total of $1.33 more in profit per item on Delcampe per sale.

SECOND; [Items listed Vs Items sold]

When I first looked at Delcampe I had 48,000 cards up on ebay. I put an initial 10,000 run on Delcampe to see what it would do. I started comparing ratios of items listed to items sold on both sites per month. At the six month point of being on Delcampe I compared the ratios of the two sites to each other.

On Ebay I have to list 48 items to get one sale per month. 48/1 (pretty much a steady ratio the entire 5 years I was Ebay's top volume postcard seller)

at six months on On Delcampe my ratio was 23 to 1 (That surprised me, so I put up another 10,000 cards on Delcampe)


at 12 months on On Delcampe my sales ratio dropped down to 15 to 1 (That surprised me even more, I put up another 15,000 cards on Delcampe)

Now I am at almost 18 months on On Delcampe and my sales ratio is down to 10 to 1

Comparison: Ebay 48/1 Delcampe 10/1 items listed/sale

Comparison: A Delcampe sold item generates $1.33/item more profit for me vs an Ebay sold item. That is almost 11% more profit/sale

My Conclusion:

I came to the decision that that could sell more items on Delcampe for the same amount of Items listed on Ebay. [With an additional 11% profit in my pocket.]

Add in that on Ebay you have to pay a monthly reoccurring fees for all the items that are re listing themselves in your store and you save another .05 cents per item. For me that was almost $2,200 a month more in savings.

THE BIG QUESTION: Numbers are nice.. But what really sells on Delcampe?

note : My opinion below is subject to change without notice depending on the market.

1) Good clean cards, any price range from any where. The key I found was to create a critical Mass of items (10,000 was my number to start) so that you will be taken seriously and also be seen in the vast swimming pool of 5,000,000 postcards for sale that is delcampe. My own sales did not really take off until I had 5,000 items listed.

2) Obtaining critical mass; Target a regional area , or a specialty that interests you and flood it with the best cards you can find. I have 3,000 NC/SC USA postcards as the base of my business and support that with 15,000 European postcards. Every month I sit down and plan an increase in another section of Delcampe and add all I can to that section... Asia, Africa, Oceania, Topicals.. whatever, it varies from month to month. The point is... keep pushing and adding postcards into your Delcampe storefront. My two base sections ( NC/SC & Europe) each now generate $1,000/mos in sales on Delcampe for me.

3) Market..Market...Market I tell all my Ebay customers about my Delcampe storefront. All my old customers get periodic emails about items in their collectible area on Delcampe. I run ads advertising my Delcampe storefront... and so on.

4) Never stop adding new cards. Anywhere, Anyplace, Any price range. When you make a sale in an area.... put five more up the next day if you can. Target your buyers with more of what they want. My best customers came from other customers that are pleased with how I find stuff for them.

5) Look at other dealers listings and emulate what you like and avoid what you do not.

6) Never stop anticipating the next great change in your business.

Example:

Delcampe now automatically puts your item into GOOGLEBASE if it is a fixed price item. That puts your item into the most trafficked website on the Internet. Due to Google rules auction items are not indexed by Googlebase.

My reaction: ALL my items are now switched to fixed price after one week at auction.

The results: Sales are climbing. As I write this I have come off of a month of $300/day average sales... and it is still slowly increasing. I haven't changed what I list, I just expose them to googlebase faster to the get the exposure on Google.

Stefano

As you can see I have had a few sales now.

Better than before I am up to 4 sales on 200 cards.

One of my problems is that I thinkI am listing my prices reasonably, even cheaply but still no decent sales. I do take your point though about volume. I do have about 3000 cards but I have this nightmare of spending weeks listing and then just getting a handful of sales. Hardly worth the man hours involved?

It may be I sale English cards that are not so popular here. But none of my Freng ones have sold can you see why??? Advice please...

PCS

As you can see I have had a few sales now.

Better than before I am up to 4 sales on 200 cards.

One of my problems is that I thinkI am listing my prices reasonably, even cheaply but still no decent sales. I do take your point though about volume. I do have about 3000 cards but I have this nightmare of spending weeks listing and then just getting a handful of sales. Hardly worth the man hours involved?

It may be I sale English cards that are not so popular here. But none of my Freng ones have sold can you see why??? Advice please...

PCS

Hi PCS,

Some thoughts;

Look at the pool composition of postcards for sale on Delcampe International. Take note of the number of items listed within each section.

In the French Section there are are currently 4,000,000 French postcards competing for the same market of buyers as you.

That is a lot of competition. You will have to make sure your prices including shipping are cheaper than the other sellers.

In the UK section There are only 45,000 postcards listed (I have 2,000 there myself). Much less competition.

Granted that there are far fewer UK buyers than French buyers now. But with the new added upload of your fixed price items into Google on Delcampe, I would think you would be far better selling UK cards mostly (98%), and only put up French cards (2%) from time to time.

I do have French postcards up myself (2,800), but only because they were in a listing pile here and there (They add up). I do not plan to post large (To me that would be 5,000 cards or more) amounts into the French area of Delcampe.

I do plan to increase my UK listings up to 5,000 cards with an emphases on Wales, and the channel Islands .

My sales in the UK are are steady, while in the French area they are hit & miss.

Look at countries where the number of listings are relatively small and your listing have a greater chance of being seen. Example: I sell a ton of Norway cards, all the way from old rare ones to modern Cont. Chrome. About $2,200 USD sales a month in fact.

There are currently only 4788 Norway postcards on Delcampe, 1122 of them are mine.

I have a 1/4 chance of my cards being viewed. What do you figure 1122 postcards in France would produce in monthly sales?

it comes out to a 1 out of 3700 chance vice 1 out of 4 chance.

I was taught long ago in my career (Before postcards) as a naval Submarine Officer..work smarter not more.

Look at Delcampe International. Look at how many items are listed in each country. Target the countries where you can get the best ratio of your cards to those already listed.

Sales will follow.

Once sales happen, keep a list, add to the categories that sell as soon as you can. Keep your customers coming back.

Stop listing French cards for now.

There is a topic on this forum where an American seller could not figure out why his rare French postcard would not sell. I did a search for his card (Which actually was a rare card as listed in Neudin) and found 11 others already listed on Delcampe. With shipping 5 already online were cheaper than his.

In a smaller area of Delcampe your listings are much more likely to unique, hence; Interesting to look at for a collector.

As an added note; British colonial stuff is a big seller for me on Delcampe. I sell all the colonies all the time. Once again, from the rare to the modern CONT chrome.

Stefano

Hi PCS,

Some thoughts;

Look at the pool composition of postcards for sale on Delcampe International. Take note of the number of items listed within each section.

In the French Section there are are currently 4,000,000 French postcards competing for the same market of buyers as you.

That is a lot of competition. You will have to make sure your prices including shipping are cheaper than the other sellers.

In the UK section There are only 45,000 postcards listed (I have 2,000 there myself). Much less competition.

Granted that there are far fewer UK buyers than French buyers now. But with the new added upload of your fixed price items into Google on Delcampe, I would think you would be far better selling UK cards mostly (98%), and only put up French cards (2%) from time to time.

I do have French postcards up myself (2,800), but only because they were in a listing pile here and there (They add up). I do not plan to post large (To me that would be 5,000 cards or more) amounts into the French area of Delcampe.

I do plan to increase my UK listings up to 5,000 cards with an emphases on Wales, and the channel Islands .

My sales in the UK are are steady, while in the French area they are hit & miss.

Look at countries where the number of listings are relatively small and your listing have a greater chance of being seen. Example: I sell a ton of Norway cards, all the way from old rare ones to modern Cont. Chrome. About $2,200 USD sales a month in fact.

There are currently only 4788 Norway postcards on Delcampe, 1122 of them are mine.

I have a 1/4 chance of my cards being viewed. What do you figure 1122 postcards in France would produce in monthly sales?

it comes out to a 1 out of 3700 chance vice 1 out of 4 chance.

I was taught long ago in my career (Before postcards) as a naval Submarine Officer..work smarter not more.

Look at Delcampe International. Look at how many items are listed in each country. Target the countries where you can get the best ratio of your cards to those already listed.

Sales will follow.

Once sales happen, keep a list, add to the categories that sell as soon as you can. Keep your customers coming back.

Stop listing French cards for now.

There is a topic on this forum where an American seller could not figure out why his rare French postcard would not sell. I did a search for his card (Which actually was a rare card as listed in Neudin) and found 11 others already listed on Delcampe. With shipping 5 already online were cheaper than his.

In a smaller area of Delcampe your listings are much more likely to unique, hence; Interesting to look at for a collector.

As an added note; British colonial stuff is a big seller for me on Delcampe. I sell all the colonies all the time. Once again, from the rare to the modern CONT chrome.

Stefano