In 1997, Jim Carrey took the stage at the Golden Globes to present an award and said with a huge smile, “How was your weekend? Mine was good.” This got a huge laugh from the crowd because that room was full of entertainment industry professionals that knew that his movie, Liar Liar, had just ruled the box office that past weekend with huge numbers and his statement was a reference to that.
In the same way, when I am asking you how was your holiday, I’m not just asking if Santa was good to you or if all your holiday baking came out OK. What I am really asking is how did your holiday selling go. (Though, don’t misunderstand me, I really do hope your holiday was restful and fun!)
While Amazon claims this was their best holiday season ever and analysts debate whether e-commerce is up, down or the same as usual, us smaller retail forces have waged our own war against this recession that the news won’t cover. We are each running businesses distinct and unique, some of you are recession proof and some of you were probably hit really hard. How did you fare?
For us, oddly enough, this holiday season was pretty much the same as last year. We actually put less listings up but ended up selling the same amount because a lot of random items from our store that we weren’t even marketing were picked off. Auctions were also at above average prices which is always nice. It’s especially cool because we were so busy with incoming sales that we never got a chance to list a lot of listings that we’d planned to list so it was nice that we did fine without them.
Priced Nostalgia also hit 100% feedback on eBay for the last year AND all 4.9s in our DSRs in Dec through some divine act of the feedback star gods so our Best Match placement was insanely good. Just about everything we listed as a BIN was sold within 24 hours even if we weren’t the best price and I have to think that was because of Best Match since our results were one of the first ones that came up at all times.
As a buyer, I really hate Best Match but, as a seller reaping the benefits of it in Dec, I have to say I was a fan. 😉
Amazon sales also had a spike but, while Amazon made have kicked eBay’s butt in a more general world sense, for us, eBay still was the bigger earner on the identical items.
Now you don’t have to give us numbers but I would like to make this a sort of informal survey. How was your holiday sales season? Were this year’s sales in comparison to last year? Better? Worse? The Same?
How was your holiday? Mine was good.
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