Like probably most Americans have in 2020, I’ve been trying to stay safe and stay home as much as possible. Instead of going on a summer vacation, we’ve been spending our time and money on decluttering and improving our house. Since we’ve been working from home much more often and soon our kids will begin remote schooling, we decided to turn our guest bedroom into an office/school room. But we’ve been using that spare room as storage space, so first we needed to get rid of all the crap that’s in there. Seriously, you couldn’t even walk around there were so many boxes of stuff we had accumulated over the past eight years.
I decided to start selling the stuff we no longer needed on Facebook Marketplace. After my first few sales, I thought I should really be tracking all this in order to learn from it and improve my sales. So naturally I made an Excel spreadsheet! I’ve turned my sheet into a blank template for you to use as well if you want to get into selling on Facebook Marketplace and tracking your sales. Many Americans have lost their jobs or have reduced hours/wages. Selling goods on FB marketplace is a simple way to make a little additional income.
As always, even if you have no plan to sell anything on Facebook Marketplace, you can still dissect this Excel template to learn some valuable lessons:
- How to make drop down lists using name manager and data validation
- How to filter a data table
- How to use ROUNDUP, IF, TEXT, COUNTIF, MAX, MIN, and AVERAGE functions
- How to count the number of days between two dates in Excel
Facebook Marketplace Sales Tracking Demonstration
In my spreadsheet, I track several key stats, such as what day of the week you make the most sales. Here's a video tour where I walk you quickly through the spreadsheet. One thing I forgot to finish was to show how the filter works, so if you have any questions about that feel free to let me know.
Selling Price Calculator
One of the most useful features might be the Selling Price Calculator. 90% of people are going to offer you an amount lower than what you’re listing your item for, especially the more expensive it is. I’ve added a feature to the spreadsheet that will calculate how much money you should list your item for sale based on what you want to get plus a markup value based on your historical selling data. As you sell more items on Facebook Marketplace, you’ll see how much of a discount you’re settling for. Once you know that value you know how much to add to the cost of an item. I use the ROUNDUP function to round up to the nearest dollar ($25.50 becomes $26.00).
I haven't sold on other sites such as Ebay or Craigslist but you could probably use this same sheet for those too.
FB MP Sales Tracking Template.xls download
Tips for Selling on Facebook Marketplace
Tip #1: Check the marketplace for other similar items to get a feel for who is selling what and for how much. Is your item unique or popular?
Tip #2: Set your initial price higher than what you want. 90% of my sales we settled for on average 13% lower than my original asking price. Some of this was me asking too much.
Be fair. When you get greedy is when you don’t make any sales
Tip #3: As far as safety, just be smart about it. If you’re going to meet someone to exchange items, maybe setup your meeting in the parking lot of your local police station. Most people may have their FV profile hidden from you, but you should still be able to see when they joined and how many friends they have. If they joined less than a year ago and/or have less than 30 friends be wary, this could be a fake account.
Tip #4: Bigger/unique items do seem to do better. Probably not going to make a lot if selling old video games (unless they’re really old or rare).
Tip #5: Communication is key. Make the sale. The most annoying part about selling online is communication issues - people backing out of sales at the last minute, leading you on, not fully reading your listing details, etc.