When to Use Bulk Vs Single lister? (Quality vs Qty)

When you are a newcomer in the drop shipping world, the choice between the right market research techniques and methods of finding hot items to sell and of course the listing of those items can be extremely overwhelming. Along with the wide range of different tools available in the market, all of those ways can be narrowed down to just 2 categories – Bulk and Single listing.

For this article, I decided to join together both the research & item finding and the actual listing of the products parts and talk about them as one, and that’s because when it comes to the Bulk vs Single debate, they are mostly aligned. Drop shippers will either go big and fast and list as many items as humanly possible or go out of their way to track down those smash-hit winners and optimize the sh*t out of them.

We brought in three experts that have mastered the arts of product sourcing and listing to give their honest opinions about the benefits and disadvantages of listing in Bulk or one at a time. I’ll also provide my 2 cents about the subject at the end, so stay focused!

Soufiane Arabi is a result-driven enthusiast and is mastering drop shipping in big numbers. He is only 21 and already made a name for himself by managing a mastermind and leading facebook groups, including DSM Tool’s Morroco/Algeria/Tunisia/Egypt community, and this is what he had to say about our topic:

In my opinion, I think that both listing in single and in bulk have their advantages and disadvantages. Listing in single has a big advantage, it is the fact that you really take care of your description, and title, in addition the pictures. Those metrics are very important in selling online. So here it comes the fact that I considered this as big advantage. The disadvantage refers to the fact that the process is too slow, so again you have to do an excellent work in your products research to deal with this way.

One of the bulk listing advantages is that, you easily raise your chances of getting impressions and therefore, more sales. The disadvantage, is that at some point, a person who deal with such a way, has to have an entire team to cover all different tasks considering that the store’s stock is getting bigger and bigger.

Adwin Ang is an e-commerce professional from Singapore, working with eBay for over 9 years. He is an admin in the Facebook group Digital Entrepreneur Mastery and updates his YouTube Channel with great sales & drop shipping related content. In one of those videos he even talks about how to use DSM Tool Bulk lister:

When we asked him about his opinion regarding listing in Bulk or single, he didn’t spare in words:

Most people misunderstood the idea behind why there are 2 types of listing methods on most drop shipping software in the marketplace. (Single listing being slow while bulk being faster and most efficient.)
A complete newbie will buy into the idea of ‘the more the merrier mentality’ by listing as many item as possible, while this is only half the story right.
Let me take you through a short journey on how I started listing products on eBay.

Before the existence of any listing software, you had to manual copy and paste information of the item you intended to sell. This is ‘normal’ for me as I have been a eBay seller since 2009. It would take me 8 hours at least to do 30 listings everyday and I was happy. However, when I jumped onto eBay drop shipping business, this was not the case.

Single lister tool allows me to quickly gather the main listings I wanted to list. Usually, I will put down the source ids in the case of Amazon, the ASIN, onto an excel spreadsheet.
You could also use DSM Tool chrome extension while you’re on Amazon. A blue button will appear on each listing to send your item directly over to DSM Tool single lister. You can then select a different template if you want before working on the listing.

Normally, I would start with editing the eBay title, item specifics, pricing and collage the images before publishing the item one by one. I have the control over many specific parameters to ensure a high quality listing is sent over to eBay marketplace.

With the bulk lister tool, you can list many item at one go. The strategy you need to use is to sell holiday targeted product range or event triggered items. The simplicity is with the use of one button “copy all Asins” from DSM Tool. All the products you wanted to list will be auto imported with ASIN onto bulk lister. Next, it’s best to select the desired template again and only create a photo collage if there is more than one images. This is to avoid eBay buyers from getting confused while looking at your product image. You can then generate the listings, improve on title and price changes. Before you hit the publish button, consider two things. Is it the best time to publish your listings now or schedule it later at a certain time. DSM Tool bulk lister allows you to do just that. And after all listings are published make sure you clear your error queue.

When to Use – Bulk Vs Single lister?
In summary, here are some tips on when to use bulk lister and single lister.

Bulk lister
– To test a range of product and know what to pick for the best ROI (continuingly improve on listings item specifics, images, title)
– To sell on trending products
– To sell festive or event driven products

Single lister
– To add more similar items which are already selling well with quality listings or proven to sell
– Great for beginner who just started out on eBay drop shipping
– Know what a well optimized eBay listing should have
– Pick targeted product to list from competitors

Ziad Ahmed is an expert product researcher and even offers his services on Fiverr. He is an admin in the Facebook group called Free eBay hot selling items where he posts great products to drop ship regularly along with the research. This is what he had to say about listing and researching in bulk vs single:

I would personally prefer bulk listing as it would be just like creating multiple lottery tickets at once as compared to single listing. The results would be ballistic if the right seasonal items were chosen in bulk listings.
Searching bulk products at once allows one to compare them with each other and hence upload only the best one provided that there are product listing limits in Ebay account. We should keep in mind maximum profits with limited resources.

Some great advice, would you agree? Wanna know how I feel about it too?

Well, when I just began my eBay journey I used to look for items manually. I looked for trending products that can be found on Amazon and were sold multiple times in recent days. It went fine and indeed I could see some items being sold more often than not, however, it felt impossible to scale and in some cases I would spend long hours finding just a few worthy items.

After trying a sniping software for the first time, it didn’t take long to see results. I would sit for hours and hours looking for eBay sellers who source their items from Amazon and scan their pages to find products that will meet my standards. Afterwards, I would go over the list and check for issues, correct titles and then list all in bulk and schedule. It helped me list hundreds and sometimes a thousand items in about 4-6 hours from start to finish.

I can’t remember if my store tripled or quadroupled its sales volume in less than a month, but what I know for a fact is that it was my method of bulk listing who made it happen. Single listing is about giving special attention to each and every one of your products – but to me, it doesn’t neccesarily mean you have to do everything one at a time. Why not enjoy both worlds? How about listing in bulk and optimizing in single? How would you go about and do that? Let us know in the comments below!