For those that opt for Fixed Priced eBay listings, you will notice that you are given a number of listing durations to choose from. You can list your item for sale anywhere from 3, 5, 7 days to 10, 30 and Good Till Cancelled.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of using a GTC listing and why in some instances a 30 day listing may be better.
What is a Good till Cancelled listing?
One of the many formats under which you can create your listing on eBay is called the Good Til Cancelled (GTC) listing. Under this format, your listing will be created for a duration of 30 days. It will be a fixed price listing and at the end of the 30 day period, your listing will automatically get renewed and listed again. This continues to happen after every 30 day period till such time that the seller cancels the listing.
Benefits:
- GTC is great for keeping sales history of an item you sell multiples on and I use it for that all the time.
- For those listings that are not GTC, if you have watchers on the listing but it does not sell, you lose those watchers when the item relists. With a GTC listing, the watchers stay connected.
Possible negatives:
- A GTC listing still ends and restarts every 30 days, however the system knows it’s an old listing. If you are going to let them end every 30 days you need to change the title slightly before you relist or the system will still think they are old listings. Tip: Actually it’s best to use “sell similar” rather than relist so they appear new to the system
Differences between a GTC and 30 day listing
Many sellers can be confused between a GTC listing and a Fixed Price 30 listing. While most of the features in both these formats are same, the one big difference is that a Fixed Price 30 listing will close after 30 days whereas a GTC listing will be renewed.
- Each time the listing renews automatically, the seller is required to pay whatever fees are applicable for the listing at that time.
The main benefit of a GTC listing is that sellers who have high inventories of same products can keep a listing going on until they have sold all their stock. They need not bother to create a fresh listing again and again. However, since re-listing costs additional fees every time, sellers should be careful to track whether their sales are turning enough profit or not.
Another advantage of GTC listings seems to be the fact that they feature higher on best match searches. Since the previous sale history is carried forward in renewed GTC listings, this helps the listing to appear higher on the results pages. However, this is mostly applicable to sellers with very high sales.
So whether you opt for a 30 day fixed price listing or GTC one needs to be a personal decision. Being aware of the potential listing fees with GTC but also the many benefits it offers.
What are your preferences? Do you find that you have more control over a 30 day fixed price listing?
