Get that attention

Malnaborg

Hi everyone, or sellers / store owners at least :-)

This last month i have had 0 orders, from my shop, my last one was from the 21. February, and even that was slow.
This weekend however i tried to promote a free shipping period, and ended up getting 4 orders on Sunday and none the less making money in the end.

So now i wanted to know how others are doing, and even so, how and where if so, are you talking about your store?
Am i just a little store, with to little inventory for people to buy ? I always have a few carts open, so i guess i have something people want, but i never comes to a buy.
Then i have tried to look at the analytics that brickowl do for our shop, and the highers orders come from "None" which i guess is just this site in general, and the next is Rebrickable. But since i am not really active anywhere else, than here or sometimes facebook markedplace, i wonder how i can get more business for my store, at least i try to sell sets, and maybe stand out with that, compared to "just" another store with parts.

So help and advice is wanted, and looking forward to see what others do :-)

Jay37

I've had 16 orders this month to date (1st March - present) and they have all been parts, and I also currently have 12 active carts. I do have some sets for sale, in a variety of states from new and sealed to used with no box or instructions, but they don't seem to shift too well. I'm sure I've seen comments that BL is more of a 'set' based marketplace and BO is more 'parts', but I only sell here so it would need other stores to comment on that.

I don't do any outside marketing (not on InstaFaceTwitTok), so it's purely wishlist, Rebrickable and general browsing. I did find it quite ironic that I had a period in January where I added quite a few parts to my inventory, taking it over 40,000 for the first time, which potentially appeared in wishlists, and this coincided with precisely zero sales!!

I imagine there could be any number of reasons for your slow sales, most of which I would guess are simply out of your control. Maybe lower disposable income at the moment? Maybe sets mean higher shipping costs and that might be off-putting to some. As you say, at least you offer something a little different by concentrating on sets.

shawndev

I have also seen very slow sales on BrickOwl recently. I was usually seeing active carts in the 8 to 12 range but now down around 2 to 3 (have 5 at the moment). In the last 30 days I have only had 2 orders on BO and 27 on BL with the same inventory and pricing structure. The 2 recent BO orders were all Star Wars and one of them was a huge order with 10 Clone/ Storm Troopers that was the biggest single total sales order to date. So while orders are down overall it has not been bad.

Our store has a little over 30K in items. That is a mix of parts, minifigs, instructions, and sets. The sets we have for sale are newer so we don’t get much interest in them yet. Good old standard color bricks and plates sell well. VIP packs and Ninjago minifigs are items that we do sell pretty quick when we add them to the inventory. Star Wars of course is a great seller especially Clone Troopers and Jedi.

I am still new and looking for ways to improve and hope some of the more successful sellers will add some suggestions to help us all. One thing that I did when I first started and had limited inventory was to make sure my most common parts were priced in the lower tier so that people would see my store name and see what else we had to offer. That did help. Another item that helped was when I first got started I had a lot of older parts (Town, Blacktron, Space, etc.) that were difficult to find. I got a few sales by word of mouth for that time of inventory.

BrickOwl is an awesome platform and I hope that at some point it will be the primary source for customers to find my store as it is so easy to use. I have seen some of the bigger stores provide discounts to repeat customers and offer free shipping over a certain price. I have not done that but those are ideas I am thinking of.

Good Luck and I hope that you will see some improvement. I took a look and your store and there are some cool things I don’t see often on others.

Calibrick

I have seen slower sales, but it's still pretty consistent for me this month. For us, historically, this is where the slowing starts, getting slowest during the summer and picking back up in early Fall.

I have been trying to gradually readjust my pricing, which has DEFINITELY helped. So many new stores opened here and are trying to race to the bottom for pricing that I was way out of whack at one point. :-)

We do not advertise at all; we affiliate with all options BO provides, though vast majority of sales are BO with a smattering from Rebrickable. Our store sells to the US only (I'm too lazy to do the international paperwork for each order) and primarily sells used good parts/minifigs, but I do have some new items and sets (not too many). From 3/1 to present:

Items: 136,650
Active Lots: 11,784
Turnover: US $752.23
Items US $599.44
Shipping US $152.79
Average order value US $24.27
Average order item value US $19.34
Orders 31
Items Sold 4,556
Lots Sold 809

The above inflated a bit more than normal, as I received an order yesterday for 300+ lots, 3000+ items for a bit over $300.00, so you could amend my numbers above with that.