Scavenger Life

We had a good week of sales. Our highest sale was only $75, but we simply sold more items than usual. It feels our store is humming along.

Our current challenge is needing to more stuff to sell. Our helper has been working through a huge backload of unlisted inventory that we amassed…which is all now listed. We do a little scavenging here and there in our daily life since junk is everywhere, but we have not spent a full day at an auction, flea market, or estate sale in a couple years. We enjoy hearing your adventures scavenging because it tells us there’s still a deluge of stuff being discarded out in the world. We’re making plans for our new scavenging adventures.

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Our Store Week November 20-26, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9199
Items Sold: 35
Gross Sales: $1,528.25 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,239.74 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $169
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $75 (vintage wool blanket)
Average Price Sold: $35.42
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 30
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

This was our week of $15 sales. As much as we like to fill our store with “high dollar” items (aka $30+), we do have a number of lower dollar items that build up over time. About half of this weeks sales were $15 or less. Mainly clothes we’ve had listed for a long time.

Looking at our inventory of 9000 items, we have about 1400 items that are $15 or less. Why? Some of these items are just remnants from our early days of eBay. You know we never delist items since everything eventually sells. We also do still list low dollar items when we purchase box lots at auctions. We might as well just list the little trinkets that are hiding at the bottom of boxes. It’s like bonus money.

What we don’t do is purposefully scavenge low dollar items like clothes. When we started selling on eBay in 2008, our entire store was just $10 clothing items. That was a grind to squeeze out profit. We’d come home with trash bags full of clothes and start the long slog of photographing and listing. Even if those clothes were free, it takes the same amount of work to list a $10 item as a $100 item. This is why we do our best to pick and choose what we scavenge. If we can only list 100 items a week, we want them to be the best value items we can find. This is just how we’ve evolved. Some sellers have perfected the grind of high volume, low dollar clothing/DVDs/books/etc sales.

Hope you guys are having a good week and getting ready for family/friends at Thanksgiving (if US based 🙂

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week November 13-19, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9215
Items Sold: 29
Gross Sales: $976.21 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $758.79 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $48
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $200 (bread slicer)
Average Price Sold: $26.16
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 30
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

This week is a good example of just business as usual. We listed items, we sold items, we lived our lives. We sold some winter gloves, cabinet knobs, a silverware set, a desk lamp, antique egg cups, some old photos, a tea pot, brass wall hooks, water filter, shoes, several old magazines, various pieces of clothing, a wallet, a Christmas ornament, and an incense burner. A great snapshot of our weird deep store inventory!

Everyone seems sick these days. We’ve been pulling shifts at our cafe because multiple employees are sick. But it’s been great! We keep expecting things to slow down, but we’re busier than we’ve ever been. We’ve been getting great reviews which makes us very happy as a hospitality business.

Luxury problems are when more people want what you have than you can almost handle. Keep it coming.

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week November 6-12, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9229
Items Sold: 27
Gross Sales: $1,272.11 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $983.37 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $83
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $200 (set of silverware)
Average Price Sold: $36.42
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 100
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

Ryanne posted about her trip to Vermont for the regional US Cup Tasters Championships where she came in 4th place. This is a huge deal since Ryanne went head to head with some of the best specialty coffee tasters on the East Coast. It gives her a shot to compete at the next competition before Nationals. You can watch the video where she was one of the few that correctly guessed all the coffees. We’re all so proud of her because it shows people how far she’s come as a roaster and that we take coffee seriously at Broad Porch. She put a lot of time into practicing to get to this point.

Ryanne competing also shows how we like to find things to do that mix community, space to refine our skills, and ability to make money and own our time. The specialty coffee community is big with a lot of stiff competition that focuses on quality and design. We’re super psyched to keep building our coffee company. It’s a fun way to spend our time.

We found the same excitement when we started selling on eBay back in 2008. There wasn’t much of a community (other than the negative eBay forums), but it was an exciting intersection between our love of scavenging and need to pay the bills. There were so many problems to solve that are now obvious: how much do we list? where do we store all this stuff? how much should we pay for items? how much should we sell things for? Every time we walk into our 40′ x 26′ building to pull sold items to ship, we see how we’ve into a sustainable business that has helped us build a life together.

We had decent sales this week on eBay. The weirdest things sell that make us try to remember where we found them: on the street, in the bottom of a box at an auction, in the corner of a thrift store under a pile of junk. We had faith it was valuable,  took time to list, were patient, and now the sale pays our bills. It’s a virtuous circle where once one good thing starts happening, other good things happen, which cause the first thing to continue happening. eBay sales are an embodiment of how we live our lives.

Hope you had a good week. Consider buying the holiday blend that Ryanne is roasting: Matching Pajamas!

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week October 30- November 5, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9130
Items Sold: 25
Gross Sales: $1,339.24 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $976.86 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $103
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $225 (pair of curtains)
Average Price Sold: $39.07
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 20
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

It’s been a very busy October for us. Leaf season is in full effect in our area so city people are coming out to enjoy hiking in the gorgeous weather. That means our cafe has been packed everyday. We’ve doubled our sales from last year which means we’re learning how to handle staffing and making enough food. Running a cafe is obviously much more work than running an eBay store. Our goal is to eventually get the cafe to run itself (while the owners get to do the fun stuff). What we do love is meeting everyone that walks in the door.

Our eBay sales were very slow. Slower than they’ve been in a while. Is the economy showing strains? Do people just not want our stuff? Who knows! Let’s see how next week goes.

Hope you had a good week.

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week October 23-29, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9127
Items Sold: 19
Gross Sales: $717.20 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $572.69 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $33
Cost of helpers: $0
Highest Price Sold: $70 (old iPhone)
Average Price Sold: $30.14
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 20
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)