When you sell on eBay things pile up.

   You can get frustrated. You can ignore it like my husband is able to do. His favorite phrase when I talk about all the piles of stuff is, "Face piles of trials with smiles." I cannot ignore the piles.

Separate into eBay Inventory Categories

Your eBay inventory generally falls into three categories:

1. Unsold items that you want to sell
2. Items you've listed for sale but whose auctions haven't ended
3. Items that you've sold but not mailed yet

   You must have a dedicated eBay area if you sell more than 5-10 items each week. Your eBay area doesn't have to include the items you have yet to list. Your eBay area must have room for what you have listed and sold however. All of that must stay together as well as you can keep it together. Otherwise - and you need to trust me on this - someone will pay for something that you can't find when you get ready to wrap and mail it. It happens to the best of us. Your goal should be to reduce its happening as much as possible so use a dedicated eBay area that always contains your currently listed and sold items.

   If your dedicated eBay area is large enough, then you'll be able to keep the items you've not yet listed there too. Even if you have room for these items, try to separate them from the more critical listed and sold sets of items. Doing so makes it so much simpler to locate what you need when you need it.

   If, however, you don't have the luxury of a large eBay space (and few of us do), you will need to find another spot for your items waiting to be listed.

My Original eBay Space and Our eBay Space Now

   Before my wife got involved in our eBay business, I didn't organize anything. I didn't have time. I was selling too much.

   Problems began happening due to my lack of time for organization. I didn't have time to get organized! Of course, as you no doubt understand if I got better organized I would have more time because my accuracy would improve and the time to move from one task to another would decrease. But eBay sneaked up on me as it does many people and I was smothered in all my eBay stuff. But I kept listing and selling. There's a very good reason why Jayne calls me an eBay Maniac!

   Jayne made eBay a far better experience with her suggestions, sometimes strong suggestions, for getting things more organized, keeping the eBay storage area less cluttered, and organizing the shipping area far better than before. The clutter still occurs but it's more of an organized clutter. For example, the clutter in our mailing area is generally all related to mailing supplies, boxes, tape, and so on. Keeping things better separated makes eBay a far easier activity.

Get Organized and eBay Gets Simpler

   Surprisingly, you don't need to store your to-be-listed items close to your primary eBay area necessarily. Sure, it helps a lot if you have the room to do so. But the items you haven't listed are far less of a priority than those you've listed and those you've sold that await wrapping and mailing.

   So if you must store unsold items elsewhere, even if it's in the garage or in clean attic storage, that's acceptable. Actually, it's not just acceptable; it's far better than clumping the unsold items in the same spot as those you've listed and sold.

   When an auction ends without a bid, we try to remove that item from the listed or sold area as quickly as possible. The only exception is if you think its lack of selling was a fluke, or perhaps due to too high of an opening bid in which case we'll relist the item with a lower starting bid. If you don't remove the unsold items, they will begin to clutter and confuse the listed and sold area. Make it your goal to keep only what is currently listed or sold together and keep all other items out of that area.