The Numbers: Week February 25 - March 2, 2024

This topic has 23 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 10 months, 1 week ago by craig rex.

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- 03/05/2024 at 11:59 am #102560
  Jay
  Keymaster
  Location: Virginia
  @jay
  We had some good sales on eBay, even though it was slower than last week. Our new cafe is busy and fun to hang out in. Otherwise, we’re focusing on ju
  [See the full post at: The Numbers: Week February 25 – March 2, 2024]
- 03/05/2024 at 1:05 pm #102562
  Retro Treasures WV
  Participant
  Location:
  @retro-treasures-wv
  Items in Store: 3023
  Items Sold: 48
  Total Sales: $2,135.00
  COGS: $242.00
  Total Profit: $1,893.00
  Average profit: $39.44
  Average sales price: $44.48
  New Listings: 30
  Items scavenged: 31
  2024 weekly new listings Avg: 43
  2024 avg gross weekly sales $1,658.22
  2024 Avg weekly Items Sold 38
  2024 ASP $43.64
  2024 projected total sales $86,227.56
  
  My 2024 metrics are still trending upwards. Let’s keep that trend going! One perk with this pregnancy that I’ve never had before is that my day job now offers 4 weeks paid paternity leave. So when the baby is born I get to stay home for a month. Yay! It’s safe to say I’ll make TREMENDOUS strides with ebay in that month. The baby is due in July so it’s a great time to be off for a month. No school is happening, the weather is phenomenal, etc. That’s the push I’ll need to really set up for a bonkers Q4.
  
  I decided to treat myself and upgrade my photography setup this past week. I bought some new marine vinyl as my current piece is looking pretty ragged. I also bought some LED lights to replace my CFL light setup.
  
  I got these for the front/side lights first. I place these at the front corners of the 3’x5′ table aimed downward at 45 degrees. I mount them to the ceiling on dowel rod. I just had to take down my old CFL ligthts with umbrellas and put these up.
  
  I was very happy with these lights, but they made the CFL’s I had overhead look like absolute crap. So I ordered this one to put overhead:
  
  I’d like to rig up a method to raise/lower the overhead light with a telescoping pole so I could get it closer to smaller stuff.
  
  Items sold is staying strong. MY ASP is getting bailed out by some high dollar hoarder items. This week I had 13 items sell for $13 or less. Like I said before – I’d rather get money for some of these old listings than just throw them out! I didn’t hit my listing goal as this weekend I did zero work on Saturday and spent my work time on Sunday doing some VERY necessary inventory management. During the weekdays I made sure to list 6 new items each day before I left for work in the morning. It takes me 10-15 minutes to photograph 6 items which is no big deal to do before heading out. Then I upload the photos and list the items during break at work.
  
  One thing I’m getting concerned about is that I’m listing more shoes than I’m selling. Shoes are the easiest thing for me to source and list. I keep a bin of shoes in my van so I can list a couple pair every day just in downtime. My son cleans them. My daughter is good at photogrpahing them.
  
  I currently have 892 shoe listings. I’ve sold 102 in the last 90 days for an 11.5% STR. I’m basically selling 8-10 pair a week and listing 15-20 a week. Eeesh… I gotta sell more of these bad boys (lower price) and increase my standards for STR even higher! a 25% 90 day STR on shoes should balance me out so that my shoe inventory doesn’t grow much more. I’ll check again in 3 months to see where I’m at.
  
  Premium Hoarder update:
  
  Sold 12 items for $1330. I crossed a couple milestones. I crossed 300 items sold (305), $30k in sales minus fees ($30352). I’m just shy of $18k in net profit, which counts ALL of my COGS including unsold or unlisted inventory. It’s about time to start getting the rest and I am NOT ready. I’ll figure it out.
  - 03/06/2024 at 1:26 pm #102567
    twizzle
    Participant
    
    Location: Massachusetts
    @twizzle
    Hi , your LED lights link doesn’t work for me. was interested to see your purchase. thanks.
    - 03/06/2024 at 4:15 pm #102568
      Retro Treasures WV
      Participant
      
      Location:
      @retro-treasures-wv
      
      Yeah I’m not sure what happened there.
      
      Try these:
      
      https : //www.amazon.com/dp/B0BFBFMVBL
      
      https : //www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKVCDHFX
      - 03/06/2024 at 4:18 pm #102569
        
        Retro Treasures WV
        Participant
        
        Location:
        @retro-treasures-wv
        
        Amazon links appear to be broken on the forum. I tried a couple ways. You’ll need to remove the spaces before and after the “:”.
        
        03/06/2024 at 5:34 pm #102570
        
        twizzle
        Participant
        
        Location: Massachusetts
        @twizzle
        
        Retro managed to figure it out. Thank you.
- 03/05/2024 at 4:34 pm #102564
  ChristineR
  Participant
  Location: Southern California
  @christiner
  Total Items in Store: 1237
  Items Sold: 14
  Gross Sales: $620 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes); Net sales $364 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
  Cost of Items Sold: $52
  Highest Price Sold: $75 (vintage cocktail glass set)
  Average Price Sold: $44
  Returns: 0
  Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $120 +/- Macys RA + thrifting + flea
  Number of items listed this week: 5 new listings
  
  Niknax update: one featured item sale, no new listings. Something that sat a long time on Ebay.
  
  I’m glad to hear the restaurant is doing well!
  
  Just a lot of non-Ebay distraction last week. I have some family stuff going on that is taking me away but I also could have managed my time better and had a virus for a couple of days. The time just went poof! Started out the year strong but now it feels like time is passing quickly and I’m getting a bit off track with Ebay. We have a lot of expenses this year creeping up and some smaller trips to pay for. I hope to get it into gear again. I have a fun rummage sale on Friday to go to. Next week unfortunately I will have to take a break and do COGS taxes work for our appointment.
  
  My daughter helped me create a new business instagram account. https://www.instagram.com/retro_decor_and_more/ She made the first couple of posts from some recent listings and solds. Niknax has a thing called Magic Comments where people can somehow purchase. Apparently you can also sell through Instagram. Need to discover more about this. It might be good for selling some larger art locally that I don’t want to ship. I found out while picking accounts to follow about some college kids having a flea market in the college park this weekend. My daughter is going to go check it out.
- 03/08/2024 at 2:26 pm #102573
  craig rex
  Participant
  Location: south jersey
  @craig-rex
  Quiet in here this week. I hope everyone is enjoying the first days of spring weather.
  
  New Jersey has had plenty of rain over the last week, and I’ve used that time to plan out a spring cleaning. After a couple rounds of auctions over the last few months, my eBay inventory is down to barebones and I will whittle it down even more when I go through the listings again tonight, in preparation of The Philly Show this weekend, where I will drop off a few large boxes of cards at the booth of the consignment company I use.
  
  I have gotten pretty organized with my remaining card inventory with the plan of keeping things sorted into four buckets going forward:
  
  1. individual cards to list in my eBay store
  
  When I started selling full-time a few years ago, this was 90 to 100% of my inventory. I expect it to be roughly 20 to 30% going forward. Maybe slightly higher at certain busy times (World Series, Super Bowl) or if I have a pile of cards which are easy sellers. Sometimes I can acquire 10 or 20 copies of the same card and I like having those in my store inventory because they’re easy to relist.
  
  2. cards for my curated 10 and 20 card lots organized by team
  
  For the next few months, this will be my easiest path to consistently churn out new listings. I have gotten this inventory pretty well organized over the last few months, so it’s just a matter of scanning the lots and making the new listings. I’ve listed at least 3 or 4 of these lots every other week for the last year and they have a decent sell-through rate, so hopefully I can up that to 10+ lots every single week. Some teams I can barely keep in stock, others are slow movers, but maybe consistency in listing will lead to more sales. My net profit on these lots is usually around $10, a little lower than I would like, but the fast sellers make it worth my time — especially with my store so lean.
  
  3. cards to ship to the consignment company
  
  This includes basically all of my new inventory purchases as well as anything I find in my boxes which might sell in the $5 range. At my peak buying, I was sending a box into consignment every week . I am down to one large (500+ cards) box every 2-3 weeks. The processing fees add up as COMC starts putting cards from these shipments into my inventory ($0.50 at the 4 month processing level, $1 at the two week level, extra for graded cards and oversized cards) and they take a cut from every sale, but it’s such a time saver compared to selling on my own. COMC has a lot of different levers you can pull to stimulate sales, like live eBay auctions, regular $0.99 7 day eBay auctions, and sales on your port on their website. I am hoping that they run a nice promotion in April since this is the slow time of the year for selling online. But I know from the last two years that sales will really pick up from October-January.
  
  4. everything else
  
  Inevitably with all my wheeling and dealing, I’ve ended up with boxes full of cards which don’t fit neatly in any of these groups. My team lots need current and/or famous players to sell consistently, junk cards will drop the demand very quickly. There are countless ultra modern graded/autographed/serial numbered/rookie cards which don’t sell for more than a buck or two because the player’s not very good, or the set isn’t collectible, or the card itself isn’t one that someone would want for a personal collection or for its flipping potential
  
  So I’m going to make some flat rate boxes with 500+ cards, sorted by sport, price them in the $300 range and see how well they sell. I listed maybe 5 or 6 boxes like this last year, and they all sold for slightly higher than expected. Can I make 5 or 6 boxes in the next month? I hope so!
  
  Once I have made some progress with all this, and maybe in the moments in between, I will start to tackle a few shelves worth of other random items. Some of it sports related, some not. Probably going to be a lot of donation trips and bulk lots! I don’t really have the physical space or interest in listing $10 items. But I love those $50 and $100 listings.
  
  This is an exciting time for me as it’s cashing in on the many, many hours I spent buying and selling and building my reselling business during the pandemic. I have built up enough of a financial buffer from the last few months (mostly focused on monthly eBay auctions and my consignment sales) that I am able to shift focus like this. It’s hard to project exactly how sales will go since this is new experimental territory, but it should be a profitable couple of months. After that? Who knows what’s in store…
  
  2/25/2024 to 3/2/2024
  
  Items in store: 197
  
  Items sold: 18 — 12 via best offer, 3 via seller initiated offer, 11 via promoted listings
  
  I know it’s “only” 18 items but I’m thrilled that this many items sold with such a small inventory and maybe 10% of those listings at “museum” prices or very long-tail.
  
  Gross sales: $912.19 (down 61% from one year ago)
  
  Net sales: $506.17 (down 68% from one year ago)
  
  Average sales price: $50.68 (up 3% from one year ago)
  
  Highest price sold (net): $126.49— Ethan Salas 2023 Panini National Treasures 1/1 printing plate patch card
  
  Modern cards in a nutshell — Ethan Salas is a 17 year old catcher for the San Diego Padres, signed at age 16 from Venezuela, the #8 top prospect in baseball. His first autographs finally hit the market last month, and even the unnumbered autos from less desirable sets go for $50 to $100. His rare refractor autos from the historically significant and popular Bowman Chrome set sell for $500+ into the thousands of dollars.
  
  I know it sounds crazy, but really it also makes perfect sense. Who knows how good Salas might be in five years…or ten…or fifteen? Then think about the massive increase in card prices over the last fifteen years. Who knows what the card market might swell to by 2030 or 2040? If you’re into flipping, you can convince yourself anything is possible if you understand what makes items valuable. That doesn’t mean you should convince yourself that you’re sitting on piles of money, but lots of people do.
  
  Not me though. I sold this 1/1 printing plate with a piece of Salas jersey for $150. Based on what I know of the Salas market, I think the buyer got a good deal. But I take my profits where I can. This is a newer set, so this was a quick flip. I paid $45 on January 22 from an eBay auction. Knowing the market for these types of cards, I didn’t expect to win that auction, but that’s how bidding goes sometimes. It’s why I will keep riding the cards wave. This was an easy flip and it went almost exactly how I expect.
  
  One of the things I like most about going over the numbers like we do is that it reminds me what sells and what doesn’t. I’ll spend a little extra time over the next week tracking Salas cards and put a little extra thought into his market over the next few months, the next year or two. I might find some great deals but probably not. I don’t know whether he’s going to be the next great player. But it’s a numbers game, and you play the game by buying and selling. It can be very easy to focus on the inventory we currently have and why isn’t it selling yet, damn it, but there is a limitless amount of potential inventory available if you look for it and (this is important) you can make the math work for your life.
  
  Lowest price sold (net): $4.56 — Liberation of Kuwait 1990s board game
  
  I went over this whole saga in Sale of the week thread. Any profit I might have made on this couple dollars thrift store find was swallowed up in undercharging the shipping and all the time I spent packing the thing. But I built a big box from two small boxes and sold a random weird item, saving it from the garbage! Someday I will make more profit from these kinds of items. What a life.
  - 03/08/2024 at 7:09 pm #102574
    Jay
    Keymaster
    
    Location: Virginia
    @jay
    This is an exciting time for me as it’s cashing in on the many, many hours I spent buying and selling and building my reselling business during the pandemic. I have built up enough of a financial buffer from the last few months (mostly focused on monthly eBay auctions and my consignment sales) that I am able to shift focus like this.
    
    As much as I appreciate people who are super efficient with their small stores, there is certainly a value to having a large inventory. Everything sells eventually. We just never know what will sell each day. Sounds like your large card inventory is the same.
    
    How does COMC process the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of cards that people send in? Are there just rows of hundreds of people taking photos and listing each card? How is it profitable when many cards sell for <$5?
    - 03/09/2024 at 3:27 pm #102581
      craig rex
      Participant
      
      Location: south jersey
      @craig-rex
      
      Jay, I wrote a long reply to your post but got swallowed up in the forum. Tried again after some editing and the same thing happened. I saved the post, so if you can’t dig it out from wherever it’s buried in WordPress, let me know and I’ll email it to you.
      - 03/09/2024 at 3:58 pm #102582
        
        Jay
        Keymaster
        
        Location: Virginia
        @jay
        
        Sorry that happened, but it never got through so I dont see it. Email me and ill post it.
        
        03/09/2024 at 4:48 pm #102583
        
        craig rex
        Participant
        
        Location: south jersey
        @craig-rex
        
        Thanks Jay I just emailed you
        
        03/09/2024 at 5:21 pm #102585
        
        Jay
        Keymaster
        
        Location: Virginia
        @jay
        
        As much as I appreciate people who are super efficient with their small stores, there is certainly a value to having a large inventory. Everything sells eventually. We just never know what will sell each day. Sounds like your large card inventory is the same.
        
        It definitely is. Having a large inventory means you have a lot more options. You can wait for the perfect buyer on certain items or you can run a quick sale, move a bunch of inventory and raise a chunk of cash. I have been selling off a lot of cards from my COMC port which I bought two, three, even four years ago, realizing there’s a certain point where it doesn’t matter what I paid, it doesn’t matter what I thought the card was worth or what it might be worth in the future. I’d rather get what I can, have the cash in hand now and use it for something else.
        
        But there are other cards where I keep the price the same, or even raise it a few bucks, still waiting for the right buyer to come along. With such a large inventory, a few of these cards sell every day, too. Then there are some cards which sell better on eBay than COMC. Usually it’s because the way COMC does the title isn’t the best way to market the card. I buy a few of these cards every week and get them shipped to me to sell in my eBay store. It saves me a few bucks on cash out fees and it’s a fairly easy way to keep my eBay sales humming even with a 250 item store.
        
        How does COMC process the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of cards that people send in? Are there just rows of hundreds of people taking photos and listing each card? How is it profitable when many cards sell for <$5?
        
        There are millions of cards for sale on the COMC site, and it’s amazing how far the company has come over the last 10 or 15 years. COMC started as a way for the founder Tim Getsch to share the steals he got on eBay! Now they have huge warehouses (at least one in Washington state, another in Canada) and large teams of employees to handle every area of operation (processing, shipping, customer service, etc). Plus I’m sure they employ a ton of people to deal with things like programming the site and app. They send representatives to every big card show around the country (this weekend there are teams in Philly and Nashville) where you can drop off your cards or you can ship cards to their warehouse in Washington, which is what I do every few weeks.
        
        Every card on their site is individually scanned, 9 at a time for regular cards and 3 for graded since that’s how many fit on an industrial flatbed scanner. They have some kind of crazy expensive robotic shipping device (like amazon) which picks some/all? cards for shipping. Then employees package the cards up. You can keep cards unpriced in your port to be shipped for as long as you want. Or you can reprice the card to try and resell it.
        
        COMC takes out fees at basically every step of the listing and selling process. Minimum 50 cents to process each card that you submit. A few percent from each sale. A buck or two to send an item to auction, and they have regular 7 day $0.99 eBay auctions ending every night and live auctions 3 or 4 times a week. A few bucks handling lumped into their shipping fees, and they ship tens of thousands of cards every week. A penny storage for each card on the 1st of each month. 10 percent to cash out store credit (every transaction happens in store credit, not deposits to your bank account or paypal). All a small price to pay if you know your cards and you build up your port like I have.
        
        Many of the cards for sale on the COMC site are also cross posted to eBay. They currently have 6.8 million eBay listings to be exact. More than I would have guessed. For every user like me with thousands of cards in their port, there are probably 10-20 users buying cards one or two at a time. The old-school collectors who can barely use a computer. The casual users who don’t really know cards. The noob flippers who will move on to flipping books on Amazon in a month.
        
        One of the best ways this marketplace works well for everyone involved (COMC, buyers and sellers) is through flipping. I’ll give you an example. This card which you can see I have is the only one listed on the site in NM condition. Yesterday there were five copies available, four by one seller and one by another. I submitted offers on all of them because I like this player and think his cards will sell well once baseball season gets in full swing. Plus autographed jersey cards are a fast nickel in the modern card market, as long as the player’s good and the set is decent quality. After browsing both sellers’ ports to find a few other cards I liked, and a bit of negotiation with the more stubborn of the two sellers, my offers were accepted and now I own five copies of this card.
        
        I will have two copies shipped to me to sell on eBay and hope to sell the other 3 copies one at a time on COMC. COMC took a percentage of each sale when the sellers accepted my offers, and they will take a cut again when the card sells at my new, higher price. Multiply this by tens of thousands of transactions every day and you have big business. COMC has really become a platform where prices change in real-time, sometimes beyond all rationality, if a player is on a hot streak or setting some kind of record. Because you can reprice so easily, a lot of times flippers buy at $6 to reprice at $10, or buy at $1 to reprice at $1.99. I like the platform a lot, but I enjoy living my life and don’t want to live on COMC all the time, so I try to double my money with most flips. But I have also begun to realize that when you’re dealing in volume, even a buck or two profit can be worth it sometimes. Of course I’d like to make more, but with thousands of cards in my port, there will inevitably be some duds and sometimes it’s best to just keep it moving.
        
        COMC is not a perfect company by any means, and some of their problems are a little ridiculous. They have a tendency to get backed up with shipping delays, like right now where it takes 2+ months to get cards shipped to you unless you pay extra for rushed shipping which is basically priority mail prices x2. It was even worse during the pandemic and their customer service is very hit or miss. Some of the reps I’ve dealt with are very helpful and really cool to message with. But I think other departments like processing have a lot more turnover, which can lead to problems.
        
        A lot of people in the card world complain about COMC, especially the old timers who remember when fees were cheaper and communication was better. I’ve only been selling on the site since 2022, so I don’t know about all that. But your podcast taught me a certain way of looking at things which I try to apply to COMC, and everything in life. Best not to worry about things I can’t control or hypotheticals. Change is going to happen whether I want it to or not. Figure out how to embrace what’s different and find what works for me. I don’t sweat the small stuff with COMC and just focus on the big picture of selling and trying to keep my profits as consistent as I can. Some weeks, that means buying cards at prices where they’re a steal and then I flip them or get them shipped to me to sell on eBay. Other weeks (like this one) I run a 30% off sale in preparation for the processing fees on my most recent shipment which will see the cards uploaded to my account by March 22nd. I price those cards as they post and the cycle continues.
        
        03/09/2024 at 5:22 pm #102586
        
        Jay
        Keymaster
        
        Location: Virginia
        @jay
        
        Completely fascinating that they can make money with a very human intensive business. I know companies have tried this way if selling with clothes, but none have succeeded. It must be the way they can store millions of cards in a relatively small space.
        
        03/10/2024 at 3:22 pm #102589
        
        craig rex
        Participant
        
        Location: south jersey
        @craig-rex
        
        Completely fascinating that they can make money with a very human intensive business. I know companies have tried this way if selling with clothes, but none have succeeded. It must be the way they can store millions of cards in a relatively small space.
        
        I did a little digging and found out they have three warehouse facilities, one in Texas, one in Canada, one in Seattle and over 200,000 square feet of space.
        
        I’m a little surprised this isn’t as widely done in other niches. Maybe it is and I just don’t know about it. I guess selling Amazon FBA is the same kind of concept.
        
        There are other consignment card sellers (lots of them, its really common in the hobby because it goes hand in hand with online box breaks) and other big sellers who have a vault model. But COMC does a little bit of everything well. Even with their flaws.
        
        COMC has made a lot of smart partnerships too. For as long as I’ve used their site, you can cash out your store credit (with little to no fees) for gift certificates at one of the biggest online card wholesalers. so you can sell your “extra” cards over time and just keep the ones you want. Then last year, they partnered with a few of the big grading companies. So now you can get any card in your COMC port graded by PSA or CGC. Of course, it takes longer and costs more than if you did it on your own or through a bulk grader. But you can’t beat the convenience.
        
        COMC ran a promotion late last year until the end of January where you could submit any item in your port to auction for $0.75. No minimum fvf, when their normal minimum is $3.50. The math only makes sense for COMC because their eBay fees are cheaper than ours due to volume. Enterprise level, I think its called.
        
        If COMC allowed for customization of their listings, I’m not sure it would make sense to sell cards on eBay. Maybe only the time-sensitive cards where if you wait even until next week the price would change. But for now (and probably forever), that’s a fantasy. And there are a lot of arbitrage opportunities between the two platforms. This weekend I have been finding steals left and right on the COMC platform after barely buying anything there for the last month. And a lot of those cards will sell for a little higher prices, or sell a little faster, on eBay. Scavenging can be funny like that. It’s important to come up with new plans for your business always, but it’s also important to remain open to the opportunities in front of you instead of rigidly sticking with something that’s less profitable. Sometimes deals present themselves and it pays off to jump on them.
        
        03/10/2024 at 4:47 pm #102592
        
        Jay
        Keymaster
        
        Location: Virginia
        @jay
        
        I’m a little surprised this isn’t as widely done in other niches. Maybe it is and I just don’t know about it. I guess selling Amazon FBA is the same kind of concept.
        
        Im not savvy to current businesses, but I know there were several used clothing sellers where you mailed in a bag of clothes, they photographed and listed auctions, then paid you once the clothes sold.
        
        Issue was people were sending in garbage clothes. If clothes did sell, it was for $10 or less. It wasnt cost effective. Assume photographing and storing clothes is much more work than a baseball card.
        
        https://www.therealreal.com/ might be the closest example of a successful (i think?) business where you mail in product and then get paid. But they are very strict about what they sell. Only the most high end fashion. I guess you can also lump in the phone buyers who purchase old electronics, refurbish and resell.
        
        03/10/2024 at 5:11 pm #102594
        
        Sharyn
        Participant
        
        Location: Central NJ
        @sharyn
        
        Yes, Swap.com was like that in the beginning for kids clothes. It was growing when I started doing resale. I was going to the local Goodwill, buying bunches of kids clothing, and sending it in along with the stuff that my own kids grew out of. I was doing very well and it helped start my reselling journey.
        
        Over time, the fees kept getting higher, and it was no longer cost effective. Over time, they started taking in adult clothing and dropping kids toys.
        
        When my neighbor asked me to help him sell off all his stuff, including clothing that his wife had bought and never wore, I decided I couldn’t do it all myself. I sent a good bit of it in to Swap, where it basically disappeared. In the end, the company was bought by someone else, and I had to file a grievance with the BBB. They paid me something like $200, which was a pittance compared to the several boxes of new or like new stuff I sent in.
        
        Whatever … I think that they and their competition put themselves out of business. By adding in online clothing thrifts to eBay and other reselling websites, they added to the oversaturation of used clothing available for sale.
        
        03/10/2024 at 5:54 pm #102595
        
        craig rex
        Participant
        
        Location: south jersey
        @craig-rex
        
        Issue was people were sending in garbage clothes. If clothes did sell, it was for $10 or less. It wasnt cost effective. Assume photographing and storing clothes is much more work than a baseball card.
        
        This made me realize that one of the reasons COMC is so successful is because they’re largely avoiding junk cards. With fees of $0.50 and $1.00 per card, you can’t just send in everything because you’ll lose money. So the site ends up full of ultra-modern cards with a unique feature (autograph, serial number, piece of jersey) or vintage cards where the condition is in decent condition. I think the ideal sale on COMC, for both the company’s sustainability and for consistent profits as a seller, is around $5 to $20. It’s a good marketplace for the very niche cards that are sought out by old-school player or set collectors, as well as a marketplace for supply and demand to work in real time.
        
        COMC fees have only increased over the years as the site has become more successful and popular. Back in the day, supposedly you could send stuff in for pennies. That’s why there are a few copies of your typical junk wax era cards on the site, but those types of cards are so plentiful that it’s always a race to the bottom to sell. Best to focus on cards with only 1 or 2 copies on the site so you can use Terapeak to determine your pricing strategy.
- 03/10/2024 at 5:01 pm #102593
  Sharyn
  Participant
  Location: Central NJ
  @sharyn
  Hum ,,, I was very busy with my career job this past week – actually past two weeks – and I spaced out on posting my numbers. I suppose it was not a hot week for sales, and I didn’t list anything.
  
  Week of Feb 25 – Mar 2
  Total Items in Store: 1670 eBay, 30 Etsy, 30 Ruby Lane
  Items Sold: 11 eBay, 0 Etsy, 0 Ruby Lane
  Cost of Items Sold: $2 + $86 Commission
  Total Sales: $278.07 eBay; includes fees but no shipping
  Highest Price Sold: eBay $78 for Orrefors Isabella Crystal Bowl Signed Numbered
  Average price: $25
  Returns: 0
  Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
  Number of items listed this week: 0
- 03/10/2024 at 6:56 pm #102596
  BrianB
  Participant
  Location:
  @brianb
  Jay, Ryanne: I thought I would mention that tomorrow, March 11, 2024 is the 11 year anniversary of the first eBay Scavengers podcast. Congratulations. If anyone would like to hear that podcast it is available here: https://archive.org/details/EbayScavengersPodcastEpisode1
  - 03/10/2024 at 7:52 pm #102597
    Jay
    Keymaster
    
    Location: Virginia
    @jay
    Whoah. 11 years ago. What a wild ride. Glad you guys could join us on your own adventure.
- 03/12/2024 at 1:10 pm #102609
  BrianB
  Participant
  Location:
  @brianb
  Jay: I am re listening to the archive of eBay scavengers \ Scavenger Life podcasts.
  - 03/13/2024 at 2:00 pm #102622
    craig rex
    Participant
    
    Location: south jersey
    @craig-rex
    I have thought about posting threads when I relisten to old episodes. Like how communities that love a tv show rewatch old episodes and discuss then. Is this something that people think would lead to more discussion on the forum? If it is, let’s do it!
    
    So much has changed selling on eBay in just the last couple years. but a lot of the basics are the same as ever. And one of the biggest lessons the podcast taught me was to embrace change. Don’t fear it, don’t complain about it, don’t pretend it’s not happening. Figure out how to change your business to meet whatever’s changing about eBay or scavenging.
    
    It’s great life advice really.
- 03/13/2024 at 11:21 am #102617
  ChristineR
  Participant
  Location: Southern California
  @christiner
  I hear current podcasters still talking about you legends! I think we even got some of our lingo from you guys. I miss hearing your perspective but love your current endeavors.
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