Scavenger Life Episode 478: Access To Opportunity

Total Items in Store: 314
Items sold: 5 on Ebay, 2 on FB Marketplace
Gross Sales: $199.43
Highest Price Sold: Panini Press (42.49)(this came from the free wall!)
COGS: $5.50
Average Price Sold: $28.34
No Returns
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of items listed this week: 4

Had an emergancy surgery on Friday that’s kept me down for most of the week in preperation. Also decided to put in my two weeks at my boring retail job after my boss said that taking time off for said surgery might affect my job, so I only have 4 working days left until jumping into resale full time. Packed some FBA stuff, but in the chaos of surgery it’s sat in my car for the whole week. Looking forward to being able to get to work on Tuesday!

Total Items in Store: 26,496
Items sold: 165
Gross Sales: $2,256.92
Highest Price Sold:  $225 postcard sized color chart used for ordering postcards & $125 Tempe AZ Street View from 1920’s
COGS: $16.50
Average Price Sold: $13.68
No Returns, but another Item Not Received refund, luckily only for $1.49
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of items listed this week: +/- 655

Great week for me.  Sold a few dental books and also sold a lot of CD’s for $68 that were part of a larger collection of over 400 that was being thrown out during our last community bulk trash day.

Thanks for the podcast! I love coffee, so your new business sounds so interesting. You guys are setting yourselves up for success with all the careful planning.

I had a reasonable week for the end of summer. No sourcing. I only bought stuff for myself at garage sales. I’m going to an auction this afternoon, so we shall see.

Week of Aug 30 – Sept 5
Total Items in Store: 1292 eBay, 36 Etsy
Items Sold: 19 eBay
Cost of Items Sold: $35.85 + $12.50 Commission
Total Sales: $325.72 eBay
Highest Price Sold: $34 Mens Wrangler Thermal Jeans
Average price: $17.14
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 20

Total Items in Store: 354
Items Sold: 8
Gross Sales: $415
Cost of Items Sold: $78 (a few items ours)
Highest Price Sold: $110 small vintage painting of Paris (paid $0 (my parents’))
Average Price Sold: $58
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week:  0
<div id=”powerpress_player_9307″ class=”powerpress_player”>Well the week of sales started out well but has been very quiet the last few days.  I’m just sitting down to list for a bit and start a sale so hopefully will get a bump.  Look forward to listening to the podcast.  It’s strange having Ebay dumping money weekly into my account.
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<div>Our dog became mysteriously very ill (and is now improving) and there is another crazy heat wave so it was a crap week where I got nothing much done on any front.  Lots of day job work to start catching up on tomorrow.  Both kids back in school this week, so might help with the chances for listing after that.  I’m kind of getting excited about Fall.</div>

Thanks for the podcast!  🙂  Great to hear from you guys again.

We had a bit of an adventure this weekend. I got a response to my kijiji ad ISO a warehouse, offering me a 4000 sq ft quonset for a rent of $800/mo. It was too far away from us but it started our land hunting a little more in earnest. We went to see a few properties yesterday. The goal is (a) a place with a big quonset or space to build one, (b) with a few acres as well & potential for us to build there when we retire, plus have big gardens, chickens etc. now, (c) within 30 min, (d) for under $200k (which would equate to an $800-900 mortgage payment, which is about my limit).

One way to see it is I’m hoping eBay will allow me to monetize having an acreage so it’s not a mere extravagance.

I am encouraged by what I’m seeing – although we haven’t found the perfect place, there are some in the ballpark. There was one quonset on 4 acres for $165, but too far away and the quonset was in bad shape. There was really nice bare land, with beautiful trees on 5 acres, for $270k but I bet we could knock $100k off the price. I think we will figure this out this year. I am looking forward to all the things we could do with such a property!

I had probably my best single week on eBay last week, thanks to one big sale.

Sales: CAD$8765, 15 sales, COGS: $831, Fees: ~$1185, Postage: $262 –> Gross profit: $6488

Expenses: $942, New inventory: $1920 –> Cashflow: $4457

The big sale was two hydraulic crimpers to the same buyer for a total of $6500. I think I found these on ebay for a total of $500. There is a moderate risk of return but I am pretty sanguine.

Had a few other decent sales, like a lathe chuck for $550, but the rest are rounding errors. Does seem like sales are starting to pick up in the fall though!

My Sales Ending 9/5/20

Notes: Terapeak subscription for one month to help determine profit on death piles by looking at yearly averages and high sales. Reduced death piles from approximately 200 items to approximately 60 items. Donated remainder. Should help me keep average at $30 per item rather than the lower profits I’ve been seeing lately and help me prepare for rental of my current home and a move to a better home in 2021.

Total Items For Sale: 62

Profit: $78.05

Items Sold: 5

Items Listed: 7

Average Profit: $15.61

Highest Profit: $27.34 Adriano Goldschmied Women’s Jeans

Cost of Items Sold: $0

Returns: $0

$ Spent Sourcing: $0

Thanks for the podcast.  I listened as I did a late evening hike in the hills near my home tonight. Have you thought about doing a podcast about what it’s like to start a retail business. I think that would be pretty entertaining. I’d listen to a podcast about opening a coffee shop for sure.

Here are my numbers for the week:

Total Items in Store: 4086
Items Sold: 52
Total Sales: $1766.62
Cost of Items Sold: $288
Average Price Sold: $33.97
Average Cost of Item: $5.55
Highest Price Item Sold: $529.95 Zebra ZT410 300 dpi Industrial Thermal Label Printer
Number of items listed this week: 85 worth approx. $1717
YTD Sales: $41536
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +21%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 465
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 218
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 66
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.27%

My numbers were skewed a bit by my big sale of the week – an industrial label printer that I got from a neighbor who worked for a now-defunct startup company. I bought a pile of electronics from him a month ago and finally got around to testing, selling and shipping this big printer. (Knock-on-wood it arrives safely).

We’ve had the same heat wave in Northern California that @ChristineR is getting in Southern California.  It’s been over 110F here the last 2 days.  Thankfully the air quality has been OK for the last few days.  We had 5 days last week where the air quality from the nearby wildfires was so bad that it was unhealthy to open the windows.

My big news outside of ebay is that I’ve decided to ditch my day job and retire from that world.  I’ll give my notice in the first week of October (after I get a company stock grant – RSUs). I have a couple of years worth of expenses in cash so I wont need ebay sales to pay the bills but I’ll probably ramp up slightly so that I can hopefully pay half of my monthly living expenses via ebay.  I had originally planned to retire in June but retiring into a pandemic seemed too weird so I stuck it out.  (Working from home instead of commuting was also much easier to handle).

I hope everyone has a profitable week on ebay.

Items in Store    1405

Items Sold           27

Total Sales          $766.00

COGS    $83.00

Total Profit         $683.00

Average profit   $25.30

Average sales price          $28.37

New Listings       68

Good week getting alot of things listed and organized. I condensed 12 totes in my inventory storage so I have plenty of room now to list. Lots of family stuff and did some traveling to visit family as well this weekend. I jumped off a 30 foot waterfall yesterday which was pretty awesome!

My plan is to grind away at listing as much as possible this month so I can enter 4th quarter at my highest ever listed inventory numbers. 1578 is my highest inventory number, so I want to be at 1600 or better by the end of the month. I’ll need to list about 300 items to get there.

Congratulations @Simon

I took early retirement from my organization in Summer, 2018, and I have been having a blast ever since.  The initial 6 months off from work is THE BEST – enjoy it.

I just wanted to chip in on the subject of withholding money from a customer’s account when they accept an offer- one of the things that I like about sending offers is the fact that customers can accept multiple offers from us and then we can send an invoice with the correct combined shipping amount. Ebay’s calculated combined international shipping can be laughably high sometimes. Often, a customer will balk when asked to pay the combined shipping amount that ebay has calculated and then rely on us to send a refund. And for some reason, most customers have a hard time accessing the feature that allows them to take the buy it now option on multiple items and then request the total from the seller.  I’m worried that requiring upfront payment would make combined shipments look more expensive than they should be, since we refund shipping overpayment.

I REALLY REALLY wish that Ebay had a feature that allowed sellers to send multi-item offers to customers, with a discount option, and with our combined shipping amount included. We had a customer in Japan recently who had to send us 41 separate messages so that we could send him offers with an appx. 20% discount on all of them. It’s just such a clunky way to do things. It would be inconvenient if an item sells before the customer accepts the group offer but there are ways to deal with that- the offer could delete that item and they could still accept it as is, or you could send a new offer with the sold item removed, etc.

J&R, sounds like the roasting course was intense but worthwhile. You mentioned the topic of bad buys. I think Jay called these paying for your picking education. I’ve sure made my share of bad buys, but never anything that really stung. If I end up losing a few dollars and in turn learn something about a category of type of item, I’m fine with that. Whatever I’ve lost I’ve more than made up for on the plus side.

Listings in Store: 678
Items Sold: 12
Gross Sales (includes shipping): $505
Highest Price: $195 – Tom Cat Battery Charger
Average Price: $42
Cost of Goods Sold: $20
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Purchased this Week: $44
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 13

Challenge of the Week: Spent a large part of the week re-taking photos. I have a new LG G8 phone and figured out how to increase the brightness of my photos. As soon as I posted a photo taken using the new setting, it instantly made the of my listing photos look like crap. So I started taking new photos like mad. I’ve only done about 100 items but I’ve decided that’s enough of my current listings. Counting about 5 photos per listing, that’s 500-600 pics. With almost 700 listings it would take a least another week to do everything. Not sure it would be worth the time. Anyway, I’m very happy with the new photos.
Example with old settings: https://www.ebay.com/itm/154053155872
Example with new settings: https://www.ebay.com/itm/154079008667

8/29/20-9/4/20

Total Items In Store: 2041
Items Sold: 29
Gross Sales: $2058
Highest Price Sold: $600 (IRD Vibration Analyzer)
Average Price Sold: $70.96

Returns:  1 $100
Money Spent on New Inventory: $300
Number of items listed: 38

• A great week in sales this week. Aided by some high dollar sales.  $200, $200, $250 and $600 sales.  The $600 sale was an item I picked up for $50 at an auction about a month ago.  Probably my best average price sold ever this week.
• I spent $153 at an auction house this week. One of the lots was a garbage bag full of purses I picked up for $6.  My wife found $12 in one purse and $100 in another.
• Had a great week scavenging for new inventory. Scored some great items at a local online auction, had a truckload full at the auction house and a local lake community had their community yard sales after postponing from memorial day weekend earlier this year.
• My highest priced sale from last week was returned this week because it wasn’t working correctly. That was a bummer, but it happens sometimes.

One more comment regarding this week’s podcast.  Similar to Ryanne,  I recently had an Ebay Standard International Delivery order that had tracking stop updating (in Mexico).  I filed an insurance claim and it paid out pretty quickly. Insurance info can be found here:  https://pages.ebay.com/sell/send/termsofservice.html

You file a claim using this form:
https://www.pip-claim.com/PIPClaim/eBayIntClaim/CreateeBayClaim

(For anyone that hasn’t come across it before, this website gives much more detailed tracking info for international standard delivery orders that you’ll find on ebay: http://parcelsapp.com/en/ )

Hey all! Great podcast this week; I listen every week though I haven’t been great about reporting my numbers for the last few weeks. I so appreciate everyone (consistent, or inconsistent like me) who post their experience and numbers on the forum. It’s seriously such a great source of encouragement!

Also, you guys rocked my world on the podcast this week talking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As a licensed professional counselor who practiced privately with therapy clients in my former life (before full time eBay, haha) I think about that concept ALL THE TIME, especially related to my own transition to full-time-ish eBay work as a way better fit for my life!

I’ve been pressing ahead, listing like crazy and working with a new helper too. I’m trying to get to 10k active listings by the end of the year… I’m at about 6350 right now. I’m not totally sure why, but it feels like a big milestone to me and I think there will be a lot of good stuff in the journey there as well as on the other side, speaking of self actualization! Sales haven’t been super great, but not terrible either. It feels a little tight as I’m now paying my new helper for photographing 400-500 items per month and the sales haven’t caught up to my higher inventory quite yet. It’s an adventure; it’s got to be at least a little bit scary. I’ve also just yesterday turned over my final author proof of my book about the function of my eBay store to my publisher… it’s hopefully going to be in print in the next week or so! Eeeek!

Wishing everyone a satisfying and productive week as we all gear up for the holiday season!

Thanks for everyone’s comments. Annaesthetic23, if Ryanne and Jay would allow it, I would be very interested in you sharing that book when it is available for reading? You did say it is about eBay, correct? Thank you.

Hi. Jay’s accidental purchase of an “incoming” offer was so funny.  I recently did the exact same thing! I listed a video game ( new & sealed).  I don’t sell them regularly. I guess I researched it for price and found one (sealed) and put a watch on it. About 2 weeks later I received an offer and the listing looked exactly like mine. It was a good offer about $5 less than mine so I clicked “ACCEPT”and there was no “cha-ching”! I then realized I bought the one I had a watch on. Just like you I had to do the “walk of shame” to cancel it but the worst part was my purchase was from a charity! So you think I rec’d bad karma? 🙂

Thanks, annaesthetic23! That sounds great.

Checking in.  Long time since I’ve been on the forums, but I’ve been listening as usual, and have been working like crazy.  I’ll swing by and update our numbers next week if I get a chance.

Wanted to weigh in on ebay send.  I’ve used it about ten times now, and I’m done with it.  Just had my third package go “missing”.  This one shows as delivered to my buyer in the UK, but they’re saying they didn’t receive it.  $30 item, $40 shipping…  ugh

I’d rather use global shipping or USPS International going forward.

So exciting about the coffee adventure.  Can’t wait to taste the results.

Maslow’s theory is what sticks in my mind most from my psych classes.  It makes so much sense in so many ways.  How can you focus on anything else when you are concerned day to day with food and shelter.  So many in our society are stuck in the lowest tiers and more so with our current quarantine situation and so many out of jobs.

I also relate to your comments on sleep.  Back in my “real” job as a project manager I stayed awake so many nights worrying about all the minutiae of the job and keeping my projects on track and my boss happy.  It is a rare night I lose sleep like that now.  Love being my own boss and setting my own agenda.

My big sales last week were fun.  I sold two newspapers from 1865 that announced the assassination of President Lincoln.  Got busy listing last week and went back into my trunk of historical documents that I purchased last summer.  All that is left are newspapers and other similar items, and low and behold two of them were from April 15, 1865, the day after Lincoln was shot.  Fascinating to read and satisfying to post and sell almost immediately.  Both papers sold within 24 hours, which tells me I probably didn’t ask enough, but “c’est la vie”.  I made out all right.  Also sold a diary from the box from 1843 that was a travelogue of a 4 month trip along the Erie Canal.  That sold within 1 hour of posting it for $100.  Tough pricing items like these.

Week Ending 9/5/20
Total Items in Store: 1200
Items Sold: 20
Gross Sales: $1,158.00
Net Sales (after fees, shipping, etc.) $875.91
Cost of Items Sold: $31.95
COGS Percent 3.65%
Highest Price Sold: $260.00 Lincoln Assassination Newspaper
Average Price Sold: $43.80
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 13
Promoted Percentage: 65.00%
Average Days Listed: 268
Longest Listed: 707
New items listed: 33

Hello. I just listened to this podcast yesterday. Thank you for going into more detail regarding the subject “if anyone promotes their store on social media”. It makes sense to me that it would be time consuming and that is why I never did it before. It seems that the time and effort that has to be put into it is not very effective for bringing more traffic to the store.