Scavenger Life Episode 244: The Little Street of Virtual Shopkeepers

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We enjoy doing a weekly podcast and running this blog because it often feels like we’re all shopkeepers sharing the same street, interested in what each is selling and happy we’re all in business. Instead of being isolated in dark rooms across the country, we’re helping each other. Camaraderie over competition.

It’s the deep of winter where we are. This is Jay’s favorite time of year. Since there’s no yard sales or flea markets to distract us, we continue to get a lot done. “Death piles” (boxes of unlisted items) continue to disappear in our house. We are working on three years of stuff we have put off photographing. We keep mentioning “death piles” because they are the thing that often paralyze sellers who shop way more than they list. Attack those piles since it’s money just sitting there waiting to be sold.

We continue our Amazon FBA experiment, sending in 431 items in the past two weeks. About 25 items have sold. After in-bound shipping and final value fees, we’ve made about $145. Lots of low dollar items. We’re learning. We’ve become scan monkeys.

If it wasn’t for one very large $1500 commissioned art sale, we would have had the slowest week we’ve ever had. As others have said in the comments, sales trickled in for us. But we made the money we needed to make. When sales are good, keep listing. When sales are bad, keep listing.

Here are links we discussed this week:

A listener told us that eBay has started a pilot program to help sellers find better resolutions when a buyer starts an unfair return. Sign up for it here.
Thanks for every who educated us on the MSDS document we need to send in items to Aamzon considered “hazmat”. Here’s the page explaining how it works.
Dave has also set up a search engine specifically to find MSDS documents (super nerdy!): http://msdssearchengine.com/
And if you are in the area, think about renting our Farmhouse for a vacation. It’s already filling up for the Spring and Summer.
You can listen to our other podcast on running a rental at http://shampooandbooze.com