Scavenger Life Episode 466: Life Is Just Numbers

05/31/20 – 06/06/20

Total Items In Store: 3430
Items Sold: 17
Cost of Items Sold: $ 60
Total Sales: $ 583.89
Highest Price Sold: $ 85 (Vintage car)
Average Price Sold: $ 34.35
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0
Number of items listed: 34

Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales have slowed down to a normal level for this time of year for me.

Challenge of the week: Start listing more now that my taxes are done.

Scavenge of the week: None

Trends of the week: Shoes are selling well.

Mark S

My Sales Week Ending 6/6/20

Total Items For Sale: 58
Profit: $40
Items Sold: 3
Items Listed: 12
Average Profit: $13
Highest Profit: $20.31 (Bamboo Tech Charging Station)
Cost of Items Sold: $0
Returns: 0
$ Spent Sourcing: $0

Just saw this in eBay announcements: And, as an extra thank you, for those of you who already receive shipping supplies coupons as part of your store subscription, we will send you an extra one next week. We know you are shipping record volumes so we wanted to give you the supplies to be successful.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/Your-business-Our-results-Jordan-Sweetnam-SVP-GM-Americas/ba-p/30990752

Thanks for the show and belated Happy Birthday Jay! Your birthday celebration sounds a bit like me. When I had my milestone 50th birthday my immediate family and I got fancy take-out hamburgers and we ate them in the local park. That’s all I wanted as a celebration.

Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3921
Items Sold: 61
Total Sales: $1306.59
Cost of Items Sold: $166
Average Price Sold: $21.42
Average Cost of Item: $2.74
Highest Price Item Sold: $132.5 SONY Walkman WM-D6 Professional Cassette Player Not Working. For parts / repair.
Number of items listed this week: 66 worth approx. $1147
YTD Sales: $25607
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +17%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 441
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 383
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 331

My big sale of the week was a old Sony Walkman which had a funny story attached to it. A week ago I was doing an evening walk around my suburban neighborhood when I came across a free pile on someone’s lawn. I grabbed a few things and the Walkman was among them. As you can see I made from the numbers above, I made $182 from something I got for free that didn’t even work.

To the topic of your podcast this week, I guess I’m the opposite of Jay. I’ve always been motivated by money. In the last 25 years, I’ve focused on paying the bills and raising my family. I haven’t spent any time trying to find a job I really enjoyed, I just focused on being employed and earning a good salary. I have had to grind through years and years of jobs I didn’t enjoy but I’ve always had interests outside of work and I never let work interfere with my home life so I’ve had balance even if my day job didn’t really interest me. As much as I like the idea of “following your passion”, I don’t think that’s a life that many people get to experience.

I hope things seem brighter in the world this week. Sell trash. Be free.

May 31 – June 6, 2020
Total Items For Sale: 286 (Plus FB Marketplace)
Items Sold: 57 (16.6% Sell Through Rate for Week, FB Marketplace and Multi Quantity Listings make this look higher than it should be)
Gross Sales: $1776 (Includes Shipping)
Weekly Profit: $912.56, $130.36/Day (after shipping, fees, COGs)
Cost of Items Sold: $387
Highest Price Sold: $116 (3 Rare Star Wars Hardcovers)
Average Price Sold: $31.16
Returns: I need to track when I get a return, I only track what item was returned and how much was refunded.
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $1281
Number Of Items Listed This Week: 74 ($2082)

Overall an amazing week. One of my best ever. I was invited to a private sale on the 31st and spent around $700. Still working through listing it but it looks like ill make upwards of $2000 profit from the sale alone. Garage sales opened back up and I have been hitting that hard as well. Lots of cool pickups. (P90X DVDs $5 into $60, Justin Boots $2 into $60 and so much more.) I have been doubling my goal for the month of $50 profit per day. This month should help make up for March which was terrible.

Funny story from this week. I picked up some Adidas YEEZY Boost 350s at a garage sale. (if you dont know these are hype shoes and can be worth $200 plus in good condition. These were very worn. The shoe is commonly faked so I checked it carefully and was confident it was authentic. I listed it for 0.99 Cents free shipping 7 day auction. It got a ton of attention but then it was taken down by ebay and I got an automated email saying it was counterfeit and that I could not relist it. Im not sure how this happened? Did someone report it? Is it something in the algorithm that flagged it? I sent customer service an email but I have not heard back. Im going to just sell it for $150 on FB marketplace but I am super frustrated about the whole thing.

Items in Store 1461
Items Sold 33
Total Sales $955.00
COGS $89.00
Total Profit $866.00
Average profit $26.24
Average sales price $28.94
New Listings 8

Well I fell under $1k finally. It was a good run! I’m still WAY up (more than double) compared to this time last year. I also haven’t been listing for 3 weeks which cost me the $1k number this week for sure.

We did go out to yard sale this Saturday. Social distancing was definitely NOT a thing. I suppose there is an unwritten agreement that if you are hosting/attending a yard sale that you aren’t worried about the virus. Several of the people having the yard sales said the traffic was as heavy as trick or treat! I got some awesome stuff, but the highlight was this one yard sale that had records. Normally I avoid records like the plague due to the high junk to treasure ratio, but this one started off with the guy saying “records are a dollar except for Bob Dylan and the Greatful Dead.” Then another person asked him how much for a nice copy of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper Album. Oh crap! I better dig in!
I put together a pile of 10 and brought them up to him expecting him to change have sellers remorse and charge me $5+ for each of them. He flipped right past a very nice MJ Thriller album, Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, some AC/DC like they were nothing. When he got to the Beatles White Album I found he hesitated and asked for $10. I had NO PROBLEM with that! It was original, complete with headshot photos.
After seeing he was legit with the $1/record thing I went back to his rack and bought a bunch more.
Most of the ones I got will sell for between $10-20 so I won’t get rich, but it was sure fun! Preliminary research on the White Album I think it will sell for between $50-80 (high serial number…boo!)

Happy birthday, Jay. Almost over the hill. Don’t worry, the ride down is a hoot!

Haven’t done my number yet, but had to comment regarding online auctions. You mentioned you thought the prices were high. My exact impression as well. We do most of our scavenging through online auctions and have been laying low through the quaranteen. The few times we’ve been tempted to bid the bidding has been off the chart. As you said, people are bidding items up way past my usual levels of 10 – 25% of estimated value. I accept that I will always lose out to the collector, but usually come out with a few lots. The last two auctions I’ve bid on I haven’t won a thing as prices went way beyond my limits, with some going to above what I could have bought the same item on ebay.

I also can relate to the comment about once you’ve one an item, you feel like you need to go all in to make the drive worth it. I hate it when the item I want is towards the end of the auction and I let things pass that would have been good buys, as I don’t want to make the drive if I don’t win the main prize.

It’s a double edged sword though, with more buyers online, there are also more auctions online. Here’s hoping the auctions stay and the buyers go back to their old ways once things go back to normal.

Cheers!

Total Items in Store: 351 Ebay, About 70 Mercari
Items Sold: 12 Ebay, 2 Mercari
Gross Sales: $700 Ebay, $32 Mercari
Cost of Items Sold: $346 Ebay, $5 Mercari
Highest Price Sold: $200 New bedding
Average Price Sold: $58
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $15
Number of items listed this week: 21

Happy birthday to you guys! I hope you enjoy a chill birthday celebration. I was thinking it would be cool to blow up some old town postcards for your shop decor, though I’m confident that you already have already planned or found some amazing wall art.

An old friend once said to me that very few people get to do a job they really love and the rest of us just have to suck it up and that’s why they call it work.

This week my sales fell off a cliff mid-week and vintage did not moving well for me. However, I did get a whole box of death pile Starbucks mugs listed so I’m happy with that. I’m going to wait until I have fewer RA repeats to post another video with unique vintage. Thanks to people for the nice comments. It feels really good to get to some piles listed – still much more to go. The kids are demanding more of my time but I’m hoping to knock out another box this week and I think that would be all but the Christmas Starbucks.

Finally, a word about promoted listings. I have a story actually. I was a finance major and we had an mid 80s computer simulated group project to launch a business. We met regularly to discuss strategy, but as the weeks went on spent less and less time. At the end our team won first place! It turns out that the person in charge of turning in our weekly tweaks had steadily increased the advertising budget while everyone else was snoozing. This week I was looking for something to buy in the app and frequently scrolled through a banner of my own sponsored listings. I do 2%. Hopefully, it will pay off as some sellers forget about it or refuse to pay more fees.

Have a great week. Hope it is a healing week in many ways. Masks are required here in businesses and have apparently worked well. We are grateful to our neighbors for making the effort and to the business and local government for requiring this. The culture here is wearing is caring.

Here are my numbers for this past week. After a few down weeks sales took an uptick based on two larger sales. Best sale was an antique bible from 1828 that I sold for $299.95. I love old bibles. This one had genealogical information in it and I assume it was purchased for that reason. Paid $30 for it at an auction. The other high sale was for some lens filters for a Rollei twin-lens reflex camera. THese were in a lot of camera equipment that I paid too much for after I misidentified the camera. I averaged the cost across the items I posted so figure I have about $150 in the filters and sold for $250 on best offer. This had my cost of goods much higher than normal.

Week Ending 06/06/2020
Total Items in Store: 1217
Items Sold: 12
Gross Sales: $957.66
Gross wo Shipping $804.65
Cost of Items Sold: $201.68
COGS Percent 25.06%
Highest Price Sold: $299.95 Antique Bible
Average Price Sold: $67.05
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 7
Promoted Percentage: 58.33%
Average Days Listed: 94.93
Longest Listed: 635
New items listed: 19

5/30/20-6/5/20
Total Items In Store: 1930
Items Sold: 24
Gross Sales: $546
Highest Price Sold: $100 (General Electric Contact Kit)
Average Price Sold: $22.75
Returns: 1 $60
Money Spent on New Inventory: $90
Number of items listed: 0

• Didn’t post an update last week as I was in California visiting family. It was interesting to see how open CA was compared to Illinois. Nice to be able to attend some estate sales.
• Sales were very light this week with my extended handling time. Had a $100 and an $80 sale that kinda carried my week, otherwise all very low dollar sales.
• I use business policies on my listings, but my son does not. When we edited his handling time for the trip to CA, it allowed him to edit 750 listings at a time instead of only 500. He was able to change his entire store in one edit. I don’t know how new this is, but its new since the last time we used it.
• A friend arranged a private showing for me at an estate sale that wasn’t starting until next week. I was able to pick up over $1000 worth of inventory for $50. Unfortunately, it cost me $100 to ship it all back to IL. That made my cost of goods much higher than I like, but at least it’s a good size chunk of inventory to list when it arrives this week.
• I’ve been experiencing the same online auction issue…prices way to high. I’ve kinda given up on them for now. Last one I made bids on I won 1 item of the 20 or so I bid on and had to drive an hour one way to pick up a single item. I can’t wait until in person auctions start back up again.

May 31 – June 6
Total Items in Store: 3,959
Items Sold: 31
Total Sales : $759
* Below yearly average of $946
Highest Price: $90 ( Lifetime Cookware 3 Quart Double Boiler Saucepan w/ Lid)
Average Price: $24
Returns: 1
Cost of Goods Sold: $82
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 36

Happy belated birthday, Jay! And happy future birthday to you, Ryanne! It’s been a slower than average week of sales. But I thought my numbers would be lower than they actually were so that’s nice. I tried getting back into the eBay listing routine but found it really hard to find time to list. I’ve got a lot of summer time choirs and projects that I’m working on, so I’ve resigned to stop worrying so much about listing goals during this time and just do what I can.

Hi guys. Good week.

Sales: CAD$2061, 16 items, COGS: $406, Fees: ~$281, Postage: $366 –> Gross profit: $1008
Expenditures: $487 –> Cashflow: $1414
Listed: $270, 6 items
Doing lots of good buying, just acquired another storage unit. We have a baby, our third, coming at the end of July, can’t believe how fast that day is approaching. Hoping things stay hopping on ebay.

140 items shipped out last week. 45 items went out today. It’s still busy, but not crazy busy like it was even a few weeks ago. I’m happy with the current level of sales, as it’s overall still busier than last year during this same time period.

The “slow down” in sales has given me an opportunity to get back into listing. I’ve been trying to list both new items and items from the backlog each day. I’m currently trying to list 20 items a day in order to keep up momentum and start refilling the holes in the listed inventory. I’m also not allowing myself to bypass listing items that aren’t interesting to me – if I want to get them out of my immediate “listing from” area, they either have to be actually listed if worth it, or put in a donation pile if they are not. It has been nice to spend more time actually researching items and putting in the work to get them listed rather than just continually putting it off.

I’ve been curious to see how sourcing is going around the country, so I’ve been watching youtube videos of resellers going to garage sales as I pack. A few weeks ago, people were wearing masks and gloves and keeping their distance from each other. As recently as this past weekend, maybe half or less of both the garage sale holders and the customers were wearing protective gear or keeping their distance from each other. It’s such an odd time right now and I just can’t believe many people don’t seem to care about what’s going on.

I suspect thrifts won’t open up again here until early or mid-July. When they do, I can only imagine how much pent up demand there will be from resellers and people who have been bored at home to shop at them. My feelings on going to them are still the same as they were in March – I’ll pass. With the first phase of reopening happening today, we should have numbers in a few weeks to show how safe it really is to venture outside again. That will give me a good indicator on whether it will be safe to start shopping outside again in late summer/early fall. Otherwise, it’s just not worth it. The backlog will keep me occupied.

This recession/pandemic really can’t be compared to 2008 at all – it was a good time to buy stock back back in 2008 with much cheaper prices for items. Now? There’s a lot of competition and items are priced much higher. I don’t know if there are a lot of new resellers out there trying to buy stock, or if there are a lot of bored people at home with nothing to do driving up the prices. In terms of sales, the slow-down in March emulated the 2008 reselling slowdown that I experienced. It felt more like 2008. April & May were an extended holiday season. June is back to a busy normal. Weird times.

I have a questions that Ryanne and Jay are probably not familiar with since they primarily do not sell new stuff. I sometimes sell new or like new electronics. I go to the eBay seller hub and select “Listing” >> “Create listing”. I enter the UPC and fairly often eBay provides an accurate template for the item I’m listing.

I select the item and a listing is initialized with 1 stock image of the item. If I add additional images to this listing eBay will remove the initial stock image. So, I normally expand the stock image, do a screen grab of it and then upload that screen grab image file to the listing.

Is there some way to retain this initial image w/o having to do the screen grab?

Happy Birthday Jay! I really enjoyed this episode and spent nearly the entire podcast duration while in my local supermarket. It’s quite therapeutic! I have been selling on eBay FOREVER but only just recently started doing it seriously so I look forward to posting some promising numbers for you in the near future :). I like the idea of local auctions and can’t wait to try them out once I unload some of my death piles and never-ending storage of past inventory. Keep up the amazing work with all you do. I’m glad you both found something you enjoy and that we can enjoy along with you ^_^.

Happy birthday to you two! I had my birthday at the end of March after the quarantine started. I had my husband do the cooking that night, so it wasn’t so bad. I kind of missed going out, though.

I have a few comments on the podcast:
I’ve also seen that issue on the mobile app. I don’t submit offers from there, but I do look to see what is available. I’ll see something like “Buyer pays $0.00”, but, when I actually submit the offer on the desktop, the shipping is calculated correctly. I just checked it out, and it now says “Buyer pays”, so, yeh, maybe they’re working on it.

In the subject of seeing old photos of your coffee shop building, my brother-in-law received an interesting email a few weeks ago. He has an insurance company with an office in an older area of Pittsburgh. A seller on eBay found out who was currently leasing the building and contacted him through his email address on his website. She was selling a very old photo of the building (when it was a feed store) and provided a link to her auction. I was impressed; that’s some research! She had priced it a bit high at $75, so I gave some recommendations on possibly negotiating the cost down. I haven’t heard whether he bought it or not.

I’ve also noticed the high prices on online auctions in my area. I did manage to buy a small amount of inventory a week or so ago, but I was outbid on most of it. I’m now seeing more auctions in my area. Maybe the higher number and the general lifting of restrictions might make the prices a bit more reasonable.

Week of May 31 – June 6
* Total Items in Store: 1322 eBay, 32 Etsy
* Items Sold: 20 eBay
* Cost of Items Sold: $14.16 + $140 Commission
* Total Sales: $695.80 eBay
* Highest Price Sold: $150 & $140 both for gold rings on commission (one had been returned then resold), $60 nonworking vintage NordeMende Radio (highest noncommissioned sale)
* Average price: $34.79
* Returns: 0 (1 immediate cancel)
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
* Number of items listed this week: 12

Last week was very good based on the sale of two gold rings on commission, but one had been sold and returned last month, so the numbers look better than they really are. It might have been even better because I sold a radio for $164, but the buyer requested to cancel before I shipped it out. It just resold yesterday, so that should be my highest sale for this week.

Happy Birthday, Jay! It sounds like you enjoyed your day. My 30th was on Sunday, and it was fun and low-key, but I have to say kind of felt like a weird time to celebrate with everything going on in the world. My store felt pretty slow this past week, and I think for the first time this year, I sold zero things in a day (which happened to be my birthday ha!) but I’m not sweating it. I finally did go source some things in person this past week, which was a blast. I found a lot of people were indeed having yard sales; John and I found some great treasure at a couple of them! Also finished my own final edit of my book that’s all about my eBay adventure/transitioning out of my career, which felt great. I’ve got a couple more nit picky formatting things to do with the manuscript and I’m waiting on my cover art, but I can’t wait to wrap that project up. It’s admittedly cut into my actual eBay work-time a good bit for the last couple of weeks, but hey, thanks to eBay, I definitely have the flexibility to make room for that!

May 31 – June 6
Total Items In Store: 4684
Items Sold: 39
Gross Sales (including shipping): 1004.63
Cost of Items Sold: 40.68
Highest Price Sold: 72.59 (Bettie Page Iridescent Platform Heels)
Average Price Sold: 25.75
Returns: 0
Sourcing Cost: 36.19

I also found something so funny and serendipitous while I was sourcing this past week – If I can figure out how to upload a photo and find the appropriate forum thread, I’ll share it. Cheers, everybody!

@annaesthetic23 I’d love to hear more about your book you’re writing! Funny story: I wrote a lengthy book (50+ pages) back in the day about how to sell on Listia and then right as I was getting ready to release it, they completely changed their system haha. Go figure. I’m thinking I probably could adapt a lot of that book toward eBay strategies and make it a fun read, but it’d take some serious editing. Maybe some day!

Are you planning to sell it on Amazon and other marketplaces? Fill us in :).

Had a VERY wet week here last week with tropical storm Cristobal dumping close to 4 feet of rain at our house! Fortunately we didn’t have any flooding but some parts of the state are still underwater.
Sales, probably $250 total, usual mix of cycling gear, cigarette cases with built in lighters (we have a lot of these), and some Reebok workout gear.
You’re comment about it’s all about numbers, totally agree. Everyone’s numbers are very different based on what they spend. For me the overall “freedom number” is about $9000 a year, pretty easy to hit that target…
I guess I am in a unique position, I own my house outright, property taxes are a joke at $35 a year, own my car outright, insurance is about $450 a year. Health insurance is $1000 a year. Electric is a joke because i have solar panels, pay about $3 a month. Water is equally cheap, say $3 a month. Internet with a home phone with unlimited calls is $28 a month. Cell phone is $10 a month, again unlimited calls. If I am driving alot I spend $25 a week on gas. Groceries are my biggest expense, spend about $50 twice a week including beer.
Happy Hunting to all!

@Jay

Happy Birthday, kid, I just turned 71 yesterday. Life is good, I’m healthy, active, and pretty much physically fit. Oh, if I could be 47 again and know what I know now… (lol).

It’s all relative, my mother is 96 and still going strong.

Bill

You may have already considered this or someone else mentioned this or something similar, but regarding your building. If you want an old photo of it, maybe try going to county records or some online records of building ownership. Then find out who first owned it and see if somehow you could track down a living descendant in area (or living in another area) that has old family photos and you might find some photos that way or through similar such avenues.

The thing I find strange about feedback is that you can’t leave negative or neutral feedback for a buyer. This definitely feels like something that’s left over from the 90s—the idea that buying something off of eBay is a risk and that buyers must be super protected. I both buy and sell on eBay and I definitely only receive “scammy” messages from people trying to buy my items, because eBay protects us all as buyers from receiving those types of messages from sellers. It’s like they tried so hard to get away from that scammy reputation, they actually tilted things the other way. A tip I think I picked up from you guys is just not leaving feedback as a seller. I’ll leave it after someone leaves it for me, but I don’t go out of my way to leave it because the dynamic is already skewed in the buyer’s favor. If they want to leave a comment great, if not, I’m not going to prompt them by leaving feedback for them because they might leave a negative which is worse than just not getting feedback at all.

Slight detour on this conversation… If you find yourself with higher-end clothing and you are getting scammy email offers, etc. on eBay, try pulling those off eBay and sending them to The RealReal. Their process is slow (mainly due to Covid) and, as a beginning seller, I only got 50% off the profits. However, I had four really great high end tees (estimated $199-$250 new). Only one was worn and two sold already – each for about $170 each (so I got around $85 each). The other two are in process. So much better than a buyer buying it on eBay, and then sending back a ripped up “replacement” shirt (to fill the return box) saying the one you sent was a fake. That first one taught me. eBay paid me the $225 on that one but now I just don’t even bother with eBay for those. eBay has the authentication process on some brands, but if you have a brand that is not on their list, check The RealReal website to see how your brand might do there.

Hi all- long time listener. Fun (I hope) story about Google leading to an Ebay item. Last year I was randomly Googling my late grandfather’s name (passed away over 40 years ago), when, LO AND BEHOLD, someone is selling a jewelry box from his jewelry store from the 30s or 40s on Ebay. Had his name on it and everything. I bought it and now I have yet another family treasure.
You just never know…