Podcast Pause 8/1/21

Ryanne and Jay – Sleep tight, you deserve the rest.  I’m sure we all look forward to hearing from you next week.

Numbers for the whole month of July 2021

Total listings: 1250
Items sold: 68
Sales: $1,342.51
Highest price sold: $80 – Boxed set of The Door’s CDs
Average price sold: $1974
Cost of items sold: $206.05 / Average cost: 3.03 each
Spent on new inventory: $670.25
Number of items listed: 79

July was one of the better months for me in a long time. I had a few days of no sales but the weekends seemed to bring all of the buyers out. I spent quite a bit on inventory this month due to buying 4 large boxes of vintage computer games, video games, graphic novels, and comic trade paperbacks (TPB). Going through the games, I’ve increased my limited knowledge about video games and will probably be pickier when buying them in the future, but with the first box listed and about half of the games sold, I am already in the profit column on that box.

August looks to be even better. So far today, the first day of August I have had $231 in sales, and there are still 5 hours to go.

Weekly sales 7/25 – 7/31
Random Item Store
Total items 743
Items sold 24
New items listed 63
Gross sales $757.59
Net sales $443.91

Patch Store
Total items 2697
Items sold 48
New items listed 60
Gross sales $293.97
Net sales $164.58

Etsy
Orders 8
Gross sales $115.75
Net sales $98.38

Net sales total $706.87

Sold mostly bread and butter items this week and paid my subscription fees so that took $120 out of my net total. Also had a couple returns so it wasn’t the best week for me but I’m still happy with my numbers as they’re better than they were before I took the plunge to go full time.

I had someone come through and buy $170 worth of patches last night out of my patch store and that will reflect in next week’s numbers. I guess that’s the beauty of having a store with only one type of item – people can browse knowing they’re only going to see patches 🙂

I started checking out the Goodwill auction site this past week and it seems like it could be a decent place to shop for inventory if you can find listings that other people have overlooked. I won a lot of Harley Davidson patches for $25 that should turn into over $200 easy.

Items in Store 1512
Items Sold 21
Total Sales $1,399.00
COGS $65.00
Total Profit $1,334.00
Average profit $63.52
Average sales price $66.62
New Listings 59
Items scavenged 8

So there is a HUGE asterisk on my sales numbers right now. Friday evening I sold one of my Manga book listings for $600. They still haven’t paid. I sold another $50 item around the same time that hasn’t been paid as well, so I have $650 in pending sales. Booo!

This weekend I tag teamed with my daughter to do a bunch of listing. She photographed almost 60 items and also cleaned 30 pair of shoes. I gave her a $10 bonus on top of all her work for getting everything done in the same day I gave it to her. Hopefully we can keep this momentum going into this week. I have a MASSIVE backlog of shoes awaiting listing.

7-25-21 to 7-31-21
Total Items in Store: 1611
Items Sold: 3
Gross Sales: 244.62
Net Sales: 181.10
Cost of Items Sold: $ 10
Highest Price Sold: $ 167.00 Sioux Falls Wiener Dogs hoodie
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 7
Number of items listed this week: 25

Slow week with 2 big sales. The Hoodie is kind of funny. As a wiener dog owner and hockey fan we support the Sioux Falls Stampede of the USHL. Once a season the Stampede become the Fighting Wiener Dogs and do races at the game and most importantly host adoptions with a local rescue. We buy merchandise each year to support the cause. We bought the hoodie because 2 years ago it was as close as we could get to a Wiener Dog hockey jersey. Of course this past year they made jerseys available for sale making the hoodie redundant.

Total Items in Store: 160

Items Sold: 7

Total Sales: $67

Highest Price Sold: $13 Death Train VHS

Looking at my July summary I believe sales were low not due to general malaise but the fact I have been coasting for a while. I still list, but more casually and I am certainly not working to improve my sales. I only had one big sale last month, my average price sold was $19. Lots of odds and ends, some older stuff and I am happy that the baseball hats are selling steadily. The auction experiment was a failure, all sold but for minimum bid with only one bidder. I made money, but would have likely made more if I listed fixed price and let it sit for the right buyer. Glad I discovered this site or I might not have made the change in strategy to mostly buy it now listings.

This month I am more focused on Craigslist and FB as we start to have lots of big special events (most outdoors) that draw visitors, so hope to hit some buyers coming into town with stuff they might be looking for. Hot August Nights starts this week so I am pulling out big lamps, suitcases and vintage stuff participants might like that I’d prefer not to ship. I also will do a yard sale the week college students move in with more furniture and things that they might need for a first apartment/dorm. Will see how that goes.

Hi R & J,

Hope you’ve recovered from that mountain of packing.

Here are my numbers for the week:

Total Items in Store: 4642
Items Sold: 65
Total Sales: $1717.61
Cost of Items Sold: $264
Average Price Sold: $26.42
Average Cost of Item: $4.07
Highest Price Item Sold: $123.5 Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera Alpha 1 – for Parts/repair
Number of items listed this week: 61
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +31%
Hats sold this week: 42 (64% of sales) worth $709 (41% of sales $)

I had another solid week.  I had some lucky bulk camera-related purchases at garage sales recently and I’ve been busy listing those. They should do well for me.

Random question for anyone:  When you send out offers you can now send a coupon along with your offer.  Does anyone have any good suggestions for what kind of coupon might be effective to send in that situation?

There’s a new change on the eBay site that I saw today:- On the Feedback Left for Others page,  there’s a new “Follow up” link on the right side of the page.  I believe it is supposed to be you can leave additional follow-up feedback for a transaction.  (I’m not sure when I’d ever do that).  Anyway, the link doesn’t do anything for me right now.

Random answer: no idea- I was invited to send a coupon to a buyer after I accepted their offer; this coupon suggestion turned up a day or so after acceptance (they were a slow payer.)

So maybe the idea was I’d give them a discount if they paid up? So I’m a proxy debt collector for eBay now? 🙂

The coupon and Seller Initiated Offer. At the time you send the offer, you can designate whether to send a coupon or not. The coupon is NOT applied to the same transaction and can’t be used for the item you offered the buyer. The buyer ONLY sees the coupon IF he accepts the offer OR if it times out…if he actually declines, he doesn’t see the offer at all.

So, I would probably not send a message about the coupon with the offer itself. I think it’s intended more as  1. Thanks for accepting my offer OR 2. So my offer didn’t appeal, but here’s a coupon for some other stuff you might like….

@mycottage- thanks! Seems like that would be useful for selling to dealers- e.g. when listing a range of old books.

Family emergency put me behind on all projects and chores. All is OK. Annoyed but not beaten.

Total Listed: 73

Items Sold: 1

Items Listed: 0 (As planned.)

Total Profit: $18.17 (Ermenegildo Zegna Men’s Long Sleeve Shirt)

Goal This Week: 0

Can’t wait to hear about everything on the next episode!

7/25/21 – 7/31/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 318
Items Sold: 8
Gross Sales: $123.34
Highest Price Sold: $45 plus shipping – 1944 Des Moines high school yearbook with Cloris Leachman as a senior.
Returns:  $0
COGS: $12 (including consignment commissions but not including cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 0
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0.

No big sales to rescue my week. Life distractions will be winding down this week and next so I hope to get back to listing soon.

A well earned pause, I honestly can’t remember the last time you guys took a break from the podcast. Enjoy your rest

Tony

Hey Hey Ryanne & Jay,

Thank you guys again for being super Super Hosts.  I am so happy to have met half of you, wish I could have met you both.  Now I am back home and ready to list as much as I can.  I am so so happy you guys took a break.  Definitely a well deserved break.  I look forward to the update.

Here is my question:

Where do I enter my stock location on my eBay listing?  Taking a break from shipping reminded me of the value of making my inventory easy for anyone to find.  I am creating stock locations for my items, but, where do I put the information on eBay so it can be retrieved when I sell and create a shipping label?  I did some research and it said under the custom shipping label…but, I am not finding where it would go.  Is it something I can only do when it’s created or can I enter with a revision?

Thank you in advance eBay community

Carol, One place you can do it…Seller Hub>Active Listings>there is a column for Custom Label….you can just add it there. (I’m not sure, the column might not be there by default, but you can customize the Active Listings page grid). Since we don’t put our stuff away until after it is listed, this works best for us. very quick and easy.

Thank you so much.  I love this eBay community.

One nice thing if you use the custom label … we use the new packing slip, and have it set to print out with the custom label info on the packing slip. Since I handle shipping for both accounts (mine, the better half’s), I can pull stuff just by looking at the packing slips. Also, I believe it carries over into the order info in Seller Hub, so there are a couple places you can find it.

(some people use the CL field for multiple data points, we don’t….but I know I’m not the only one who has asked ebay to provide us with more than one Custom Label field for each listing….)