Get a list on my items
Is there a way to get a list on my items showing Country, Scott Number, and Price? Somehow a large number on my items have had their prices changed. I usually sell for around 35-45 percent of scotts. Many of my 3200 are showing 90-120 percent of scotts. I have no idea what happened but my sales have declined are taking a hit. A list would help me find the problem and correct the prices. Right now I have to look at each of the 3200 items. This is a monumental problem. Any ideas as to how I can locate the errors and correct them.
Comments
Just select everything in your store and export it to a .csv file report. Then you can sort and analyze your listings any way you want.
One other approach would be to download your offerings and then calculate the ratio of HIP Value to your offered price. This is not super clean given the accuracy of HIP Values, but might lessen the size of the subset you need to look at.
Bob
Hip values can be incredibly far off base. Take US Scott #210 used - several hundred are listed for less than 25 cents and yet the HIP value for a used copy is $7 - not in your wildest dreams unless it has a fancy cancel
If you look at the sellers feedback, the very last one he got was from 2009.
I think I stated clearly that HIP values are not super clean and was not looking to turn this into another thread trashing HIP values. Plenty of those to find here. The OP was looking for a way to parse through 3000 listings to find out what might be askew. Any ideas on how to figure that out?
Bob
Why would you give him a bad tool to use that will take him longer to work through. From what Tom is stating I think I what may be going on. He didn't state which Scott cat values he was using. Now if it is mostly the older listings and he never went back to UPDATE to a more current Cat Scott's DROPPED a number of the prices one of the worst was Brazil where on many items they gutted the prices by as much as 75% lower. A fair number of the British had their prices lowered.
Which is what Henry stated above about having newer cat. You can't list items 7-10 years earlier and expect for the cat values NOT to change.
"Why would you give him a bad tool to use that will take him longer to work through"
Wow that is some statement.
I attempted to suggest some programmatic ways to sort through 3k plus listings to fix a problem. My first suggestion, to which I have yet to see any other reasonable approach, is a bit technical and did assume that the OP had somewhat current CVs embedded in his listing data. My 2nd suggestion clearly implied that HIP value data has issues(again WELL FLESHED OUT ON THIS BOARD) but would be easy to calculate and might give a very rough sort to get started. Of course there is the old, pull out the catalog and go through it listing by listing approach. Probably the best approach.
Just spitballing ideas, not trying to cause harm.
Bob
Even if you take into account some of the others issues, you still have the issues that those values also include vales for auctions, fixed price and lots. In order to come to some reasonable price range you are going to have to do a number of sorts just to get to the information that you are looking for.
How is that going to be quicker having to do some research that way instead of having a set of cats. and either getting a csv file and go through them that way or to go into your listings, sort by country and cat number and go through it that way without have to do different searches for each item that you have in the store? It's going someone far longer to do it the way you are suggesting, that's part of the reason I say it's really a bad tool to use that way. It's not really practical for doing that on 3,000 listings or more.
Doing it that way will take him weeks to do it. To have the cats right in front of you and use either the csv file or to go through the listings sorted by country and cat can be done a lot faster. (I know because I do it every other year on 10,000 of listings. 3,000 listings depending on many changes you have to make and how long work on it can be done in a matter of a couple of days.)
The CSV download includes offer price and HIP value. Add a column. Divide one value into the other. Copy and paste across the 3000 rows. Sort by that. Time less than 5 minutes. Not quite as involved or convoluted as you imply. Accurate? Who knows but could give a rough idea /starting point of what values are way off in the context of a big dataset even if you have multiple faulty pieces of data(the offer price and the HIP value). Is that a bad idea or waste of time? IMHO.... Nah.
Personally, I go through my listings by hand and make sure that they are priced competitively. All 9k plus of them on a rotating basis. Starting with stale inventory first. Always trying to figure out ways to improve that process beyond the paper catalog and abacus.
Frankly, I would love to have a constructive conversation on how to improve the HIP value data set. Something beyond ... it stinks. Like a set of recommendations to the programming and admin folks. Use mode instead of mean. Drop values that are a certain percentage away from the mode. Drop values that are older than a certain date. Separate auction realizations from fixed price realizations. Include true cost of acquisiton(aka total price paid including S&H). Just a few thoughts. As I said before, spitballing.
And, if anybody knows of a reasonably priced SQL or spreadsheet accessible current catalog value dataset I am all ears. It might be out there for all I know. But that could really be helpful.
Bob
So to do what you are saying includes all the old data from items that have been sold up to 15 years ago, both auction and fixed priced,, take the offers and hipvalues combine then divide by 2 to come up with it. yet 2 paragraphs later you state that the older listings should be removed and separate auction realizations from fixed price realizations. If someone is trying to account for those, isn't the only way at this time to account for those is to actually look at those listings?
Offers and Hipvalues are behind the curve when the cats first come out. (Some of the sellers have some items priced using 8-9 year old cats.) The offers are going to be based on older cats and so are the Hipvalues. Now in the case of the Brazil say you have a set that when it was first listed had a cat value of $10 and they dropped by the 75% in which case that set now has a cat value of $2.50. Just for example say the Hipvalue was about $5 and the offers average $4.75 . So now you price it $4.85 and your price is STILL over cat value.
You do leave out one major factor in that in that Scott's is NOT consistent in how they change their values. Some they will raise, some they lower and others they leave alone. And they will also only change a range of years of issues. And the ONLY way to verify that at this time is to go through the cat and verify each cat number 1 x 1.