Scavenger Life Episode 468: The In Between

06/14/20 – 06/20/20

Total Items In Store: 3400
Items Sold: 21
Cost of Items Sold: $ 60
Total Sales: $ 593.32
Highest Price Sold: $ 70 (Painting)
Average Price Sold: $ 28.25
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 138.48
Number of items listed: 10

Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales are still about normal for this time of year for me. Felt good to go to a number of garage sales.

Scavenge of the week: Santa Bears – I went to a garage sale and they just wanted a huge box of them gone. $1 for all, but you had to take all. I couldn’t resist and I bought them. I usually get about $25 each for these, but they take up a lot of space and take awhile to sell.

Trends of the week: My reel to reel tapes have been selling this week.

Mark S

I’ve found a trick to not getting ‘screwed’ by a buyer on things like framed art behind glass, batteries, light bulbs, etc. Make that stuff ‘free’ and ‘not included in price’, but build it into the shipping cost. I also add text like that allows the buyer to request that that extraneous heavy stuff be left out of the package and invoice, thus affording them a shipping discount. Have never had a problem once the item is received. Glass is so cheap, I honestly can’t imagine someone wanting to pay to ship it free or not. In the case of batteries and light bulbs (often found in lava lamps, clocks and radios, etc) it gets me off the hook if those things die after arrival. Anyone have any other tricks?

Just gonna drop this here…thought it was interesting:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/21/business/people-signing-up-for-coffee-subscriptions/index.html

Total Items In Store: 184 Ebay (many cross listed to Poshmark)
Items Sold: 12
Cost of Items Sold: $ 4
Total Sales: $ 160; probably will clear $110 after shipping and fees
Highest Price Sold: $ 20.20 (Swim bikini bottoms, going to Denmark)
Average Price Sold: $ 13.38
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 10
Number of items listed: 0

Gut Sales Report for the week: I haven’t had the energy for listing and it shows. I have more swimsuits and jewelry I need to focus on. Elastic sales have slowed down (or I’ve been priced out).

Scavenge of the week: There is a neighbor that constantly puts free stuff out on my block. A few weeks ago I picked up a NIB VHS video converter. This week, there was a Department 50 Christmas house that should go for $30. I also bought a huge box of CDs and DVDs at a garage sale, mostly out of personal interest. While there are probably 25 I’ll keep, there are probably over a hundred more I could sell. I did go thrift shopping with my kids, but didn’t find anything for my resale.

Trends: My new-with-tags swimwear is selling. I bought three lots of it for 25 total in a local online auction. I’ve more than made my money back. They are low dollar items (a lot of Target brand), but there are a few multiples, so that makes it efficient to list and ship.

Challenge for the week: Listing my big ticket items and starting to list my vintage travel brochures. I have 4 items that I will price between $100-400, and I’m just so nervous about it for some reason. A bible from the 1800s, a couple of embroidered portraits, and a vintage wool Canadian sweater.

Keeping it in the family: My teenager has started reselling on Depop, and just made her first sale. I hope she has fun and makes lots of money! But today she spent her profits on clothes for herself at the thrift store.

My Sales Week Ending 6/20/20

Only listed 3 items. 600% more productivity than pre-Covid. 25% more than during furlough. Reasons: Work. Wife working at home. Kids off with no summer camps.

Total Items For Sale: 61

Profit: $213
Items Sold: 5
Items Listed: 3
Average Profit: $43
Highest Profit: $92.50 (High End T-Shirt, New w/o Tags – Sold on The Real Real)
Cost of Items Sold: $0
Returns: 0 (Resolved 2 month case on false return. No tracking. 100% feedback restored.
$ Spent Sourcing: $0

Items in Store 1418
Items Sold 25
Total Sales $1,026.00
COGS $56.00
Total Profit $970.00
Average profit $38.80
Average sales price $41.04
New Listings 7

Scavenging has been amazing the last two weeks. People are finally bringing all their junk they ditched to the thrift stores it seems now that things have opened up. Yard sales have also been very lucrative. Yesterday’s highlight was a new in box Harley Davidson motorcycle seat. Paid $30 and it will sell for between $250-300.

Listing time has been scarce as house projects are taking preference. I took a tip from Jay, and I had my wife make a list of every single house project she wants done, no matter how big or small. Then I took the list and built a scope of work with cost and estimated timing for each item.

Making the list definitely reduced my stress level about everything. Usually when she mentions a new thing (when I’m already in progress with 2-3 others) I have a mini panic attack. Now I have a plan and can execute it.
First item on the list- I learned how to do roofing and replaced the rotten shingle roof on my smaller 10×10 barn style shed this weekend.

Total Items In Store: 382 Ebay, 117 Mercari
Items Sold: 14 ebay, 1 mercari
Cost of Items Sold: $70 + a few items ours
Total Sales: $511 Ebay, $13 Mercari
Highest Price Sold: $94 (my son’s AP bio textbook)
Average Price Sold: $37
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of items listed: 0

Busy week and I got good and tired of being at the computer so I worked on some cleaning out of our garage, where my Ebay stock is located. Man, there are a lot of piles. I have to admit that I’m now creating some death piles out of the piles. Not sure I won’t have to end up donating some the smalls and duds later. I’m definitely looking at things with different eyes three years down the road.

I have decided to use Mercari to liquidate some $10-15 items from the piles. Sometimes low end items do better on Mercari if there is more quantity on Ebay, so it’s more novel on Mercari and because some sellers use auctions ineffectively on Ebay and create low comps. Also in Mercari notes, they have upgraded their desktop version and now you can see stats, including your own response time, etc. They also now allow you to relist items. I’m hoping for more enhancements.

Lots going on this week outside of Ebay again, but I’m now looking forward to getting back to Ebay listing. Thanks for the podcast.

Cases are up in our neck of the woods, were we have enjoyed having hardly any cases originating in our City until recently. It’s a tourist town and they opened up the downtown so we are getting visitors from places with more cases and it’s inevitable.

Hi guys, good to hear from you as always. I had a decent week.

Sales c/w shipping: CAD$2095, 12 sales, COGS: $688, Fees: ~$292, Postage: $337, Gross profit: $778
Expenditures: $0 –> Cashflow: $1466
Best sale was a voltage surge suppressor for $750.

Hi Everyone,

Here are my numbers for this week:

Total Items in Store: 3990
Items Sold: 50
Total Sales: $846.64
Cost of Items Sold: $117
Average Price Sold: $16.93
Average Cost of Item: $2.36
Highest Price Item Sold: $32.95 Maximum Carnage Super Nintendo SNES
Number of items listed this week: 65 worth approx. $1692
YTD Sales: $27268
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +13%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 441
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 463
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 307
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.25%
Hats sold this week: 41 (82% of sales) worth $657 (77% of sales $)

From my numbers above, this stat is pretty crazy : Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 463 8 of my sales were more than 1000 days old this week.

Nothing really new for me this week. Garage / estate sales haven’t really started back up much locally (which is good that it shows people are carefully about distancing, but bad for sourcing). My numbers are starting to slip compared to what I normally expect to be selling at this time of year as all my sales were low value items. On normal years I sprinkle in high value items found at garage/estate sales.

On the topic of returns, I had a return closed automatically last week (June 16). The return had been opened on April 22nd. So it took 50-something days to close.

Hope everyone has a great week!

I meant to say on that Videotronics caller question, I sold one of those types of units. To test it I hooked up the output from a VCR player into the input for the Videotronics unit and I hooked up the output of the Videotronics unit to my TV. When I played a movie in the VCR, I was able to manipulate the output using the dials/sliders on the Videotronics unit to see that everything worked. (The unit I had could adjust color / contrast / brightness and that kind of thing).

June 14 – June 20
Total Items In Store: 4809
Items Sold: 50
Gross Sales (including shipping): 1236.56
Cost of Items Sold: 82.06
Highest Price Sold: $104.32 (Vintage Poodle Statue)
Average Price Sold: 24.73
Returns: 1
Sourcing Cost: $24

Great episode this week (as usual!). I’m happy to report that my numbers seem to be magically back to normal this week, thank goodness! I never thought about looking at an “average day” counter… that is very interesting! Regarding returns, I technically had one completed… I’ve got several open from many weeks ago. I doubt they will actually return the items at this point, which is fine with me. I don’t count an item as sold until it’s paid for, and I don’t count it as returned until the return is actually completed. It seems like at least half the time it never even gets shipped back. No complaints about that!

I did have an exceptionally grumpy would-be buyer who was essentially pissed about the cost of international shipping for a very low dollar item. I explained the situation and this buyer unleashed his wrath on my eBay inbox; I was actually laughing at how dramatic the messages were. I felt like I may have dodged a bullet there, glad I didn’t actually have to ship anything overseas to him.

My book draft is officially done (woo hoo!) so now I’m just waiting on my cover design (perks of being married to a graphic designer)…then I guess I’ll really be slaying the self-pub dragon! In the meantime, just keep listing, listing, listing…

6/13/20-6/19/20
Total Items In Store: 1957
Items Sold: 27
Gross Sales: $555
Highest Price Sold: $60 x 2 (Cream Rose Lace Wedding Victorian Fabric and A Strand of Ceramic Artichokes on a Rope)
Average Price Sold: $20.56
Returns: 1 $30
Money Spent on New Inventory: $125
Number of items listed: 25

• Very slow sales this week, but picked up some good inventory this week which should boost sales next week as it gets listed.
• I think thrift stores in our state get to open up on Friday the 26th, so I am interested to see the impacts of the pandemic on what they have available and prices.
• Scavenge of the week: A lot of vintage rotary Bell telephones new in the box from the 70’s at a yard sale. He wanted $10 for one and I asked how much he would take for all of them (7 total) and a bunch of accessories that went with them. Ended up getting him down to $35 for all of it.

Three things I wanted to comment on from this week’s podcast. The first is regarding managed payments. I just signed up last week and I have spent more time on the phone with EBay in the last week than I have in the last year lol. They have been extremely helpful-I just had tons of questions. The lag between things switching from PayPal to my bank account has been a bit painful but the funds have finally started to flow today. What Jay said about fees with managed payments is correct, but they informed me that it won’t start until the July billing. In the meantime there is around a 2% fee per transaction. You also need to make sure you switch paying for your shipping labels to the held funds. I don’t keep a lot in my PayPal account and I almost drained it dry before I realized I needed to change my method of paying for labels. It’s a learning process.

As for selling magazines, I have never hesitated to list them, but I have found they either sell quickly or become very long tail. You can make some good profit on them though if you do your homework.
Lastly, for all of you scavengers in Ohio, you can access the Sanborn Fire Maps FOR FREE through online access of your local library. You have to have a library card, but if you are a scavenger you should already have one lol. If you aren’t in Ohio, check your local or state library website and see if they have them.

Haven’t done much scavenging because a friend had three boxes of stuff from the 1920s-1950s that had belonged to her aunt. I’m selling them on a 50/50 consignment. It’s been great fun-like having carte blanche at an estate sale without having to pay any money! My sales had been pretty steady until last week, I’m hoping it’s a one week glitch but it may be the summer slow down.

Jay and Ryanne, thanks for another great podcast. Great tip about Alone. Immediately ran to Netflix and started watching. I love that kind of stuff. I was surprised by the contestants who suffered gastrointestinal issues from eating tainted wildlife. Eat one wrong thing and you’re toast. Very impressed with archery skills I’m seeing. Hitting a squirrel in a tree with an arrow has to be crazy hard. It would take me about 6 hours to tap out. RE musing on the universe, I try to avoid pondering about the cosmos or things like geologic time, since it magnifies our individual insignificance.

Total Items in Store: 590
Items Sold: 13
Gross Sales includes s/h: $631
Highest Price: $220 – Sansui store sign
Average Price: $49
Cost of Goods Sold: $40
Returns: 0
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $120
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 10

Gut reaction to week: Solid. Got a nice boost from my sign sale ($220) on the first day of the selling week. Went yard sale-ing on Saturday but underwhelmed by items I saw. Tons of Hobby Lobby-style home decor items that I wouldn’t take if they were free.

Still amazed at the mind-set of some yard-saleers. Example: Jogging stroller marked at $50. It was toward noon and the rush was definitely over. I offered $40. Woman responded she had ‘thought hard’ about pricing it at 60, but settled at 50, and so she just had to have 50 for it. If she would offered 45 I would have bought. I just said ‘OK’ and left. The more I go to yard sales the more I’m comfortable with just walking away when I encounter inflexible sellers. I wonder how they feel at the end of the day when the crap is still setting in the driveway. “Oh man, I really showed those pesky re-sellers I won’t be taken advantage of!”

Magazine selling: Oh boy, that’s a long game. Got a load of about 200 Architectural Digest for $5 early this year. Spent hours listing them. I’ve probaly sold 5 for $100 total. It’s all an experiment, but right now I wish I’d spent my time on something more productive.

Happy birthday, Ryanne! Had to look up existential nihilism after you mentioned it. That’s exactly my own philosophy, but I didn’t actually know there was a name for it. Now I can seem smarter at parties by throwing that term around. 😉

Had a decent week in sales. Had a great sale of a vintage fishing reel with it’s original box for $255. I purchased at auction for just shy of $50. Actually had to buy two different lots for it because the reel was attached to a rod and the box was in a different lot with a different reel. Got this in my final auction purchase before the virus got bad in our area. I enjoy selling old fishing tackle. Lots of interesting stories.

Bought from my first auction in 3 months this past week. One of the things that is great about the virus is how some auctions have changed their methods. This one has curbside pick up now and was much more efficient than they were on past sales. Got a really cool antique bible from 1882. It is huge! Weighs in at 14 lbs. Has some detailed family genealogy in it and gorgeous illustrations. I paid $46 for it and hope to sell upwards of $500 based on comps.

Here are my numbers:
Week Ending 06/20/2020
Total Items in Store: 1194
Items Sold: 14
Gross Sales: $977.94
Gross wo Shipping $807.40
Cost of Items Sold: $107.36
COGS Percent 13.30%
Highest Price Sold: $255.00
Average Price Sold: $57.67
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $112.55
Sold via promoted listings: 8
Promoted Percentage: 57.14%
Average Days Listed: 304.14
Longest Listed: 829
New items listed: 8

June 14 – 20
Total Items in Store: 3,952
Items Sold: 28
Total Sales : $1,254
* Above yearly average of $965
Highest Price: $199 (Huge Lot of Handwritten WW2 Letters)
Average Price: $45
Returns: 1
Cost of Goods Sold: $44
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $9
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 34

Another great week on my end. This year has been fantastic compared to my numbers from last year. I’m so glad to see business pick up finally.

Steph and I went out to yard sales for the first time this year. We saw very few people with masks on which was discouraging. I didn’t have much luck other than negotiating a $7 price for a really nice wheelbarrow.

I had a really devastating return. That $460 knife from last week is being returned because the buyer thought it was a spring loaded blade. I sent him a link to a video demonstrating how it works but I guess it wasn’t good enough. And of course he put his reason for return “Doesn’t work or defective.” Ugh! Well I guess when I go to relist it, I’ll need to give better instructions on how to use it.

I love that bit about when you were younger, Jay, and the notebooks full of dreams. Relatable content. Lol I just turned 30 (June 4th), still have the notebooks, still have (some of the) same dreams. I still feel young but I enjoy getting older. I finally feel like I’m living life on my own terms. Anyway, happy belated birthday to you both!

June 14 – June 20, 2020
Total Items For Sale: 318 Unique = 425 Total (Plus FB Marketplace)
Items Sold: 51 (14% Sell Through Rate for Week, FB Marketplace and Multi Quantity Listings make this look higher than it should be)
Gross Sales: $1385 (Includes Shipping)
Weekly Profit: $627.88, $89.70/Day (after shipping, fees, COGs)
Cost of Items Sold: $267
Highest Price Sold: $181 (Star Wars Action Figure Vehicle, 2008)
Average Price Sold: $27.16
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: $300
Number Of Items Listed This Week:61 ($1507)
Weekly ROI:2.35x June ROI: 2.86x 2020 ROI: 2.53x

Interesting discussion this week on existential nihilism. This is not my world view at all. But, I understand that without a God, it is the logical conclusion to draw. I think it is incredibly depressing though. You basically cannot function in life if you think about it too hard. Nothing matters…. not what you do, not people, not anything……

Anyway, another consistent week of sales for me. uncanny how close the numbers are to the last few weeks. But above what I expect for this time of year so I am happy. I am still beating my per day goal of $50.

Cheers

Dusted off my extremely old and underused account to comment on the latest podcast re: 35 business days for returns.

It’s possible that the rep you were talking to was confused/wrong! I made this Reddit post a few weeks ago with my experience. The short of it is that there is (or was, at the time of my original post) a glitch in the system where the eBay auto-generated label did not show up on the seller’s end in the system. As such, to the rep, it made the return look like a case where you provided your own label, in which case the 35 business day rule applies. However, eBay auto-generated labels only have 15 business days from when the label was provided.

The rep said I was the one to bring this glitch to their attention, and that there is a way around it but the rep will probably need to talk to their leadership about the workaround. PITA to be sure, and the 35 business day rule is crazy regardless, but as long as you’re using eBay generated labels and want to put in the time to try to explain this to whoever answers your Facebook message, you can probably get the case closed right now.

Something interesting happened today to me as an ebay *buyer.* I had been looking at some homeschool book bundles last night, and then I got an offer today from the seller for a discount price. The difference was, I did NOT have the item watched, I had just looked at it a fair bit the previous day.

I wonder if that is who is on the receiving end of our “send offers”. I.e., not actual watchers but just people who looked at the listing.

Hello from Old Town Alexandria!

I have been meaning to post for months, so let me get it all out here while I’m back in Virginia and won’t forget.

1. Your sale of the funny fountain to Latvia is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, and I have my own fair share of crazy sales. I was born in Latvia, and I went back there a couple times in the past few years (https://shatnersoldtoupee.wordpress.com/2019/08/29/selling-russian-histories/). We all recognize how much of an extravagance it is to buy something like that with international shipping. The thing about Latvia, is that functionally everyone is poor. I think you guys have mentioned having traveled to Eastern Europe. If you think about a place like the Czech Republic or Brazil, the bulk of the population is much poorer than our middle class, but there are enough pockets of wealthy people that we all see those odd sales to there – you guys with your funny fountain, me with my CDs and records. Something that embodies Latvia’s poverty is that it outright lacks meaningful upper middle-upper wealth classes. People growing up well educated in successful families typically rely on opportunities throughout the EU; there is no strong sector of the Latvian economy. There are some Russian oligarch families who buy secluded gated houses here and there, and their wealth and cars are so uncommon that I heard several unconnected people talking about them. Our family still living there doesn’t even get to travel to surrounding Estonia or Lithuania – a 1.5 hour bus ride away. It is very funny that you found a sale opportunity from them. There are actually a lot of eBay sellers in Latvia and Lithuania who sell Soviet memorabilia who sell things for like $1-$5 + $20 shipping, but the salaries are so low that I guess it makes sense for them.

2. I am in Virginia for the first time since the pandemic, and it is crazy to be able to sit outside and laptop. People are just walking around unmasked all over the place. Even inside the shops (which are open!!) people are disregarding the mask rules, and it is just eery to be around. I was so relieved when the virus spread seemed to calm after our NJ/NYC debacle. But with the recent news about Texas and Florida, I am very concerned about this relaxed behavior.

3. My pandemic sales were complete explosions, and like you I have seen severe drop over the past two weeks. eBay was going at around 200% normal sales volume. Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist were so active, that I began purchasing in bulk from eBay and Shopgoodwill in a few areas, and the local sales (porch pickup) turned into a serious income stream on their own right. I was so busy that I experienced none of the lockdown boredom everyone seemed to be complaining about.

150 orders went out last week. Down from the boost in sales last month, but still higher overall than sales were last year at this time.

Currently at 118 orders out the door this week Monday-Thursday. Working hard on catching up on listing through the backlog – I’ve now gotten through 12 bankers boxes of materials over the past 10 days and have 4 more to go to meet my goal of getting one area completely finished before I can move on to a new section to work on.

Thrift stores opened up again here this week, but I’ve been hesitant to source. I don’t want to get on the subway. It’s not worth it. From what I can tell, a lot of the stores have a lot less merchandise available than what’s normally put out. Combined with masks, social distancing measures, travel to & from the thrift stores, cleaning, etc,. it makes me feel tired just thinking of the effort I would have to go through in order to get new stock and get it back. Plus, it’s hot out again. Garage sales and other sales are starting to come back, but I’m hesitant to go to them as well due to the huge number of people I’m expecting to be at them – with hardly any sales for months, it’ll probably be a madhouse the first few weeks.

I’m late in posting. My parents are visiting, so we went for a two night AirBnB stay at the Jersey shore. I was at a loss at what to do with them for 6 days with almost everything closed, so I figured a short trip was in order. But, then I had to figure out what to do with them the rest of the time. It’s been a bit boring, but hopefully we will figure out something for tomorrow.

Week of June 14 – 20
* Total Items in Store: 1237 eBay, 32 Etsy
* Items Sold: 11 eBay
* Cost of Items Sold: $11.80 + $19.60 Commission
* Total Sales: $272.90 eBay
* Highest Price Sold: $80 Austin Production sculpture
* Average price: $24.81
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
* Number of items listed this week: 6

Definitely a sudden reduction in sales, but expected. The sculpture is something that was sold and returned previously.

Over the past week, I had two cases open. One was closed by PayPal because it was covered under their seller protections. The other one was closed by the buyer. Not sure why because they said that they didn’t receive their package. Maybe their neighbor or spouse had it.

Happy Birthday Ryanne! We are about the same age and I had the exact same reaction to the Cosmos opening sequence. OH Lord I went into some weird crisis or panic of being nothing and meaningless. I am also claustrophobic and agoraphobic so that seemed to switch some weird panic knowing how we are like an atom compared to the universe. It was just wayyyy too much. LOL