Scavenger Life Episode 378: Like A Coyote At The Dump

Good Morning, here at the regular job listening and putting up the numbers as I can!

9/16 – 9/22/18

eBay store totommyto

Total store items: 604
Number of items sold: 13
eBay sales (not counting s/h): $688.50
Cost of items sold: $49
Consignment payouts: $85
Highest price sold: $95 – Playskool McDonalds play set vintage
Average price sold: $52.96
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: 0
Number of items listed this week: 10
STR for week: 2.1

Etsy store Oldfleatoymarket

Total store items: 615
Number of items sold: 6
Etsy sales ( not counting s/h): $125
Cost of items sold: $6
Consignment payouts: 0
Highest Price sold: three items each sold at $25 – recipe cards, dresser hardware, and a plush ‘Super Pickle’ (all vintage items)
Average price sold: $20.80
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: 0
Number of items listed this week: 10
STR for the week: .98

Sell Through Rate added as a weekly stat for now, monthly to follow, and certain it will play into decisions/moves in the near future.

Fun sounding podcast…thanks again!

Regarding the “also bought” item suggestions. I believe done well, this is very positive, particularly for vintage/one-of sellers. When a buyer searches eBay, the main thing we as sellers should be worried about is that they leave without finding anything that they want. Not that they buy somebody else’s nut bowl instead of ours. If eBay can guide them successfully to stuff they may like, that’s great! Maybe not so great for the commodity sellers although presumably it’s a wash there too.

Sales: CAD$557, 5 items. COGS: $41 –> Item profit: $418
Expenses: $1809 –> Cashflow after tax: -$1459
Listings: $980, 12 items
Hours: 14, -$105/hr

I bought a huge auction haul for $1800 that will keep me busy for a month. Hundreds and hundreds of items from an electrical supply store bankruptcy.

Notable sales: miter saw laser $17–>$215 on amazon, the Official Catholic Directory 1991 $1–>$175 on eBay. Slow week.

My numbers for the week of 9/16/18:
Total Items in Store: 177
Items Sold: 17
Cost of Items Sold: $47
Total Sales: $578 + shipping
Highest Price Sold: $82 (ECCO Dress Shoes)
Average Price Sold: $34 + shipping
Returns: 0

I have not posted in a while. Kids are back at school and the routine is settling in. September has been a solid month, though this week was slower than the one before. Trying not to let it get to me and just plugging through for the quarter ahead.
I had an awesome “Scavenge of the Week”. I purchased 5 animated store display Christmas elves….they are by (David) Hamberger and sell on eBay in the $350-500 range EACH. Bought them for $40 total off a local Facebook site! They are big (3 ft tall) and heavy so I am going to try and sell these locally. There happens to be an year-round Christmas store/Christmas movie prop museum in my town with an eccentric owner who looks like Santa, so I think my chances of a quick flip are pretty good. I also have a decent stash of vintage Christmas items to get started listing on eBay, just finished up the Halloween stuff.

Week of 9/16-9/22
Total Items in Store: 2,695 (Up 52% YOY)
Number of Items Listed: 121
Number of Items Sold: 89 (Up 35% YOY)
(Includes 1 Etsy, 0 Bonanza, 0 TrueGether)
Weekly STR: 14% (Down 2% YOY)

Total Product Sales: $2,339 (Up 37% YOY)
Cost of Items Sold: $503
Highest Item Sold: $136 – Vintage Converse All Star Chuck Taylor Red Low Top Canvas Sneakers
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Veronica wins the week and Veronica leads for the year 22-16

eBay Clothing
# Listed: 1,678
# Sold: 71
STR: 18%
ASP: $23.94

eBay Shoes
# Listed: 417
# Sold: 9
STR: 9%
ASP: $50.58

eBay Hard Goods
# Listed: 600
# Sold: 8
STR: 6%
ASP: $20.48

Etsy Hard Goods
# Listed: 161
# Sold: 1
STR: 3%
ASP: $14.88

Business Improvement for the Week – Start new purchasing streams. Veronica has a lead on a few new online auctions, and I have a couple of liquidation sites that may prove fruitful. Going to start pulling some triggers this week.

We are also heading to Nebraska on Thursday for the annual Nebraska Junk Jaunt, a statewide garage sale. Hoping this year is better, as last year was a lot of overpriced items and not a lot of meat on the bone to resell. Good news is that we get to visit our oldest son at the same time.

Veronica did great on the Converse Chuck Taylor’s, now we just need the guy to pay. Good news is that we had a lot of auction activity, so if we have to, we will look to move those to a second chance offer.

My Store Week Sept 16-22, 2018
Total Items in Store: 1155
Items Sold: 7
Gross Sales: $151.84
Cost of Items Sold: $7.50
Highest Price Sold: $40 (Lot of Vintage Chandelier Crystals 🙂
Average Price Sold: $21.69
STR: 2.6%
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $47
Number of items listed this week: 13

Well after getting excited about “higher sales” (relative) last week, I went ahead and had my 2nd lowest week of sales since tracking numbers…Ouch! I hate posting these low numbers. Oh well, back to the drawing board – I need to list more… my sales drop when I don’t keep pace with the previous week(s) of listing. Hope you all did better!

Sep 16 – 22
Total Items in Store: 1769
Items Sold: 18
Total Sales : $605
* below yearly average of $807
* above 2017 total week sales of $298
Highest Price: $110 (Set of 5 KOH-I-NOOR Rapidograph Technical Drafting Drawing Pens)
Average Price: $34
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $26
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $286
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 0

Another week of slow sales. It’s kinda a bummer. When it’s slow like this, I can’t help but get that dread feeling that something is wrong and that I can’t rely on eBay to pay my bills anymore. But it’s just irrational fear. When I finally do my numbers on the Monday after, I can see that things aren’t so bleak after all. $600 in sales isn’t that bad really. When you compare that with my day job paycheck, that’s still on par with my take-home weekly pay.

We went to an auction on Thursday that was a complete bust, which wouldn’t have been a totally big deal except it was almost 2 hours away! Nothing was going for less than $100. We stayed for an hour and left. Stopped by a few thrift shops on the way home, so at least it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Now in contrast, we went to another auction on Saturday and were able to completely fill our car up with stuff for around the same cost as a single item at the first auction!

I didn’t list at all last week. Instead, I organized all of my 35mm slides. I think I have over 10 thousand of them. There’s lots of good stuff including Reno, NV pictures from the 70s that might sell for great money. I think I’m just going to do a small set at a time and see how well they do.

Average week. Still working through some decent commission sales of my friend’s items. Always exciting to see (his) cha-chings on my phone, before I realize I don’t get to keep all those dollars I see! 🙂

Feeling/finding (it’s been a year now) that sourcing in this neck of the woods isn’t good. It’s either overrun with scavengers, or else overrun with military (true) and young families, demographics that don’t skew towards offloading re-sellable items. Blah. Even the online auctions nearby haven’t had anything worth looking twice at. Looking at how to build in scavenging trips here and there in the future…

09/16/18 – 09/22/18
Total Items In Store: 941
Items Sold: 19
Total Sales: $864.18 (incl just my portion of commission sale below)
Cost of Items Sold: $20 (sold several freebies and items I owned)
Highest Price Sold: $600 – Aerostich Roadcrafter One Piece Moto Suit (commission sale)
Average Price Sold: $50.99
Returns/Refunds: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $49.44
Number of Items listed this week: ~30

I also have a DeLonghi Magnifica! It really is a game changer.

1. Delonghi has great customer service. I had to call them once because our machine quit working and started flashing an error message. The super nice and witty customer service person walked me through the steps to fix the machine.

2. Not to out-scavenge you guys, but we got our DeLonghi for FREE. For awhile, my spouse was really into writing music reviews and posting them on his personal website and Amazon. Other Amazon shoppers liked his music reviews so much (and ranked them as helpful), that he was ranked in the upper percentage of reviewers. Amazon invited him to be part of Amazon Vine Voices. He now gets free products in exchange for writing detailed and engaging reviews. I help him to test and review the products. The Delonghi is probably the best thing we have gotten to review. We also scored a fancy Miele pethair vaccuum cleaner, a Ninja blender, a set of outdoor patio furniture, a Tumi travel bag and lots of random useful things.

So hey, if you buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, definitely take the time to write a clever and detailed review. You might get asked to be a “Vine Voice.” 🙂

Week of Sept 16 – 22
* Total Items in Store: 1175 eBay, 13 Mercari
* Items Sold: 22
* Cost of Items Sold: $54.22 + $13 Commission
* Total Sales: $322.82 eBay
* Highest Price Sold: $39 Antique car horn trumpet
* Average Price Sold: $14.67
* Returns: 0**
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $35.70
* Number of items listed this week: 5 eBay + 6 Mercari

Another week of low priced sales. The antique horn was pretty cool. I had paid a premium for it because I knew that my husband would be interested in it. After he hung onto it for a short while, I listed it. The rubber on it was completely shot, so I was surprised that it sold at a premium.

I also found that prices were very high at the auction I went to last week. I did buy one lot, but that was it. I did very well at an online auction, spending only $24.20 and filling up my trunk. However, part of the reason was that the auction company’s provider had an outage, so bidders weren’t able to bid for some part of the auction.

** I did not have a return, but I realized days after a sale that I had shipped out bread plates when the buyer had purchased the salad plates. I sent a message that I was shipping out the correct plates and to keep the other ones, and she thanked me and then mentioned that one of the plates and one of the bowls had broken. She said not to worry. So all’s well that end’s well, but I did lose some profit due to my not checking twice (and having my first breakage in over a year).

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Sharyn.

Listening to the podcast now. Quite simply, last week sucked. It was my lowest numbers since March 2017! As I mentioned last week, Monday, within a one hour period I had two return requests and a cancelled sale. The week never really recovered from that hour. My cancellation was exactly what you were talking about, bought it and almost instantly cancels it. To make matters worse, they paid with an echeck. I hate echecks. They are a royal pain in my patoot. So the buyer didn’t get an instant refund because the darn thing was hung up in the clearing period. It cleared Saturday, but so far neither PayPal or eBay has refunded it yet. I will probably just go ahead and do it tonight and hope it doesn’t end up being a double refund out of my account. Or I will break down and call eBay and hope I get a decent rep.
Speaking of thrift stores, my Goodwill has become somewhere I don’t want to shop anymore. I’m wondering if it’s just my local Goodwill or if they are all on a downhill slide. Not only is it trashy, I have been told they get fumigation for bedbugs a minimum of once a week. They have also started using labels on the hard goods that won’t come off without causing damage to the item. My current favorite choice for sourcing is an online auction. The auctions close on Sunday evenings, pick up,is the following Friday. Love to scoop up lots of things for just a buck or two!
I am not posting my numbers this week because they are so pathetic. Between low sales and the returns, I think I barely broke even this week. At least I didn’t go in the hole, right? Ok-onward and upward!

Here are my numbers for the week:

Total Items in Store: 2569
Items Sold: 43
Total Sales: $1003
Cost of Items Sold: $105
Average Price Sold: $23.32
Average Cost of Item: $2.45
Highest Price Item Sold: $89.95 SHARP Pocket Computer PC-1500 (Paid $10 at an estate sale)
Number of items listed this week: 72
YTD Sales: $33591
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +17%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 324
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 220
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 126
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.67%

It was a decent week for me. Lots of smallish sales that added up nicely. I hope it continues into the holiday bump.

I had one of those fully-automatic expresso makers for a month or so. It was a starbucks one that cost me $3 at a garage sale. I wanted to test it thoroughly as they seem very prone to breakage. After we got through a bag of beans of use I decided it wasn’t going to be an essential part of our lives (and my wife wanted her counter space back) so I sold it for $144. Happy to take that profit.

I’ll have to re-listen to the show, I had it on during my commute but I had a nap (on the bus) and missed some of the show. (It’s a reflection on Monday mornings and not on the quality of the podcast).

Have a great week!

Week of 9/18-24
Items in store: 777
Sold: 24 ebay, 2 Poshmark
Sales: $705 + $60 Poshmark = TOTAL $765
COGS:$89
Highest sale: Free People Sandals: $65
Returns: 0

Updates: Continue exploring new sourcing locations. Also, I am forcing myself to find stuff. I drove far today and didn’t “find anything.” I was about to leave, but challenged myself to at least go deeper. I found some ink and an unusual tin, prob about $40 worth. I really wanted to “earn” my time back from driving to this place. I don’t know whether that is strategic or not.

2018-09-16 – 2018-09-22
Site: US / Feedback 1174 (Red)
Neutral Feedback 2.00
Positive Feedback 438.00
Total Items In Store: 2474.00
Items Sold: 13.00
Cost of Items Sold: 40.00
Total Sales: 449.90
Total Fees 72.04
Net Sales After Fees: 377.86
Highest Price Sold: 59.99 (Vintage Pre-Recorded Cassette Tapes)
Average Price Sold: 34.61
Buyer Shipping $ 105.84
My Shipping $ 0.00
# Days so far 6.96
Avg. Daily $ 64.64
Proj. Week $ 452.49
# Items Listed 47.00
$ Listed 1801.53
ASP $ Listed 38.33
ebay Final Value Fees 36.70
ebay Fees Allocated 16.12
Paypal Fees 19.22
Fee % of Gross 16.01
# items being watched 1100.00
# items watch count >= 10 15.00
Avg. Item Hit Count 515.00
Best Offer # 3.00
Best Offer $ 54.99
Best Offer ASP $ 18.33
Money Spent on New Inventor: 60.00

Like I told Doubly, Sept has not been good to me. Sales are nearly the same as last year. My STR is way down, but ASP is way up which evens things out, but still down a lot from last year. However, I have 20% more items this year and most everything is on a promoted listing. I have listed more items this month than I usually do, so that isn’t the problem. I guess it is just the ebb and flow of ebay and my store. I just hope this trend doesn’t continue. I plan to start listing a lot more, so that should help.

I found a “new source” of finding items where my return is in the 30x – 35x range. Item quality is all over the place – some really great items, some just ok. The average sell price is $32. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but it is. It is fairly stressful because of how fast you have to pick the items (it is like a rummage sale atmospehere), but I have learned how to cope with it. I hope this source continues to be available because I can get a lot of items quickly. This is needed because I have decided to up my listing game.

Mark S

Oh, I forgot my new format since I haven’t posted my numbers in a few weeks.

Gut Sales Report for the week: Sept. has been a really slow month for me.

My process improvement(s) for the week:

1. Add the custom label to all my listings so that determining COGS is much easier.

2. Cleared my ebay room of a lot of the clutter of misc items (not quite a death pile, but it would become one)

3. More planning of the new basement space to open space for about 1250 new items. (this has been in the works for a while, but everything takes a lot longer when you are a part timer)

4. To get more focused, I have created a spreadsheet that has my work for the day broken down into an estimate of how long it will take (so that I don’t plan too much for the day). This has been great because I am strategic about what tasks should be done it what order. I am trying to fix the issues of the past and yet list items at the same time, so this is challenging.

5. I had 30 listed items in my ebay room. These were from cancelled item, unpaid items, returned items, questions about items, requests for measurements for items. I have been lazy in getting these back to inventory, so I took care of this. This is part of “Challenge of the week” below.

To Do: Order new photography equipment this week.

Scavenge of the week: Bought a new in the box Nike golf cover from a guy who won it at a golf outing. He said he couldn’t use it, so that was my cue to offer a low ball offer that was accepted.

Challenge of the week: Get messes from the past cleaned up as much as possible and put processes in place to prevent them from happening again. This is hard for me as a part timer because some of this is very time consuming. That is why I don’t want to have these things happen again.

Pulse of my business
Things are really starting to click for my business. I am getting my old messes cleaned up and starting to get a lot of items listed. Getting messes cleaned up is very important to me right now. It is hard to feel organized when there is unfinished business that is causing issues. I really feel like my business is about to take off. It will be exciting to see what happens.

Mark S

Found a few things on my TN trip, but space was limited since I was the people transporter. Will need to source hard this week!

9/16 – 9/22

Total Items in Store: 1087
Items Sold: 32
Gross Sales: $1371.22
Cost of Items Sold: $128
Net eBay Sales (After Shipping, Fees): $1056.14
Highest Price Sold: $125 (Carl Schlieper Knife)
Average Price Sold (Gross): $42.85
Average Price Sold (eBay Net): $33.00
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $100

Week of 9/16-9/22
Items in store: 310
Items Sold: 10
Sales without shipping: $542.84
Cost Of Items sold: $56
Average Price Sold $54.29
Cost Of New Inventory: $20
I had a great week with 3 items selling for $100+
Highest price item sold: 4′ Grandma and Grandpa Porcelain Dolls for $125. I paid $35 for them. I advertised local pick up. Buyer arranged for UPS store special packing and shipping. Cost him $280 to send 7 hours away!

Total Items in Store: 418
Items Sold: 7 Ebay, 1 Mercari
Gross Sales: $303 Ebay, $79 Mercari
Cost of Items Sold: $51 + $30 free shipping (+ some items ours)
Highest Price Sold: $100 best offer (West Elm Duvet and Sham Set paid $10 at indy thrift, free shipping $17)
Average Price Sold: $43
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 4 Ebay, 9 Mercari

Extremely quiet week on Ebay, with a big bang on Sunday afternoon. Busy life week outside of Ebay. Enjoyed the podcast and love the exposed brick!

I put best offer on all of my items over $10 and removed the auto-reject floors. Kinda burned myself on one item that I paid too much for so I’ll have to watch that going forward. I’d like to try an experiment soon tweaking older listings. A Youtuber suggests tweaking as many as you are doing daily listings.

I’m continuing to use Mercari to list our clothing. I just sold my daughter’s Patagonia jacket for more that I paid at Backcountry Steep and Cheap brand new. So we used it for free. Like you said in the Podcast, gotta love that. Also, we sold a Pottery Barn dining room set we bought used, used for 9 years for only $125 less. The top coat had white heat pizza box marks that were turning people off. Then I discovered on Youtube that a steam iron on a towel fixes that right up. The table sold immediately after I fixed it. Have a great week.

I’m constantly looking at my numbers in different ways to become more efficient – one number I’ve been playing with lately is how much profit I make from each location I find items at.

What I’m trying to figure out is what places are the most profitable per visit to shop at. The challenge I am having is that I’ve only cross referenced my numbers since January to where the items were purchased – and I have items that have not sold.

Essentially, I’ve added up my total sales on items from each store, subtract what I’ve paid at each store for items (including those that haven’t sold yet), and divided that number by the trips I’ve made this year to each location.

So far the numbers are interesting – some stores that I thought were average are where I really make money, and others where I have had good finds (but only a few items per trip) aren’t looking too great.

Does anyone have any further formula suggestions to get a better, or truer number?

Inglewood: For me, it would be to break down your profit/hour for each of these items.

Look at your total time to source at that location (door to door), the number of items you purchased on that trip, and get the number of items you find per hour at that location. At this point, I would assume that your time to list, photo, and research is the same across all locations. If not, add the extra time to the items at that location to your number of items you find per hour at that location. Then multiply by your net profit for items at that location.

I did a similar analysis earlier in our business building, looking at the time for us to source our products. We find something every 5 minutes, including travel time. So, if I can source something every 5 minutes, and I net $10/item, I’m making $120/item in my sourcing.

PS – You may have some locations that you can bundle with other locations. I have one good location that is unfortunately not close to other locations, but I keep it on our rotation. There is another location that is really hit or miss, but it is close to 2 other locations that are solid, so we put it on on the route. There is profit in chunking…

Good idea in keeping track of the time for each location – I already put myself and my wife on the clock when we are out scavenging, so I have those numbers and can split them up against clustered places I scavenge.

Part of my exercise is also to determine the most fertile scavenging areas – we are planning to move once I become unemployed, and the location we are moving to is about 4 hours away from where we are. Most of our scavenging is in a major urban area directly in the middle (2 hours from my current location, 2 hours from our new location) but wanted to determine if coming back 4 hours every once and awhile to my current area is worthwhile every now and then when I move. Also, it is interesting to know what areas produce better results – therefore, it may be worthwhile getting hotels, travelling further, etc. if the history of success is there.

I’ll play with my numbers to add in the time factor, and see how it works out and compares to my current results.

That makes sense.

Veronica and I have done some travel to other areas to potentially move to, and EVERY time, the first thing I want to look at is “what can we source, what can we net, and how plentiful”. We also look at the long drives with the same thought: Can we drive 2-4 hours, source all day, and come back? Overnight?

All great thoughts…

PS – This lead me to look at how to have the product to come to US, rather than the other way around…

INglewood- I track which estate sale companies have the best houses/sales to maximize my time. I tend to pick up more damaged clothing items at estate sales, however. So that has cost me. I def have some honey hole stores I have on a heavier rotation over the blue moon places. I see so many resellers pop in and out and only look in their category (mens jeans for ex), and leave after 5 min onto the next stop. My biz plan is to sell across categories so a stop is never wasted, but I see the appeal of hitting several places fast.