How to Manage Your eBay Listings

Managing your listings on eBay

Viewing your selling activity

To start managing your selling activity on eBay, go to www.ebay.com in your web browser of choice and log into your account there. Once you’re logged in, move your mouse cursor over My eBay in the top-right corner of the home page. This will make a drop-down menu appear; click Selling when it does.

This will take you to a page where you can see a summary of your selling activity. This includes your seller performance level, any monthly selling limits you have on your account, and so on.

You can use the “Sell” menu along the left-hand side of the page to view your listings on eBay of various statuses. For example, click Active to see all items that you currently have for sale.

Managing your active listings

You can click on the options across the top of the main box to filter the listings you see by their specific statuses. You can also click the drop-down menu labelled “Format” and select an option to filter your listings based on what selling format you selected for them (see our article on eBay selling formats for more information). Furthermore, you can click the drop-down menu labelled “Sort” in order to re-organize your listings by various criteria (such as listing date, expiry date, price, selling format, quantity, etc.).

Further down the page, you can see your actual items for sale, as well as various pieces of information about them. These include: listing titles, listing numbers, listing types, reserve prices (if you’ve set any), any notes that you’ve written, item prices (including highest bids and shipping costs), counts of how many people have looked at/are watching/have bid on your listing, and remaining durations of your listings.

You can click the check box beside an item to select it and then click one of the buttons at the top or bottom of the page (or else just click the More Actions drop-down menu beside the item) to manage that listing in various ways. Some of your options include:

Managing your items that have sold

If you click Sold under the “Sell” menu, you can see items that you’ve already successfully sold. Some information here is different than in your active listings, such as your item’s listing expiry date being replaced by its date of sale, as well as the addition of a package tracking number (if one is available). One of the most important new things to pay attention to, however, is the set of status icons on the far right side of each listing.

These status icons get changed or colored in from their greyed-out forms as parts of the transaction are completed. From left to right, they generally represent:

A full legend of what the different status icons on your “Activity” page mean can be found on the left-hand side of the page, if you scroll down far enough. It looks like this:

Like with your active listings, you can click the check box beside a sold listing to select it and then click one of the buttons at the top or bottom of the window (or just click the More Actions drop-down menu and select an option) to perform various functions on your listing. Two in particular that we’ve highlighted here are:

Other actions that you can take include sending invoices for unpaid items to your buyers (which you can group together to offer combined shipping discounts) and changing the transaction status of the item (so that a buyer knows that it has been shipped).

Managing unsold items

In the event that one of your listings expires without the item being sold – which, unfortunately, can happen – it will end up in the Unsold category of your “Sell” activity menu. Click it to see all of your items that didn’t end up selling.

Like with listings of other selling statuses, you can click the check box beside an unsold listing to select it and then click one of the buttons at the top or bottom of the window (or click the More Actions drop-down menu and select an action from there instead) to do something with it.

The main function that we’ve pointed out here is the Relist function. This allows you to create another listing that, by default, has the same parameters as the listing you selected. You can, however, edit these parameters as you normally would; we outlined the process for doing so in our lesson on listing items on eBay, starting with step 5 of the “How to List on eBay” section.

There! Now you know how to follow and manage your listings on eBay. Next up, we’ll have a lesson on how to control who bids on ­– or buys – your eBay wares. Or, if you’ve already made a sale and are wondering what you should do next, head on over to our tutorial on how to ship on eBay. It will teach you everything you need to consider and do to get your item packaged and ready for its big send-off!