The Numbers: September 25-October 1, 2022

Total Items in Store: 3782 listings for 5742 items
Items Sold: 44
Gross Sales: $4711.96 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $3202.81
Cost of Items Sold: $1211 ($77 mine / $1134 consignors)
Highest Price Sold: $491 Avirex Leather WWII Tribute Bomber Jacket
Average Price Sold: $112.19
Returns: 3
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $85
Number of items listed this week: 31

Total Items in Store: 284
Items Sold: 2
Gross Sales: $114.80 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $73.04 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $27 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $75 (Vietnam War camouflage jacket)
Average Price Sold: $47.11
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $12
Number of items listed this week: 2

I sold a clothing item I’ve had listed for years that I couldn’t find last week. 🙁

09/25/22 – 10/01/22

Total Items In Store: 4703

Items Sold: 21

Gross Sales: $1,059.30 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $895.54 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Highest Price Sold: $ 150 (Massager)
Average Price Sold: $ 42.64
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 262.56
Number of items listed: 21

Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales were better than I thought.

Focus for the week : Trying to get my items cross listed to other platforms to increase sales for the upcoming busy season.

Scavenge of the week: Got a 1960’s Pendleton Jacket for $2.50 and will list for $150. I went out on a limb and bought a Vintage 1980’s Murano Tea set made with Gold. I think I can get $2500 or so for it. I am going to get it appraised.

Thoughts for the week: I have changed my mind on the cross-listing path. I have decided to go with List Perfectly because they were the only major player I found that can do batch mass cross-listing. Also, they support all of the channels that I want to list on. I am going to go with the pro plan for $69.99. I have my etsy store setup and I am going to cross list to that store first.

Mark S

Total Items in Store:  452
Items Sold: 12
Gross Sales, Ebay: $567.64 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $381.76 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $134  (Two were items I bought full price for my kids)
Highest Price Sold: $100 (4 x 2 sets Williams Sonoma Halloween Cocktail Picks (Paid $8 for my own use))
Average Price Sold: $41
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $29 (Rummage sale + 1 yard sale)
Number of items listed this week: 72 (ebay and Mercari)

Having good sales on Ebay, and sold two high dollar items in the two days after this period and some items on Mercari.  Shipping today will be annoying.  A high number of my sales are make offers, with only a quarter of my recent sales coming in without an offer.  60%+ are buyer initiated offers, wow.  I haven’t gotten around to sell similar yet on my really old stuff but I think the 4% promoted may be helping.  After watching that video I referred to in my recent post, I think I may go back and fill in some item specifics for old listings as well.  Hard to tell if the recent pinning on Pinterest was helping much.

I had a depressing thrift store run.  One of my indy favorites has hired a bunch of college kids who look absolutely everything up on Ebay and price high.  Then, the manager starts the really good stuff there and drops the price over a long period of time.  That store gets really unique estate sale type items.  Our regional chain volume stores are also pricing high again and stopped running color tag sales.   So, obviously they have a lot more people shopping.  This is consistent with the long lines at my favorite honey hole that started during the pandemic.  On the other hand, Goodwill is churning stuff out, other than the smalls that they ship off to corporate.  The current manager there is keeping prices low and things turn over super fast at that location.  Happily I went to a small rummage sale and did well. I have an alert on Craigslist for rummage and church sales but there have not been many.

I experienced a glitch this week with the new listing format.  I start on the desktop and when I switch to the phone, the price seems to revert to the trending price instead of the higher price I entered.  Luckily it’s usually lower than the auto decline so it gets flagged and I caught it I hope for all of them.

@Anna I liked your video. 🙂  I also plan to watch Sarah’s video on reading your numbers / analytics.

PS. Jay on that video someone linked recently, it was said that Ebay slowed down on the required payment for offers as there were apparently complaints from Ebay buyers (and sellers) part of the early roll out who were used to having 4 days to pay and this was the climate on this platform.

I used to cancel after using the auto message to remind the buyers but have recently sent a super quick message and some have paid after that short second message.

Week of Sept 25 – Oct 1
Total Items in Store: 1706 eBay, 27 Etsy
Items Sold: 9 eBay, 1 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $2 + $66 Commission
Total Sales: $186.34 eBay, $15 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $33 Vintage Epilady Trio Hair Remover
Average price: $20.13
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 19

My eBay store reached over 1700 items. I’ve been oscillating above and below for a few weeks, but I seem to be over that hump now. I have a Basic store, and I paid about $8 over my store subscription cost last month. Most of the items I’m adding are clothing, so they count towards the 1000 listings (as opposed to collectables, books, and such that have a 10,000 limit). I’ll have to keep an eye out if I start to get close to moving up to the next store category. Somewhere along the line, eBay increased the over limit listing charge to 25c, so I can see that happening in a few months.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am listing on commission for my neighbor who was widowed early in the year. Most of the clothes are L, XL, 1X, etc., so my large mannequin has been doing quite well for me. However, she had a closet full of vintage clothing where the sizes are smaller (oh, the struggle of getting older). I went and purchased an inexpensive smaller mannequin off eBay for a bit over $70 with tax. It meets my needs, and the only real complaint is that the screw that keeps it in place and the metal rod it connects to aren’t that sturdy, but it works fine. It is pretty nice otherwise.

I have had a rash of no-pay buyers recently too. It’s frustrating since I hardly did any listing due to evacuating for the hurricane and sales are down as a result. I think the non paying buyers tend to fall into a couple of categories. I think a lot of them accept my offer because they get excited about the lower price, then realize they don’t have the money. Sometimes they send a message saying they will pay later in the week, sometimes they just say nothing. Then there are the ones who send low offers and then never pay when you accept the offer. These people I think are window shopping, they want to see if they can get something on a super deal but then change their mind when I actually agree to their price! Overall I do think ebay has cultivated a really bad situation by allowing this to go on so long, it’s kind of like lay-away but instead of there being 10 more of the same item on the shelf, buyers are tying up one-of-a-kind items so that you can’t sell it to the next guy until the process works itself out.

Week Ending 10/1/22
Gross Sales(w/o shipping $ tax): $433.60
Net Sales: $353.40
Total Items in eBay Store: 1099
Items Sold eBay: 9
Total Items in Etsy Store: 266
Items Sold Etsy: 1
Cost of Items Sold: $42.00
Highest Price Sold: $139.95
Average Price Sold: $43.36
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $416.90
Average Days Listed: 167
Longest Listed: 748
New items listed: 18

Didn’t have time to put my numbers together for the previous week, but they were really lousy for me (only 5 sales for < $150)  This week was better but still below what I’m used to seeing this time of year.  Trying to remedy this lackluster performance with a boost of some higher quality items.  Spent $416 at an auction and sprinted to get almost all of the items listed this week.  The best item I listed is an antique Stanley No. 55 combination plane.  I paid $214 for it and hope to get $750.

I’m already encouraged as many of the items already have lots of views and watchers.  Since eBay changed the views counting system I’ve been shocked at how few views many of my items get now compared to previously.  It was a rare item that didn’t have views within 24 hours and now it is common for days or even weeks to pass for some items.  So, seeing lots of views quickly at least makes me feel like I’m posting better items.  Time will tell.

I’m working on getting myself more organized and made a run through my death piles this morning and pulled items I’m not excited about listing and dropped them at Goodwill during my Fedex run.  I stopped in the Goodwill to see what might be for taking and it was all just junk to me.  The place was very busy and there was a line at the check out, so obviously eye of the beholder.

Made a trip to the mall over the weekend to get Cecile a new iPad.  I keep hearing that the economy is going into a downturn, but couldn’t tell that from the mall.  Busiest I’ve seen it since the Pandemic started.  There was a 2 -hour wait to be served at the Apple store and most stores had good crowds.

As an aside, I saw one of the craziest things in the mall.  A woman in a wheel chair was there taking her two pet geese on a walk around.  Had them dressed up in little outfits and wearing diapers.  No leash and they just followed along ignoring the crowds.

It was cold and wet in the Northeast this weekend, so I spent a lot of time on organization and thought a lot about how to best spend my time over the next few months. My consignment trading card sales have been very consistent over the last few months which has allowed me to keep feeding the pipeline both for eBay and my consignment port. I have a huge number of items to list for eBay and it’s a great mix of high quality (meaning high list prices) and very inexpensive (so even a $15 sale will be a nice profit).

It will be exciting to see how many of these items I can get listed over the next few months and how quickly these listings will sell. I built my store inventory like most of you, on long-tail low cost and low priced items, and I have a soft spot for these types of listings especially when I can see the value in things when others don’t. But it’s fun to see items sell within a few days or weeks, too.

9/25/2022 – 10/1/2022

Total items in store: 1164 (up from 1023 last week)

Items sold: 32 (18 via best offer, 7 via seller initiated offer, 8 via promoted listings)

Gross sales: $2005.73 (down 10% from one year ago)

Net sales: $1430.44 (down 8% from one year ago)

Average sales price: $62.68 (up 60% from one year ago)

Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 15 hours (up from 12 hours last week)

Highest price sold (net): $260.21 — Josh Hart 2017-18 Panini Donruss Optic Rookie Kings black prizm 1/1

Lowest price sold (net): $14.53— Gino Odjick Pinnacle Tough Times autograph ##/299

I love sales like your flute. While it’s always more exciting to make a large profit, you turned a small profit and got paid to learn about musical instruments. I love getting paid to learn.

Your flute story kind of resinated with me. Probably 9 years ago a woman in my wife’s office gave us her daughter’s flute as our daughter was learngin how to play the flute in school. Not long after we got the flute it needed some repairs. I took it to a music shop. They said we could make some minor repairs for a small amount of $ so we did those repairs. It didn’t last long. We took it back to the shop. I asked if they’d buy it off me. The woman looked at it and asked, “Woudl you take $100 for it?”. I did my best to say, “Yes”, without a smile on my face.

We bought her a better flute from someone else.

Items in Store 2101
Items Sold 10
Total Sales $457.00
COGS $120.00
Total Profit $337.00
Average profit $33.70
Average sales price $45.70
New Listings 0
Items scavenged 25
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 43

Oh my….

So guess what my sales did immediately starting after the update announcement? Yep. Tanked.

A major bug that came out of the update was that the condition item specific filter was deleted from the app. It got fixed today.

Now granted I haven’t been listing but only selling 10 items hasn’t happened in over 3 years for my store. I haven’t been listing all month and yet I still was selling over 20 items a week the last couple weeks. In  August I average 27 items a week. At the beginning of the month even with an almost 2 week time away in place I sold more items!

I’m not a conspiracy kind of person, but they clearly bonked some settings on this update that have affected my store. I know about the condition filter. I wonder what other bone headed bugs have happened?

That’s my whiny 2 minutes. I’m entitled to that! Now I move on with positive momentum.

I’ve been contemplating all year a way to empty out my ebay workspace so I can be streamlined and focus on death piles. When my workspace is cluttered I don’t even want to be in there. I made a plan to list a massive amount of items this year to empty the space, yet still ended up with a cluttered area after I gave two areas of the garage to my wife for her hobbies.

I considered renting a storage space and putting a time limit of 6 months on getting everything I put in there listed. Then I considered buying an enclosed trailer to use a storage and then resell the trailer after 6 months for a profit. I couldn’t find any good deals on trailers and my wife hated the idea of spending money on a storage unit.

Then last week I went out into my non-ebay storage shed for something- it is a 10×10. I looked at how inefficient it was organized, assessed what I could just get rid of or sell that I no longer used. I determined that I could use the back 6′ for the death pile 6 month storage project and still use the front 4′ for normal shed stuff. I spent some time this weekend cleaning/organizing the shed. I got rid of some junk, sold the huge generator I haven’t needed for 8+ years, sold a mini fridge, and started to get the death pile stuff moved in.

I built back wall shelving in there during Covid lockdowns. I found the large boxes walmart that fit the shelved area perfectly for 100% storage efficiency. I LOVE it when a plan comes together.

I also found that the medium new walmart boxes fit my rolling storage carts perfectly so I can make them 100% efficient too! I linked both boxes below in case anyone wants to check them out. 100% storage efficency has been a dream of mine for a while.  The only thing I had to do to the boxes was use my resizer to lower the height 2″ to fit in the shelves. I may end up abandoning plastic bins all together if this goes well.

A cold has taken me out of commission for the last couple days, but I plan to get most of my workspace emptied out and get back to listing HARD this month.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Pen-Gear-Large-Recycled-Moving-Boxes-24L-x-16W-x-19H-Kraft/352453749?athbdg=L1102

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Pen-Gear-Medium-Recycled-Moving-Boxes-19L-x-14W-x-17H-Kraft/236154133?athbdg=L1200

@retro-treasures-wv – That storage clean-up is inspiring.  I definitely need to follow your lead. Gotta love finding room without spending money.

You must be better at not misplacing items than I am if you’re using the carboard storage boxes.  Having the clear sided boxes from Costco has saved me time on several occasions when I have put something in the wrong box.

Monthly numbers: 09/1 – 09/30

Active listings: 1435

Items sold: 43

Sales: $853.20

Highest price sold: $79.95 – 1901 Willis Planimeter (measuring instrument)

Average price sold: $19.84

Cost of items sold: $97.82 / average cost: each $2.27

Spent on new inventory: $258.00

Number of items listed: 35

When I went to list today (wed Oct 05) I found I had been opted into the new listing tool. It took me a while to figure it out, but now I’m getting used to it. Just another improvement that eBay has made that wasn’t needed. I think the main reason for it is to make the desktop and mobile listing tools the same.

My favorite sales for September were an Atari stoneware coffee mug that sold for $60 which I purchased years ago for $2.75 and a pair of roller skates for $50 which I found for free on one of my after dinner walks.