Scavenger Life Episode 337: If You Build It, You Will Have Storage

Good morning! I am feeling good today, it was a good week!

Sales: CAD$1,716, 6 items, $286/item average
COGS: $337
Expenses: $406
Net profit: $726
Listed: 8 items
Hours: 6, $121/hr
Notable sales: Lot of 4 barcode scanners $215  $1260.
Scavenge of the week: got some good medical stuff this week including an EKG machine and a pipette beveler. Cost was $125 for these two but I’m expecting about $1200 out of them.

My costs are quite high this week also because I bought a whole bunch of packing supplies.

I ALMOST bid on a huge 1500lb X-ray machine, but thought better of it when I changed my mind on the expected sale price. It did impress upon me though the need to get my garage heated so I could actually store such a thing if a good opportunity should come along.

Now to go listen to the podcast…. it’s become a Monday morning ritual. 🙂

Great looking building. Those double doors are good for options down the road if you get into dismantling cars or appliances.

Nov 26 – Dec 2 2017

• Total Items in Store: 842
• Items Sold: 28 (27 ebay / 1 Bonanza)
• International 2 GSP
• Total Sales $1761 (1736 ebay / 25 Bonanza)
• Highest Price $190 Polaroid camera
• Average Price Sold: $63
• Returns: 0
• Cost of Items Sold: $307
• Cost of items purchased this week $246

Made an out of town trip with the dogs to look at a lamp and visit some small town antique/thrift stores.
Wasn’t impressed with the floor lamp but I liked the 2 tier shade, they let me buy it separately which was preferable as I would not enjoy trying to ship a tall floor lamp.
Was able to get a tension pole lamp for $3 from a thrift and in the next town a pair of Doc Martens for $3 and a pair of Lucchese for $10.
Had a guy call me to come look at some power amps he was selling, I got all 5 B&K amps for $40 each.

11/26/17-12/2/17

Total items: 2965
Itens sold: 23
Total sales: $762
Avg sale: $33.13
Highest price: $125 for Strat/o-Matic Baseball game
Items lusted: 36

Good week. December has started out with a bang so let’s hope that continues.

Mark

Now you are ready for tall shelving, numbered bins and a numbered inventory system. Great space and good luck.

Have you decided on a heat / cooling system yet?

You guys are going to own so much land and property up there that you will need a big sign out at the entry road that say’s something Like “Scavenger Life Valley .. Gateway to the Unique” just like the “Ponderosa” on Bonanza. LOL-LOL 🙂

Here’s an idea for another income stream.. take some of your land [out back], mark it off in small rectangles, cut a dirt road to it and rent out the spaces to campers. A niche would be to rent to all “Airstream” owners. Wouldn’t it be cool to see a dozen Airstream trailers all lined up side by side. Just thinking outside the box.

mike in Atlanta

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by MDC Galleries & Fine Art.

Total Items in Store: 891
Items Sold: 20
Cost of Items Sold: $91
Total Sales: $594.50
Profit: $503.50
Highest Price Sold: $100 Pair of Dr Comfort Shoes
Average Price Sold: $29.73
Average Profit: $25.17

Decent week – no listing happening still.

I gotta get my heater mounted in the garage this week because winter is finally coming. Getting the garage set up has hit that nitty gritty point where progress is grinding to a halt. I have sold off a few arcade machines that weren’t making the move to the gameroom and will have cleared all the games from the garage by the end of the week. That is a huge progress, but I feel like I’m way behind. I think I’m underestimating how much work is truly involved in undoing 10 years of accumulated junk. I still haven’t set up my photo and shipping stations, and have not started the overhead storage. Truth be told, I’m still on the fence as to my vision for the ebay garage setup. I hate that I’m missing out on listing toys for the holiday season but I need to finish this project or I never will.

I’m bogging myself down in the details

• Total Items in Store: 364
• Items Sold: 16
• Total Sales $528
• Highest Price $100 (Paid $1 Giant Vintage Santa Litho
• Average Price Sold: $528
• Cost of Items Sold: $107 + $33 free shipping
• Cost of items purchased this week: Maybe $100 online RA
• Number of items listed: 8

Congrats on the new building getting up. I’m sure it will feel pretty amazing to rework your inventory organization and move to a system. I’m really curious to hear later about how many listings have dropped off and how you choose to organize. I’ve sold enough this season to see some empty spots in my storage areas. My father-in-law gave me some matching bins and has more so I’ll be doing a mini-version of your process in the new year. I’m the kind of nerd who enjoys organizing.

Glad you are considering longer sourcing trips to the cities. Maybe get a locking camper shell? I don’t know anything about auctions and – to clarify a fine point – I wasn’t suggesting you go looking for very expensive and antiqueish items. I think you will find that you can hit moving, garage, estate sales and thrifts like you do in your area, just with faster moving and more in demand product coming into your pipeline. I was thinking more middle ground stuff that you have the eye and brand knowledge for but is sourced higher than a buck or two.

Computer is fixed but crazy again and no time for new listings. Have a great week.

Comments on the podcast:

Awesome building! We don’t have land anywhere near what you guys have, but it is 0.57 acre. We’re thinking about a large storage shed in the back.

I recently listed a Copco casserole with a stand, and I have it at a much lower price than your pan. Is there something special about a paella pan, or do I have mine listed too low? It does have some loss of enamel on the lid:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/182937663938

As far as the Kewpie doll goes, I posted in the What Sold section two weeks ago that I found an article about weird things people collect. One was haunted dolls, and a related category of scary dolls. Using “zombie” in the listing probably helped sell it. Here is the broken down scary doll that I sold for $19 in three days and received positive feedback:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/182902713043

I did have a customer pay by echeck once. She informed me that she was paying that way, and I think the ebay notice email said something to effect that I should wait until the echeck posted before shipping. Perhaps the caller didn’t read the email carefully, or there was a glitch in the system.

Anyway, here are my numbers:

Week of Nov 26 – Dec 2
* Total Items in Store: 1200
* Items Sold: 22
* Cost of Items Sold: $27.30 + $13.27 Commission
* Total Sales: $371.12
* Highest Price Sold: $49 Set of 5 vintage Fire King blue (delphite) dinner plates
* Average Price Sold: $16.87
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $30
* Number of items listed this week: 29

I had one funny issue where I thought I had a non-paying customer. However, she responded saying that she couldn’t pay and she was getting a message to contact the seller about shipping. Long story short, she is in Georgia and accidentally selected Georgia as the country. When I went to invoice her, I was only given international shipping options. I didn’t think anything about “Georgia” being listed twice. Took a few days to work it out!

Wow – that storage building is totally awesome. I am playing a maneuvering game in our garage and am totally dealing with major storage issues. Really great to see what you guys are doing!

Bigger developments for me — the wife is expressing interest in getting involved with the business – which is great. Looking at selling my old Sonata and buying a pick up truck. Looking for storage options. Accumulating a network of impromptu movers available to help me move bigger items all over Massachusetts and RI and transport them to (hopefully a storage facility).

Sales picked up some this week. More sales and some bigger ticket stuff — over the last few weeks i have been going after bigger ticket items and some have moved already — which is really nice. Hopefully with the wife helping more it will help me get back to my listing goal of 100 items per week. My main struggle has been getting everything i want to get done complete as a one man show. I have showed her the pod cast a few times hoping she catches the bug.

11/26/17 – 12/3/17

Total items in store (beginning of week): 867
Items sold: 22
Weekly sell through: % 2.54
Total Sales: $1101.24 (no shipping)
Average price: $50.06
Cost of items sold: $188.08
Gross profit: $913.16
Highest item sold: tsa 88 irongrip strength weight rack with dumbbell set 5 to 50 LBS – $225 (cost 60.00)
New items listed: 25
Asking price of new items listed: $1924.43
Cost of new items listed: $183.49

Congrats on the storage shed. Looks great! Cant wait to see the process of adding the shelves. Also will be interested in hearing your inventory tracking system.

I had to do another Bandit run on Sunday (16.5 hours straight on the road), so I’ll have our numbers tomorrow. Listened to the podcast while on the road to my consulting gig, and had some thoughts.

Completely agree with getting the house as a place to LIVE, not just having stuff everywhere. Veronica especially is like this, where we make sure that rooms have a definite use, either WORK or LIVE. Our kitchen, living room, and bedroom are all living only, no work stuff!

You touched on a great subject, which is to cash flow your growth. You didn’t start with all the light kits, storage building, bins, shelves, etc. You did that a piece at a time. Sometimes those of us that do this full time and have this down forget that. But I would also tell others that are starting that they don’t need to spend a ton of money to have the same studio/shipping/storage solutions that many of us that do this full time do. Expand a little at a time, and use some of your profits to fund new storage, or better lights, etc.

I am also very interested in how to have a rural storage solution for Postal Pickup. Our future move to a rural location is potentially impacted by this fact. Any one that has postal pickup and is in a rural area (especially where all the mailboxes are at one junction (not at the house), I would LOVE to hear what they have worked out.

For the lady that called about having her sales stall out. I completely agree that the first step is to start tracking numbers each week (I would start with # of items in Inventory, # of items sold, Sell Thru Rate, and weekly $ of Sales. That will give you hard numbers to compare to.

After that, I would ask how many new listings have been put up this week? Last week? I see so much of our sales are affected by whether we are having consistent new listings. Then, for many items, I would look at what the estimated Selling Time will be. Are these long tail items? Are they seasonal? What is the estimated STR based on past listings (I look at the # of items in inventory and compare to the # of sold items (which is 90 days) to get an idea of how fast these items sell). Are prices still competitive? Are the keywords accurate? Lots of items to look at that may be either tasks that can help get the items sold, or that can show that she just needs to wait for the right buyer or right season to sell.

I haven’t been running my numbers lately, but sales have been quite good averaging 500-700$ per week between my 2 stores, I will sure miss the steady sales come next summer, LOL. I need to really consider what I want to do in my ebay store which has been sluggish for some time, my fancy things do well on Etsy, but maybe I need to concentrate on more practical stuff on ebay, got to look at what I have been selling since Fall and come to a decision on the issue.

I am reposting this, the first time I posted it it disappeared after I did an edit.

Great looking storage building R&J. It is always entertaining and educational to hear what is happening in rural America.

I finally broke the 900 listed items barrier, now on to 1000 listings.

Numbers for month of November
Total Listings: 905
Sold 53 Items for $1,258
Cost of Items Sold: $109
Highest Price Sold: Tie: $80 Computer Card / $80 1st Calvary History Book
Average Price Sold: $23.73
Spent on new inventory: $370 ($144 for a large lot of Hallmark ornaments)
Number of items listed: 100
GSP: 2 including my first one to Russia (Moscow).

I visited a consignment store last month that I very seldom go to. Somebody had just that day left off a large lot of the Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments. Somebody had beat me to all of the Disney ones already, but I bought all of the Classic American Cars and all of the All American-Trucks ones. I purchased a total of 40 for $143.99 (including tax). Since there are so many of each already listed, I focused on better photos and item specifics with free shipping. So far I have sold 11 of them for a total of $161.15. Not a high profit item but this time of year they seem to be a steady seller.

Store listings: 824
Items sold: 24
COGS: $95
Sales: $555
Highest: $160 for Galco hunting speed-loader bag; was $38 from the “glass case” at Salvation Army.
New listings: 48

Went to an auction this past Saturday in Charleston with my 3 1/2 year old daughter who lasted well for three hours coloring and talking. We bought two Sikes office “banker lawyer” chairs and an antique wooden “sea chest” for $65. I haven’t bought Furniture before but am willing after hearing about U-Ship.

Warning because here is a kid story: I bid on some antique dollhouse furniture but stopped at $50; one older lady was buying all the doll stuff. Well my toddler had promised not to cry but she did when we didn’t get the Furniture, then said
“I’m sorry, I promised my momma” to the auctioneer. A vintage baby kewpie doll was next and a lady bought it for $5 and gave it to my daughter, who promptly stopped crying and walked it around the area showing everyone. I apologized for bringing her but hey, sometimes you have to scavenge when you can. I hadn’t planned to even go since my husband is in the USVI doing engineering work but I had a couple Xmas blowmolds to sell to a woman near the auction house, so I stopped in. Sold the blowmolds for $100 and got the chairs and chest for $65.

I am having a crappy Monday. Your podcast is the light in the darkness today. My sales have been soooo slow the last 3 weeks I have been scratching my head and driving myself crazy trying to figure out what the heck is going on with my store. It was good to be reminded that there are just going to be slow times and it is the nature of the beast. I went three days last week with no sales which hasn’t happened to me in over a year. I just got off the phone with Ebay going round and round about my late shipping rate. Somehow I manage to upload tracking info at a 99.45% positive rate, but still manage to have a 4.76% late delivery rate. Their answer to getting that late delivery rate down is to sell more stuff. SMH. I know, I should switch to UPS as opposed to using USPS, but I don’t hear good things about them either. Saturday I had 5 things to ship and I scheduled a pick up. The carrier took three of the five. See what I’m dealing with? Oh well. Thanks for letting me vent. Here are my numbers from last week, which are (sadly) an improvement over the last two.

Ebay week of Nov. 26-Dec. 2

Total Sales $159.40
Items in Store 924
# of items sold 16
Average sale $9.96
COGS $16.04
Returns 0 Unpaid 1
$ spent on new $6.00
# of new items listed 25
Highest sale $29.99 Vintage oval framed needlepoint of roses (cost $2)

It is sort of weird this week, last week we sold over 300.00 every day, so far this week, 142 yesterday, 0 today.

Congrats on your new building! You never said how much it cost. Also, I know you have talked about this, but doesn’t it bother you that the first $60 of sales on your little store go to the premium store fee?

Listening to the show right now… congrats on moving forward with the storage building! Now you’re TrashElves4Life!

Week November 26 – December 2, 2017

Total Items in Store: 874
Items Sold: 30 (1 Amazon)
Cost of Items Sold: $124 (12.4% of sales)
Total Sales: $998.78
Highest Price Sold: $110 (300+ pre-1950 Stamps from Around the World)
Average Price Sold: $33.29
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0
Promoted listings test: 18 sales, $599.32 (60% of total sales), $35.81 fees (6.0% of sales)

Another fine week for me, 2 weeks in a row of 30 sales for the first time ever as far as I can recall.

I have storage envy! That’s a fabulous building. I have half a UK garage (that’s a small thing), some bookshelves and ‘vintage displays’ all over the house!

First time posting my numbers (converted to US dollars at 1.35 from GBP)
Sales: Etsy $705 / Ebay $8
Number of items sold: 22 (15 UK, 5 USA, 2 Italy)
Total items listed: Etsy 645 Ebay 85
Cost of Goods Sold: $40
Highest price sold: $229 Art Deco Mirror (shipped to Italy)
Average price sold: $32.40
New listings: 20

We’re hitting our limits on storage space, so we’ve hatched a plan to turn our bedroom into a storage room, convert the living room to our bedroom and reconfigure our (relatively big) kitchen to include the living room function.

We’ll also free up the other half of my garage over the holiday period as we plan to install the pink art deco bathroom suite (Ebay purchase $135) we have stored in there. Work should start on that project mid December.

Sales are definitely ramping up for us – we sell lots of stuff suitable for gifts (if your friends/family like vintage) books, ceramics, kitchenalia, vintage home décor, toys etc. I know it will slow down soon. I’d like to have around 1,000 total listings and, like most of us, I’m working on upping that average selling price.

My 9-year old self really, really hopes you went roller skating in that storage building before you started filling it.

That’s really funny that someone called in about their sales being slower on ebay after the summer because that’s the exact same thing that happened to me. I was blaming it on the hurricanes at first but I never really picked up to before the summer. I keep a little over 100 items in my store and last year I had 70 something but made twice as much last year in November according to my sales history. I knew it was worse. In my case, I think that it’s a couple of reasons: 1. I think I just happened to find better stuff last year. I found great stuff this year too, but I found some insane finds in 2016. 2. I haven’t been able to keep up with listing for various reasons. Plus I’m working 12 hour overnight shifts at the moment and by the time I wake up to try to list, the sun is going down and I have very little natural light to work with. I try sometimes with Daylight bulbs but I hate how it looks. I don’t really have space for a light box.

Etsy has been picking up the slack for some of it though which is awesome. I’m so glad I started crosslisting, some of my vintage 80s-90s stuff sells there for more than it would on ebay and quicker.

Omfug T-Satt, Etsy is working well for the kind of stuff I enjoy buying/researching/listing, although to be honest, I don’t think I’ve given Ebay a fair chance yet! Etsy rules say vintage is 20 years old. Nonsense of course, but I’ll roll with it. So, newer stuff goes on Ebay. I also use it for rare(ish) collectables. So recently sold a 1936 Gold Monopoly on Ebay. But that kind of item is difficult to find. I also have some vintage china/ceramics which I hope will sell to customers looking to replace broken/missing items in their sets. We’ll see how that goes.
The problem for me with Ebay is that I come to list an item and just know it will sell for more money on Etsy, so it ends up there. Fees are lower and customers are delightful.
Maybe I’d sell stuff quicker on Ebay, but I don’t think I’d make as much money per item or as an hourly rate equivalent.
I’d be very interested to see figures from sellers who have similar volumes/types of stock on both platforms.

Good morning! Congrats on the storage building! I am interested to hear when you do a complete inventory how many items you have that were once listed but now no longer are listed. I have always wondered if this plagues GTC sellers as much as it does relist sellers. Wishing we were closer so we could come and help you set up an inventory system! That sounds like a fun day to me. 🙂

That’s a great looking building. I have the Home Depot shelves that you’re talking about. We have them where I work and I liked them so much that I bought them for our home business. On a separate note have you ever tried Google photos I hope that my iPhone and it uploads all my photos to the cloud it’s free of charge and can hold millions of photos I have a years worth of photos stored in the cloud in Google Photos has some of the coolest search and editing features I have ever seen and best of all like I said it is 100% free.
Thank you for all you both do and here’s to another great year.
Alan Wilkes

Week of 11/26-12/02
Total Items in Store: 1,700
Number of Items Listed: 97
Number of Items Sold: 92
(Includes 3 Etsy, 2 Bonanza 1 TruGether)
Weekly STR: 23%

Total Product Sales: $2,411
Cost of Items Sold: $421
Gross Profit for Week: $1,704
Highest Item Sold: $125 – Wilsons Leather Brown Suede Shearling Overcoat
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Troy wins the week and Veronica leads for the year 27-20.

November 2017
Number of Items Listed: 373 (Forecast: 400)
Number of Items Sold: 357 (Forecast: 312)

November Sales Breakdown:
eBay – 339
Etsy – 17
Bonanza – 8
TruGether – 3
Amazon – 1

Monthly STR: 21% (Forecast: 19%)
Total Product Sales: $9,655 (Forecast: $7,565) – Increase of 54% YOY
Cost of Items Sold: $1,931 (Forecast: $1,891)
Gross Profit $6,327 (Forecast: $4,375)

Cracked $12k in Total Revenue (Product + Shipping) for the first time in November. We came in just under our listing goal for the month. Not bad considering some of the outside challenges that we had this month. Etsy is continuing to be a nice sales platform for us, and we have decided to keep Etsy going via SixBit for 2018.

Congrats on the new storage space! 🙂 Very exciting.

November 26 – December 2 2017
Total items in store: Etsy 444 // Ebay 606 (Items not crossposted I list different types of things on Etsy and Ebay)
Items Sold: Etsy 32 // Ebay 18
Cost of items Sold: Etsy $33.02 // Ebay $55.77
Total Sales: Etsy $341.78 // Ebay $332.83 ((Total = $674.61))
Highest Price Sold: $49 Christmas Stocking Cross Stitch Kit
Average Price Sold: $13.49
Returns: 0
Number of items listed this week: 23 (listed at $620)

I hit $3000 (Gross earnings) for the Month of November which I feel amazing about. 🙂 That is the most I have ever made in a month! I have been part time since 2011, and I started being full time Jan of this year.

Nov. 26 – Dec. 2
Total Items in Store: 928
Items Sold: 32
Total Sales (Gross Profit): $1003
Highest Price: $90 (Antique Six Drawer Wood Machinist Storage Cabinet Tool Box)
Average Price: $31
Returns: 0
Cost of Items Sold: $119
Costs of Items Purchased this Week: $60

Great week on eBay! My sales doubled from the prior week. Mostly bread and butter items, but it seemed that my phone just wouldn’t stop cha-chinging.

I love the new storage building! It’s been my dream for the past year to have a massive storage building like that. We’ve almost reached our max capacity in this old house.

I want to mention about my scavenge of the week. I was perusing LetGo on my lunch break when I saw a new listing for a taxidermied bear. This guy listed it as free. I thought it was a mistake, so I messaged him and sure enough he just wanted it out of his house. After work, I drove to his place and sure enough there was a stuffed bear waiting for me. He said he shot it in Maine in 2009. It was just a little bear, probably the size of a really large dog. It should be interesting to ship once she sells.

https://imgur.com/5dA0cTy

• Total Items in Store: 323
• Items Sold: 4
• International 1
• Total Sales $113
• Highest Price $54 Sakura Cherry tree bark vintage boxes
Lowest Price $11 Ann Taylor shirt No more unless it’s new or group of items
• Average Price Sold: $28
• Returns: 0
• Cost of items purchased this week $0 Listing the death rooms

Love the building. Ryanne/Jay, please take pics and videos as you organize it? I would be intimidated by that much room
Slow week BUT I just had a $150 sale for full price with a BO. Looking up

Awesome storage building! It will be great once you have all your stuff in one place. Such a time saver.

Total Items in Store: 1,463
Items Sold: 47 (2 Etsy, 2 Bonanza)
Total Sales: $1318
Highest Price Sold: $185 (New Puzzle)
Average Price Sold: $28.04
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $78

We had a great week. Went away for four days and came back with 27 items to ship. What a back breaker! I was joking with my husband that the Cassini Gods were smiling down on us. Seemed like the store was turned on full blast.

RR Store Week Nov 26-Dec 2, 2017

Total Items in Store: 1,380
Items Sold: 40
Cost of Items Sold: $48.98
Total Sales: $1,080.45
Highest Price Sold: $159.99 (1930’s fraternity book)
Average Price Sold: $27.01
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $46.99
Number of items listed this week: 47

Congrats on the Scavenger Shack, J&R! Can’t wait to see how you fill and organize it. I’m more than a little jealous of all that space; I have almost my entire operation in one room. It works for now, but I’m looking forward to having more room to house larger items.

Great week for me. My highest sale was a 1939 book of photos of Sigma Chi fraternity houses from all around the country. My second highest was a pledge guide from the same fraternity, dated 1959. That one went for $119.99; both sold to the same buyer for full asking price after being listed for about four hours. Paid less than a dollar each at an estate sale. At the same sale, I also picked up a bunch of higher end men’s clothing, some new with tag. I’m trying to get better at identifying contemporary brands. So far, so good.

Back to listing!

*Paul*

Total Items in Store: 937
Items Sold: 25
Cost of Items Sold: $125.02
Total Sales: $752.38 *
Highest Price Sold: $118 (Kate Spade Flamingo Bag)
Average Price Sold: $30.10 *
Number of items listed this week: Not enough
Had a number of older inventory move out this week – always a great feeling!
*caveat – I do free shipping so prices are bumped up to cover postage)

I did a lot of online retail arbitrage during Thanksgiving week and now all of those items are arriving daily in the mail. One expensive retailer is killing itself with how inefficiently it is shipping its items to me. I bought literally 100s of items and I’ve gotten maybe a few boxes that contained 10 to 12 items each, and then everything else has been arriving as items shipped individually or in small groups of two or three. Most of the items seem to have been mailed from the same place on same day so who knows what’s going on in that warehouse. I paid so little for the stuff that sometimes the retailer lost money from postage alone. But it works for me because FREE PACKING MATERIALS! Also, it’s kind of like my own Christmas; lots of randomly sized packages to open and only a vague idea of what might be inside.

That’s awesome! Can’t wait till we can afford to buy some land and build on it. My ultimate dream for eBay would be to have everything in one giant building and on a single floor. It get’s tiring lugging up hundreds of items up and down the stairs.

Rydell Relics – Great numbers! Do you have a premium store or anchor store? I have 1,1000 items listed on Ebay and thinking about taking the plunge to a anchor store soon.

Usually you want to have around 3500 items before upgrading to an anchor store.

I think this was mentioned previously and it was announced in early October, but USPS postage is going up slightly on January 21, 2018. https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2017/pr17_062.htm

Better late than never….

Total Items in Store: 2082
Items Sold: 41
Total Sales: $914
Cost of Items Sold: $193
Average Price Sold: $22.3
Average Cost of Item: $4.73
Highest Price Item Sold: $65.95 Pink Polaroid Camera
Number of items listed this week: 49
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 289
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 158
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 80
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.97%
# of Hats Sold: 28 (68% of sales)

Pretty good week. As usual, sales were inconsistent throughout the week. If I wasn’t good about tracking my numbers I would never have guessed that I exceeded $900 in sales. Wish I could find more pink polaroids. That was a quick sale.

90% of my listed inventory fits into one bedroom in my house. (The beauty of dealing mailing in hats). I have overflow, unlisted inventory and packing supplies in my garage. My garage is a mess. Having a dedicated shed sounds great.

Jay I’d be interested in hearing a year end summary from you guys regarding your numbers. Whatever you feel comfortable sharing. eg: number of orders for the year, cost of goods sold %-wize, biggest selling category, most orders in a day. Whatever numbers you can figure out relatively easily.

Relating to the package theft call on the podcast, I had packages stolen for the first time a couple of months ago. Our neighbor had the person on his security camera stealing the packages. The police couldn’t do anything though, as the packages were by the mailbox, so technically on the “right of way”. At this point, my only solution is a daily trip to the post office. It really stinks, but it’s the only way to ensure that the packages aren’t stolen. I don’t live in a busy urban area. The person who stole my packages was a vagrant on a bike. Prior to this, I’d leave piles of packages right by my mailbox for my mail carrier and I’d never had an issue.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by ChristineK.

T-Satt: My Etsy store hasn’t grown much this year in size much (around 300 items grown to 500 items). My focus has been on starting eBay this year (0 listings to 600). For Etsy though, the number of items in my store has increased this year, but there have been ups and downs. Same story with my sales, a general upward trend across the year, but ups and downs. I plotted “total items in Etsy store” and “total etsy sales” on a bar graph with my weekly data. Both increase with a similar slope. This slope however is a better fit for the “Total items” than “Sales”. (R2 value of 0.69 vs 0.46, which neither is great, so a line probably isn’t even the best fit for either.

Exponential trend lines show similar fit. Neither is great.

Maybe I just haven’t hit any plateau points, or I need more than one year’s worth of data. I have sales data for the last 6 years, but I have only been keeping track of # of items in my store this year.

I also plotted weekly ‘Sales’ vs ‘# Items in store’ in a scatter plot. No relationship.

Finally I plotted weekly ‘Sales’ vs ‘New Items Listed’ in a scatter plot. No relationship there either.

I am guessing that the increase in sales over the course of this year is just a function of increased overall shopping in Q4. (Especially since I sell almost exclusively vintage toys and kids books in my Etsy shop).

Steve Schultz mentioned in his video this week that some of his long-tail items have been selling. I thought the same thing. Maybe it’s just due to the holiday shopping and more people looking at stuff online.

I live in Los Angeles, I either leave a note for my mail carrier to ring bell for packages or I look out for him at about 12:30. Our carriers are very accommodating. I never leave things outside even though we are in a relatively safe location. Still, I would prefer to go to the post office than loose a package. Our post office has a drop off location inside and I just go there to drop things off.

Would anyone be able to send me a link to the ebay photo app. I was not able to find it. Will keep looking in the meantime.

Regarding changing the wording on unsold listing titles, absolutely!!!! I did it several times on items that were not even looked at and as soon as I made a couple of changes, boom! Sold. We are new so sometimes I just did not have the right words and that made all the difference. Just the word “lid” on the butter dish changed it from dead to sold.

I like the new storage building. I am fortunate to have access to my uncle’s steel frame shop building, granted he only lets me use the back part and the attic (He is now retired but very particular). I have been selling as usual on eBay, etsy, and FBA. I am focusing on shoes and clothes on eBay, and sales have been steady but there is always room for improvement. I use my etsy income to trade cryptos on Binance. My favorite crypto is Iota coin, which has made me some decent gains. I think cryptos will be the new money in the future once regulation gets sorted out and of course the feds want a cashless society on a block chain so they can monitor everything. I look for some scrap gold jewelry now too, I hear it is very undervalued. Have a good week!

Yes, they are speculation, but I do see adoption incoming. Craigslist now allows sellers to accept bitcoin. Agreed about us already being basically cashless. I have spent the last couple months learning all I can about trading and investing in them and I am very careful to never take a position that I can not afford to lose. So far I have made out very well, but with cryptos you must watch the charts constantly so you can sell if things change on a dime. Using them and trading the are 2 different things, and for now I agree there are many more stable investments. When eBay begins to allow payment in btc, I will be on board.

Today, yes cryptocurrency is not there. But could it be there in the future? Possibly.

At some point in our past, we went from Barter to Gold. We accepted that Gold was a medium of exchange of value. Then we went to paper currency. We are now in a digital world. Once (or if) society agrees that block chain is a more reliable store of value, we will move there.

Will it happen tomorrow? Nope. In 10 years, maybe. In 50 years, maybe.

I do know that the world 10 years from now will be different than it is today, and definitely 50 years from now. And I love to watch and see where we may be going. Just that block chain is here and the world is moving there is amazing. Will it continue? Probably. Or it may pivot out to something that we don’t have now.

The iPhone is only 10 years old…

Uber is already using self driving cars as we speak. I really don’t think they’re that faraway. I don’t think where you live is really going to matter, although I have to wonder how well they’ll deal with snow etc.

I also think electric cars could be mainstream today, if there wasn’t so much resistance. Battery technology is getting better every day. All you have to do is remember how well the cell phone batteries were 15 years ago. There would also need to be a way to get them charged away from home. If it were a priority, it would be done.

Think about all the sci-fi movies and predictions you’ve ever seen. They predicted flying cars and instant food (microwave?) and of course the video telephone system. Did any of them predict the smart phone.. or even just the cell phone. I am amazed at how quickly this product was developed and improved. It is a complete game changer in society, probably as big as the original telephone was 100 years ago.

The largest hurdle for electric cars is the recharge issue. I have driven to Montana and back twice in the last few weeks. I can be in and out in under 10 minutes, with only 5 of that being the fill up of gas (the other 5 is the potty break!). Before they get too far…that is the issue.

Plus, the power consumption of all electric cars. We would need a MUCH larger electric generation process to handle that. Right now, a lot of electric cars are powered by coal…since that is how the electricity is generated in that area.

And self driving cars will have the same issue with refills. Short trips in town, sure. Longer hauls…not so much.

Concept is good, but 100% participation…those logistics are much harder…

The recharge issue could be handled if an effort was made. It’s not rocket science. There could be quick charge stations, battery swaps and of course roof integrated solar panels on the body. It wouldn’t have to be a 100% solution in the beginning.

It’s a matter of the right people making the correct decisions. The problem is that progress rarely happens unless it is profitable.

I was a truck driver for years. My truck, like many had a sleeper. In order to keep yourself warm or cool. depending on the weather, you often had to run your truck while parked. An idling truck burns about 1 gallon of fuel and hour. You can imagine the air pollution and noise in the truck stops with all the trucks running. It’s also a quick way to wear out an expensive engine.

There were some feeble attempts made to solve this problem. In fact in many places it it illegal to idle your truck when parked. The reality is, if they wanted to solve it, they would have. The solution is fairly simple. It’s just not a priority and worth the effort to them.

I think the same can be said of the electric car.

Government regulations, laws and subsidies have a lot to do with what’s profitable.

It wasn’t very profitable for the car manufacturers to start putting Smog equipment on their cars 50 years ago, but I think we’ve all benefited as a result.