The Numbers: Week of November 26-December 2, 2023

Items in Store: 2889
Items Sold: 55
Total Sales: $2,379.00
COGS: $334.00
Total Profit: $2,045.00
Average profit: $37.18
Average sales price: $43.25
New Listings: 67
Items scavenged: 16
2023 weekly new listings Avg: 46

This is the most items I’ve sold in a week since the CRAZY weeks in April/May 2020 when everyone was buying everything on ebay. My listing & sales goals for the year are still alive. I have to average 59 listings and $2050 gross sales for the next 4 weeks. my 4Q average so far is 60 and $2453 so I think I can get there. I’m going to list higher dollar hoarder items all week to hedge my bets.

Shipping is wearing me out and eating up time I want to be listing. Hey, I can’t complain – the whole reason I list is so that items will sell! I packed/shipped every day including Saturday and Sunday, which is very rare for me. I have 2 business day handling so I can take several days off of shipping every week. I still have 15 items to ship as I write this Monday morning. I hope shipping is even MORE exhausting and time consuming this week. Let’s keep this rising tide on the upward trend. Daddy needs Mo Money!

I’m still paying every expense I have with the exception of my house payment purely with ebay profits. It’s like a fun game for me. Every day I look at my payouts and bank accounts and see what I can pay down. First I pay off my business CC, then any bills which I pay for shipping and inventory with, then I pay off my main non-business credit card. Right now I have $2k as my minimum business bank account balance to avoid the monthly fee. Maybe next year I can get my minimum balance to $5k while still paying all the bills/expenses so my main checking account can keep steadily increasing with my day job direct deposit (and tax refund!).

I’ll be thinking about goals this month, but cart – get behind the horse. I still gotta finish this year strong!

Premium Hoarder update:

I sold 10 items for $686 this week. I was actually kind of surprised how little stuff in the premium hoarder category was selling. Thankfully I had an amazing organic week on the rest of my store. I didn’t sell a hoarder item over $100 until Sunday when I sold a pair of shoes for $250. I countered an offer of $400 on another pair, but the person had previously sent me a $450 offer. They’ll either come back eventually and up their offer or they don’t.  I really don’t care because my buyer red flag alarm was going off in this buyer. Their feedback is private which did not appease that alarm. I just LOVE when buyers think that since an item hasn’t sold for a week or two that they can send me a lower “doing me a favor” offer – usually including some critique of the item. That’s a complete non-starter for me – I’ll decline on principle every time.

@Jay – looks like you named the thread for the previous week.

I fell off my listing a little bit towards the end of the week… I think I took one day off. Steady sales, but not as wonderful as in years past for this time of the year… Still focusing on decreasing the crap items in my store and improving my STR. I am still shrinking my store and gradually removing the stupid and cheap things listed in years past and replacing with more expensive and desirable items. If the item is not above 50% STR (and preferably closer to 100% or more) I am leaving it on the rack.

Our Store Week November 26 – December 2, 2023

Total Items in Store: 780
Items Sold: 19
Gross Sales: $490.44 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $266.49 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $32.47
Highest Price Sold: $30 (Free People Jeans)
Average Price Sold: $23.02
Returns: 0 (But 1 cancel due to typing wrong size in title, oops, dang!)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $49.82
Number of items listed this week: 30

$ Amount listed this week: $1208.43

Hope everyone has a successful week!

Total Items in Store: 1,087
Items Sold:  22
Gross Sales: $931.51 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $588.25 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $79
Highest Price Sold: $90 (Pendleton throw that had been returned for color resold)
Average Price Sold: $42.34
Returns:  0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $130 (Big needlepoint kit haul, 2 small thrifts runs and small flea market haul)
Number of items listed this week:  12

Well last week was a hard week outside Ebay and I needed some thrift therapy out of the house.  I got lucky and scored some valuable needlepoint kits one time at Goodwill.  Really enjoying the little flea market as a weekly outing.  The $1 clothing and linens guy was there in the shade who gets his items from the college kid overpriced thrift.  There are very few vendors cheap enough to buy from so it’s pretty safe.  So fun.

Low on listings last week so need to step that up and take photos of the needlepoint kits and a few Christmas items I have left to list.  The Christmas throw up at the thrifts I did not get to first or they were pricing too high on some items I wanted.

I listened to Ebay for Business seller response guy and I think I saw yesterday that I can change categories after clicking sell similar without losing some of the entered fields.  This was one of the fixes he was talking about, so that’s nice.  I also saw on my home selling page that they are now doing automatic % offers.  Since I’ve started running sales again, I don’t know if I want to do a blanket one if they can double up discounts, but otherwise I like the idea.

Hope it’s a good week for all on Ebay.

What a turnabout from last week.  All it takes is one great sale to turn things around.  A fairly busy week with both a nice number of sales and a good return.  My big sale was a set of 6 framed prints for $1599.95.  This was my 3rd highest sale ever.  I wrote about them several weeks ago in my scavenge of the week and am really pleased that my research paid off.  Made even better because my cost for the lot was $17.25 at auction.  This was a case of Google lens being my friend.  The online auction had no information about the art.  It was only because I used Google image search on the photos that I was able to determine they were valuable.

Week Ending 12/2/23
Gross Sales(w/o shipping $ tax): $2,256.12  (eBay $1875 / Etsy $381)
Net Sales: $1,749.81
Total Items Sold: 20  (eBay 12 / Etsy 8)
Total Items in eBay Store: 1166 / Items in Etsy Store: 566

Cost of Items Sold: $177.07 (10.2%)
Highest Price Sold: $1,599.95  (Set of 6 framed menus)
Average Price Sold: $112.81
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 7

Average Days Listed: 464
Longest Listed: 2221
New items listed: 8
New Listings Value $554.60

My promoted listings experiment was successful. So successful that I am rethinking my eBay store as a whole. If I have to give up another 9% (or more) it doesn’t make sense to sell items under $25 or so. I have lots of items under that price point, so maybe I should be getting rid of them? Right now, I have a 30% off sale of Christmas stuff, and only the really good stuff is going. I’m thinking that some rethinking is needed.

Week of Nov 26 – Dec 2
Total Items in Store: 1741 eBay, 35 Etsy
Items Sold: 20 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $3.50 + $180 Commission
Total Sales: $563.76 eBay, $0 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $78 Eau De Gucci Perfumed Body Lotion Sealed
Average price: $28.19
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0

Wow! Excellent week of sales. Merry Christmas.