Scavenger Life Episode 271: Finding the Right Balance Between Scavenging and Listing

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Our success on eBay is due primarily to one key factor: finding the right balance between scavenging and listing.

Here’s the deal if you’re new to scavenging- it’s easy to find stuff to sell. You can complain all you want about thrift stores raising their prices or yard sales getting hip to researching their items online, but you will not find a nation on this planet that has more abundance and waste than the USA. If you are creative and put in the time, it’s easy to get a carload of scavenged goods for little money. You could fill a house full of junk in a couple weeks. Some sellers just sit at home on their computers and source items on eBay or online auctions!

Don’t believe us? Just go on Youtube and watch the thousands of “haul videos” that show people bringing home bags of stuff from Goodwill, yard sales, auctions. Though it still takes some skill and experience to scavenge the real treasures out there, the bar is still pretty low. Finding items that will sell for $20-$30 is easy. This is why we like “What Sold” videos because it shows the reward of the work you do.

But scavenging is only one leg of a successful eBay business. The second leg is listing. ALWAYS BE LISTING. (The third leg is good customer service.)

When we first started selling on eBay, we spent 75-90% of our time scavenging. We’d go every day to buy stuff. Sometimes twice a day. It would drive us crazy thinking there was good stuff out there just waiting for us to find. Plus, we had no inventory so acquiring was important.

But very quickly we had more stuff than we could handle. An entire roomful of clothes piles, bins of shoes, junk. It was overwhelming. After three years of running our eBay business, we had over thirty huge plastic bins of unlisted items. Death piles everywhere. We realized that there would always be “stuff” out there, and that listing had to be our priority. It’s now taken us over a year to photograph and list these items. AND MAKE MONEY SELLING THEM.

Death piles can cause family and marital strife. Death piles can sap your morale and paralyze you. Death piles can be a sign of a shopping addiction. Death piles can keep you from having anyone visit your home. Death piles can make you feel like a fool. When there’s too much stuff, you can often not know where to start so you never start. Acquiring stuff is not the same as selling items online.

We now list 90% of the time and scavenge the other 10%. We do one big scavenging trip each week where we come home with a carload of stuff. It takes us the rest of the week to process it all and get it online. We’ll be the first to admit that we aren’t always successful listing enough to keep up with our scavenging, but we feel much better about our eBay business and our lives. And people can visit us anytime and think that we’re just eclectic collectors.

Here are the links we discussed in this podcast:
–Crystal pointed us to this site that shows the different Woolrich tags and the manufacturing dates.
–Ryanne mentioned Promoted Listings on eBay. If you have an Anchor store subscription, you get a $25 coupon to use each quarter.

Hope you had a good week!

Our Store Week August 7-13, 2016