How To List Your Items on eBay and ShopGoodwill Faster (5 Tips to Try Today)

Lori Clark

Lori Clark

  • e-commerce
How To List Your Items on eBay and ShopGoodwill Faster (5 Tips to Try Today)

Like many resellers listing on eBay and ShopGoodwill, you likely have a goal to list as many items online as fast as possible. Of course, listing items faster improves your chances to increase revenue. However, trying to speed up your process can become overwhelming and detrimental if you’re not careful.

When you attempt to list more items on eBay, it’s easy to compromise the quality of your listings. Quantity over quality takes over, so you can list more items over time. However, without care and attention to the positioning of your photos and keywords, potential bidders may never see your listings.

The good news is that you can actually list items on eBay and ShopGoodwill faster without sacrificing quality.

With these 5 tips, you’ll learn how to list online faster without skimping on quality. Over 8 million items have passed through our secondhand reselling and inventory management software. This provides our team with valuable insight on best practices when listing online.

Start Single Tasking

Multi-tasking has become a norm in today’s technology-driven world. We’re expected to context-switch between tasks in a millisecond based on the demands of the day. Your secondhand reselling business is no different. One moment, you’re a photographer. The next, an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert. Moments later, an inventory manager.

It’s a lot.

Performing multiple tasks at a time or in quick succession decreases your productivity. As Steve Uzzell says in The ONE Thing, multitasking is “merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.”

Batching or time blocking your different tasks can help increase productivity when listing online. For greater efficiency, we recommend that our clients separate the following duties:

  • Processing: deciding which items you are going to post
  • Photography: taking photos of the items you’re selling
  • Listing: writing titles, descriptions and categorizing the items
  • Inventory Management: putting away the items

If you’re working in a team environment, it’s easier to distribute your resources. If you’re working in a one or two-person operation, split up the tasks using these principles:

  1. Identify the time taken to complete each task per item
  2. Reduce a backlog of items by splitting duties based on time to complete
  3. Keep the person posting items online as the sole person in that role

For example, in a two-person operation, it may take 1 minute to process a single item, 3 minutes to photograph that item, and 4 minutes to list it online. In this scenario, your listing workflow over a 4-hour span looks like this:

  • Processing: Person 1 hour processing items
  • Photographing: Person 1 also spends 3 hours photographing items
  • Listing: Person 2 spends 4 hours posting items online

Person 1 may always be working ahead of Person 2, but through this process, they ensure Person 2 always has items to list on eBay and ShopGoodwill. This also avoids them having to move around to perform multiple tasks at once.

Batch Similar Items Together

Listing can become more efficient when you batch similar items together. Upright Labs regularly analyzes the performance of secondhand retail listers within Goodwill organizations. The findings show that organizations working fastest were limiting listings to 1-2 categories on eBay and ShopGoodwill at a time.

We know when you work on tasks that aren’t related in any way, your process becomes scattered and productivity decreases. This can also be true when you’re listing items that aren’t related in any way as well. For example, jumping from shoes to electronics to shoes to toys to shoes again can be far less efficient than grouping all of the shoe-type items together during listing. Batching items based on category will make your life easier and, in turn, allow you to list more items online faster.

Organize Space For Efficiency

Like Feng Shui, the practice of harmonizing individuals with their surrounding environment, an organized workstation is essential to listing your items on eBay and ShopGoodwill faster.

When acclaimed chef, Gordon Ramsay, designed his home kitchen, there was a primary objective in mind – efficiency.

Keep Everything within Arm’s Reach

Knowing he’d be working at a fast pace, Ramsay made sure pots, pans, and utensils were within arm’s reach. This ensured he wouldn’t be slowed down in his workflow. When listing online, you’ll want to make sure you’re not wasting time looking for an SD card with photos, your scale to weigh items, and so on. An organized listing station should have these items:

  • Computer
  • Barcode Scanner
  • SD Card or Software to easily store photos
  • Scale and Measuring Materials

Goodwill warehouse workspace

Focus on Listing

In addition to keeping important tools nearby, remove those items that aren’t important from your workstation too. Items like cell phones can become major distractions that interrupt your workflow. To list your items online faster, you’ll need to minimize physical, mental, and social distractions.

  • Ensure your workspace is free of physical items that aren’t used in the listing process.
  • Remove social distractions by implementing a visual system such as boards to indicate you’re busy listing.
  • Identify triggers that encourage distractions such as mobile devices or email notifications and remove them while processing, photographing, and listing.

It takes discipline to clear your mental and physical space. However, you will get more done in less time if you stay focused. Ultimately, this allows you to list more items on eBay and ShopGoodwill.

Use Templates for Your Listing

When listing on sites like eBay and ShopGoodwill, you need to accurately describe your items, ensure keywords are SEO-friendly, and add an item’s proper disclaimers to protect yourself. Once you’ve been listing many similar items over and over, it gets repetitive.

Introducing templates to your listing process can speed things up and help you work more efficiently. To start using templates:

  • Identify the format of your headings and descriptions
  • Create templates per item category based on these formats
  • Use software to speed up the process

Ideally, you’ll have access to eBay and ShopGoodwill listing software that automatically crafts header and descriptions after completing a small amount of form fields. If you don’t have access to any comprehensive software, a spreadsheet or running document with the repetitive information is extremely helpful.

Using a dual-monitor workspace can save even more time when listing online. Use one monitor strictly for listings and the other monitor for templates. This will reduce the time you spend clicking between tabs.

Hire an Expert

You might not know the name Alex Guerrero, but to Tom Brady, he’s the athletic trainer working behind the scenes to keep him performing at an elite level. To date, Tom Brady has won 7 Super Bowls and is still playing at a high level in the NFL at age 45. Athletes invest in trainers and coaches, because they know they’ll push their limits and keep them accountable. This is integral to getting to the next level.

Upright Labs on-site at Goodwill

The same goes for your own secondhand reselling business. If you want your business to perform at an elite level and continue to thrive year-over-year, you need an expert working with you behind the scenes. The team at Upright Labs utilizes years of e-commerce and supply chain expertise to guide your operation for efficiency. We’ve helped accelerate growth and focus on true net profitability of e-commerce operations for hundreds of clients and continue to grow year-over-year.

Whether you’re a reselling hobbyist or large-scale thrift operation, these tips will help you list on eBay faster. By time blocking and batching your tasks, setting up an organized space, and using solid templates, you’ll be able to list more items in less time without compromising on quality.

Schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation