Maximum Store Listings
The Basic Store level has a 10,000 item limit, and the Premium Level has a 100,000 limit. What happens when one goes over that limit? I see stores that are over those limits, but they are still at the same levels. What happens to the items that are above the limit?
Comments
10,000 is too low for a basic store. $15 a month for featured is too much to pay for a 15,000 item store. My sentiments.
https://www.hipstamp.com/store/wasatch-stamps
I'm sorry to hear you're not seeing the level of sales you would like to see. In general, as we recently reported, stamp sales specifically on bidStart were around $75,000 / month when we acquired bidStart last year. In March alone our stamp sales were over $280,000 - a nearly 4x increase. While each Seller's own sales activity depends on a variety of factors, on average there's been a significant increase in sales since then. With that in mind, we'll reach out to you to see what we can do to help.
Let me break down my last month for you: I had 15 sales from 3/19/17 until 4/15/17 Total gross $42.28 minus selling fee $3.58 minus store fee $15.00 minus Paypal fee $5.95 minus postage $11.14 this left a profit total of $6.61 which hardly covers the value of the stamps let alone the effort expended to do the listings, mailings, and the time consuming pulling from inventory to fulfill the orders. Like I stated I will do one more month until around May 16th and if it remains the same I will shut my store down and leave.
As an example, I have about 80 USA items in my Hipstamp store.
Yesterday there were 1,380,878 USA items listed on Hipstamp.
This means my USA listings are an almost unrecognizably small percentage (0%) of the items running, and the natural rate potential buyers would see my USA stuff is very small as well.
My thinking is that listing material that is (more) unique from what all else is out there so that specific searches catch it is good, otherwise one has to be very patient and build up a repeat customer base over time, or list an awful lot of stuff!
In my own experience I have customers who have noticed the Hipstamp advertising and have mentioned it in their communication to me. (I see it all the time in google advertising on any of the various laptops, IPADs, phones that I use).
RICARMIC
Store: https://www.hipstamp.com/store/roncarmichaelstamps
I think a large portion of HIPSTAMP sales growth has been from auction sales. The sellers product visibility is increased greatly. I remember that Bidstart, in its later years; the # of items on auction was often less than 1000. HIPSTAMP today has over 3000 items up for auction, and many of these will sell!
Although at least from my (sellers) perspective, things have changed a lot in the last decade. Today (in my opinion) the only stuff that is successful at auction is the rarer, hard to find stuff because it will generate enough attention to get multiple bidders going. Anything "regular" will not generally do well. My own personal rule of thumb is that if something would normally sell for $10 as a store item, one can generally expect it to go for $5 (aka half) via auction.
When I do auction stuff, for the very visibility reason you mention, I use it to "attract" buyers to my store items, and I treat the "loss" on the items selling cheaper via auction as "advertising expense" conceptually.
Going back to StampWants, I always found that teasing prospective buyers with auction lots was a good way to generate sales. Buys will want to get some stamps out of the store in order to "even out" their shipping costs.
Finally, if your auction stamps are selling, but you store stamps are not, you may want to reconsider what you are charging for the stamps in your store.
Michael
https://www.hipstamp.com/store/the-online-stamp-shop
Now I am selling almost nothing, because I REFUSE to sell my stamps for a penny. There are some that are doing this, because of Marks everything starts at a penny auctions. AND I REFUSE TO DO THIS!! So I just jump around on what I sell. And sometimes I get lucky. But soon I will be closing my store and in search of a better place to sell. After all this is the MOST EXPENSIVE PLACE TO SELL,AAAAAND BAR NONE. Because if you want to sell a Post Card you must open a new store. And the same goes for Comic Books. Now you have 3 stores open. HIP Stamps, HIP Post cards, and HIP Comics. Now think about this, you have 3 stores and can only list 3 things. Stamps, Postcards, and Comic books. And if he decides to open another feature, it will be another store and more expense. And even Feebay is cheaper than that. And with that I will close, and say no more. and this message will be erased, and I will be kicked off of this sight. Grampstamps
After all this is the MOST EXPENSIVE PLACE TO SELL,AAAAAND BAR NONE. Because if you want to sell a Post Card you must open a new store. And the same goes for Comic Books. Now you have 3 stores open. HIP Stamps, HIP Post cards, and HIP Comics. Now think about this, you have 3 stores and can only list 3 things. Stamps, Postcards, and Comic books. And if he decides to open another feature, it will be another store and more expense. And even Feebay is cheaper than that.
Sorry Charles but that is incorrect currently you could have 3 basic stores on Hipstamp etc for LESS then the cost of a single Ebay basic store.
Ebay is charging 24.95 per month on the basic without a subscription (Which is a 1 year subscription) 19.95 per month with the subscription. The store also has a listing limit of 250 fixed priced and 250 auction listings per month without a charge. Afterwards all listings are charged for.
Premium 59.95 and 74.95 with limits of 1,000 and 500
Anchor 299.95 and 349.95 with limits of 10.000 and 1,000
So to put in other words,taking the same type of store you could get three basic stores on each of the Hipstores for LESS then the cost of the 1 Ebay basic store.
Taking Ebays premium which is similar to the Hipstore Featured store and you would paying about S60 to Ebay or $45 per month having 3 Hipstores which is still less then Ebay.
(And don't forget that on the Hipstores there are NO listing fees for store items unless you use the feature request)
No need to even comment about the anchor stores.
I fear that even the basic store fee here will drive many more sellers to the wall. Until HipStamp becomes a major player, I would much prefer to see zero cost for a basic store with a small increase to the percentage selling fee.
I would venture to guess the reason why they didn't try to make another everything site like Bidstart was that the everything else else didn't do very well. And if that's not the market your after why would you take the time,money and effort to build it if there is not enough return to justify the time and expense to build it? Doesn't it make sense to put that time and expense to the niche market your after if it produces better returns?
If some of the stores are having problems even making the expenses of a basic store after a year shouldn't the question be is it really Hipstamp or is there a systemic problem with that store? Some stores that did fairly well on Bidstart may not make it here. If your stock was set up to work on Bidstart it may not work as well here due to the searches,a somewhat different customer base etc. (I know that is part of my problem with one thing I use to list on Bidstart. It's not working very well anymore because of the way it's set up and it can't work as well on Hipstamp,but it was specifically set up for bidstart.)
Part of it also is that Hipstamp now has almost 700 sellers and a number of larger sellers that never listed anything on bidstart with very large stocks. And Hipstamp can only do so much,they are only responsible for things within their own control. They are only responsible for getting people into Hipstamp,making sure your items are hosted,making sure people can find what they are looking for,and making sure the site works well. The rest is on the seller and that is the reality of it all.