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Quiet week in our eBay store. We’re definitely in our reseller phase of “how passive can our eBay store be and still make money”. We are still scaveng
[See the full post at: The Numbers: Week of October 1-7, 2023] -
Jay, good luck with the renovations! That sounds exciting and also stressful…. it’s always nice to have eBay to fall back on (in the background) and it’s good to have a change of pace on facebook as well… I have been doing the same thing with bulk bin sourcing and then pulling out certain items for eBay and then taking newer pieces in bulk to Plato’s closet for quick (but admittedly a lot less) cash. No shipping, no listing… just cash in hand… which is always a good thing and a change of pace. I am always coming up with more inventory than I can list in a week so I like to keep things moving.
My Store Week October 1-7, 2023
Total Items in Store: 829
Items Sold: 27
Gross Sales: $662.22 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $311.55 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $43.50
Highest Price Sold: $39.95 (Men’s Lucky Brand Jeans)
Average Price Sold: $24.53
Returns: 1 (+1 immediate cancellation)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: ~$35
Number of items listed this week: 35My goals this week is to keep up listing daily and begin building a draft bank. (I always start one and then usually use it up within a day or two 🙂 Have a good week, everyone!
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Total Items in Store: 1,010
Items Sold: 18
Gross Sales: $683.46 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $398.79 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $74
Highest Price Sold: $100 (2 New West Elm Pillow Covers (paid $7.98))
Average Price Sold: $24.53
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: ~$200ish RA + Flea Market and Thrifting
Number of items listed this week: 42Made it up over 1000 this week. Helped by another small Target RA experiment with multi-quantity listing. I’ve been listing pretty consistently. A drafts bank with a daily push out would be a good goal, as there are a few days I don’t get anything up. Expenses have calmed down a bit but really trying to crank out as many sales as possible before the next slow season on Ebay hits. I’m hearing consumers were pretty frugal during the Amazon Prime days, staying away from larger items and buying home goods and clothes. I took advantage of some sales and promotions at Target.
Glad to hear about your current project R&J. It’s been amazing to watch you become local business owners and I’m sure the community needed you. We miss having your primary focus on Ebay but I’m very excited about your success!
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If I remember correctly, the place in Harrisonburg was more like a food truck, and I recall that you sold that truck. Makes sense that you are now building a store there. I look forward to seeing the photos.
I hate to say it, but I feel better hearing that other resellers are also having slow weeks when my sales have sunk to new lows. I put my store on Time Away from Thursday to Monday since I went away for a long weekend. Thing is I haven’t sold anything since Thursday. Nada.
Last week wasn’t much better.
Week of Oct 1 – 7
Total Items in Store: 1731 eBay, 37 Etsy
Items Sold: 5 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $4 + $34 Commission
Total Sales: $92.33 eBay, $0 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $34 for Sajen Sterling Heart Pendant
Average price: $18.50
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 27-
@Sharon I am hearing on some of the people I follow that sales are not great and you have to work twice as hard as pre-pandemic for the same sales. I also believe that over time they have changed the algorithm to emphasize freshness. I do sell old items but a lot of times my item sells right away now. One of the podcasts suggests being willing to take lower offers, which I am doing if I get one shortly after listing. Still blocking offers lower than around 70% of asking. I’m wondering as my store gets bigger if I should rethink that percentage a bit for older items. The overall feeling is things are a bit tough right now when you are selling things people don’t really need, with the exception of holiday stuff. People maybe are looking forward to the holidays.
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@christiner – I definitely do take low offers, but only when the item is older, even if I refreshed it with a sell similar. I hold out on newer items.
I do need to do a bulk Sell Similar on the oldest items. I haven’t done that for a while.
One thing that annoys me is that I can’t remove a newly listed item from my Send Offers – Eligible list. If I see a new item there, I give the lowest 5% off just to get it out of there. Occasionally, someone will bite.
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Congrats on 1000 listings! You are flying through creating new listings lately.
You know I am a big proponent of sell similar and taking lower best offers. I auto decline anything under 60% of my BIN price. I have also been repricing pretty aggressively lately. Basically here is my selling model these days:
Step 1: Create new BIN/BO listing. Min offer around 60% of BIN price. For example, I’ll do a $35 min offer on a listing with a $49.99 BIN. $60 min offer on a $99.99 offer. The lowest price stuff I listed is generally $19.99 BIN/BO and I go $12 offers on those.
Step 2: If someone adds the listing to their watch list, send them an offer 20% off. Maybe 25% if I’m feeling generous or 15% if I think my BIN price is the right place. If no one adds to watch list within the first 2-4 weeks of creating the listing, send to auction with a start bid 50% of my BIN price.
Step 3: If the auction doesn’t sell, sell similar so the item is back in my inventory. If I think the price is a little high, I might drop it down to the next tier. So that $49.99 listing with a $35 min offer becomes a $39.99 listing with $25 min offer. Return to step 2 until the item sells.
I’ve been stuck around 400 listings for the last few months because I keep selling 150 to 200 items in month. A huge part of that is that I have started listing better quality items and items with a higher sell through rate. I have leveled up my scavenging basically. But the pricing structure has helped too.
Different niches and all that, but I think a lot of these principles might apply regardless of what you’re selling. Especially if inventory space is a factor or you just want to get rid of some old inventory or make a bunch of sales.
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Wow, what a journey J&R!
Did “hardworking big city A/V industry” Jay or Ryanne ever think you’d be where you are now since you quit your jobs and started ebay?
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I will say that selling on eBay was a good way to learn about business. Nothing we do now is really any different from what we are all doing: offering a wanted product, building systems, offering good customer service.
Building our eBay store gave us the confidence we could do what we do now.
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Items in Store: 2754
Items Sold: 37
Total Sales: $2,203.00
COGS: $318.00
Total Profit: $1,885.00
Average profit: $50.95
Average sales price: $59.54
New Listings: 81
Items scavenged: 140
Listing 2023 weekly Avg: 44I got to go to the hoarder apartment. See my post for pictures here:
I ended up pretty busy this week with family stuff but by doing drafts at work and doing photographs every morning before work I was able to get plenty of listing done.
I had sold another pair of shoes for $400 but the buyer never paid or responded to any messages. Why do people do that?? Oh well, they won’t have another chance to buy from me – BLOCKED!
Premium Hoarder update:
Sold 10 items for $1393 this week. Mainly because I started listing the boxed shoes again. Some of them were selling immediately (and that trend has continued this week!)
I spent $3025 buying the rest of the shoes – 121 pair new in box. So now I gotta list some of these shoes to get back into the profit as quickly as I can. I gotta say it will be nice to eventually be done buying this collection so I can actually bank the profits. I’ve spent over $12k…CRAZY! What a ‘side hustle’.
Premium hoarder numbers:
Total COGS: $12441
Total Sales (minus fees): $9928.54
Items Sold: 125
ASP: $91.56
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I ended up pretty busy this week with family stuff but by doing drafts at work and doing photographs every morning before work I was able to get plenty of listing done.
Busy times are what makes batching so important to any eBay seller with a decent sized inventory. It is easy to get 5 listings finished in 20 minutes if your pictures are done and your template only requires a few tweaks. It’s much harder if you have nothing photographed or no good items ready to list.
The end and sell similar “trick” on old listings is great for busy times too. At some point later in Q4, or early next year, you’ll have to try that with some of your hoarder haul items which don’t have any watchers or offers and report the results. I bet you’ll see one or two things sell which isn’t a bad ROI on five minutes of time.
Your taxes are gonna be fun next year!
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Christine – You got to 1000… very exciting!
Sharyn – Don’t worry, things will pick up soon… sales are very tough right now for most. Some things I need to practically give away to get the sale. I agree with you on the Best Offer button… I also offer the lowest 5% on the new just to “get it out”… and today, the button disappeared completely, so maybe something new is being tested or rolled out? Who knows?
Retro – You are living the maxim “It takes money to make money”! You will be back in the black in no time.
Everyone – This is embarrassing to ask… how do you get the hyperlink to someone’s name when you respond to a message? @christiner (in green) I can’t seem to figure out how to make that happen so someone please explain it to me 🙂
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well, nevermind, it just worked… it didn’t seem to on previous tries…Â not sure what I was doing differently when typing it in?
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Congratulations J and R on the new project, you two are improving your local area and bringing in the tourists to help your local economy.
Monthly numbers for September: 09/1 – 09/30
Total listings: 1674
Items sold: 53
Sales: $1,178.05
Highest price sold: $282.00 Seven Lots of Tasmania, Australia Slides to one buyer
Average price sold: $22.23
Cost of items sold: $73.24 / average cost: 1.38 each
Spent on new inventory: $102.00 – all have been listed and so far have generated $224 in sales.
Number of items listed: 112I’ve been trying to cut down on buying stuff and going through my death boxes, I put stuff I buy in bankers’ boxes with a receipt of when, where, and how much I spent. Going through them now, I often wonder why the heck did I buy this. Items that are not worth selling or making a lot of, end up being donated. I spent Friday night going through a banker’s box full of photos I got from one estate sale, only to realize they are all from the 1980s and 1990s, for me that is too recent to sell. The name on them is very common, so finding the person’s relatives is not going to work, but I discovered from the images that the guy was a police officer in a nearby large city. So next week, I’m going to go to the station and see if anybody there remembers him. There are quite a few images of officers and such, so hopefully they will take them off of my hands for free and maybe they could find his relatives. I would hate to just donate them or trash them.
Update: Since I wrote this, I have stopped by the Police Station. Turns out they have a department historian who was happy to take them. I made sure to separate and put in a separate envelope with a big X on it the photos that were very risque just in case they do go back to the family.
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@Jay curious if you promote any of your listings, I am finding that my sales do in fact go up when I promote (sadly not the minimum but a substantial percentage). Â I think the boost comes from having your items show up on other people’s search pages, like you I sell funky unique junk.
As an experiment instead of offering 20%, why not try 15% advertising for a few weeks and see what happens?
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I am finding that my sales do in fact go up when I promote (sadly not the minimum but a substantial percentage). I think the boost comes from having your items show up on other people’s search pages, like you I sell funky unique junk.
As an experiment instead of offering 20%, why not try 15% advertising for a few weeks and see what happens?
I would love to see what would happen if Jay and Ryanne had the time to truly play around with their store. Try a different experiment every month. One month, end the 100 oldest listings every day and sell similar. One month, increase promoted listings to 10% or 15%. One month, run 500 collectibles listings at auction with the start bid 50% of BIN price. One month, end and cut the prices by 15%.
Jay and Ryanne, if you two ever decide to sell off all your eBay inventory so you can use the storage space for coffee empire purposes, hire me to manage the process. I’ll come down to Luray for a few months and we’ll figure all this out. Maybe you two can dust off the old video equipment and we document the process?
If anyone is reading this post and your sales are slow: play around with these different ideas. Especially promoted listings percentages and end/sell similar on old listings. Adjust prices. Send out good quality offers to interested buyers. Don’t get stuck on your original BIN price. There will always be more stuff to buy. Sell sell sell.
Different tricks and tools might work better or worst for you than they do for me. But you’ll never know if you don’t try.
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@craig-rex I love this! It is such a different landscape than 5 or 10 years ago… when I turn off promoted listings, my sales slow down. I am constantly playing with the numbers to find the “optimal range”. Of course, nobody wants to throw money away, but a smaller percentage of something is better than… nothing! I am curious what you think about promoted listing standard vs. dynamic? It seems as if eBay really wants you to choose “dynamic” and then they auto-set the price for you. It can feel like a money grab, and every new listing you post automatically then gets promoted without the ability to choose not to unless you end the campaign. That feels like another money grab. Certain rare and popular items shouldn’t need promotion at all and will sell if someone is looking for them. However, for clothes, I think promoting is necessary. Currently I keep experimenting between the “standard” and the “dynamic”. What has been working for you and have you developed any good strategies? How often do you think is good to end and sell similar on old listings? Thanks!
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It’s funny, a couple years ago I had never used promoted listings. I was stuck in that mindset of “it’s a money grab.” But one month, eBay ran a promotional rate on promoted listings, and I opted in at a percentage or two above the minimum…and my sales went up like 50% that month. So I kept using promoted listings after the promo ended and my sales remained higher than I expected. I don’t think it was consistently 50% higher but items that had been sitting for a while started to sell. By then, my mindset had shifted to “Why would I mess with something that’s working?” And I’ve used promoted listings ever since.
I use promoted listings standard with a fixed rate, and when I create a new listing, I start it at 5% most of the time. If the listing hasn’t sold after about a month, I’ll kick the percentage up to 7.5%. I’m space limited, so I like to sell stuff (especially bulky items) within a few months. Some listings I will start my rate at 7.5% — usually these are listings where I have multiples or items with a lot of competition. I’ve never tried dynamic promoted listings because fixed rate has worked well for me. Every week, almost without fail, bout half of my sold listings are promoted listings. Sometimes these are popular or unique items, which I would agree shouldn’t need promotion, but as long as things keep selling, I’m fine with it.
I posted a few threads about my end and sell similar experiments a year or two ago. Here is a link to one of them to give you an idea of what you might expect. How the time flies. If you like numbers, there are a ton in there. Keep in mind most of the data is two years old, but eBay’s search algorithm hasn’t changed much since then, so I think the same principles still apply.
My rule of thumb is that if you have items in your inventory older than six months and they have no watchers and low views, I suggest ending them and sell similar. You can click “customize table” in your active listings to show the number of watchers and views on your listings. When I do a batch of end and sell similar, I sort my inventory by oldest to newest, and I like to do the oldest page worth of listings, 25 or 50 or 100 depending on how big my store is. Right now it would be 25 or 50 because I’ve been running a 400 item store for most of this year. The idea behind end and sell similar is that you are likely to get a few sales and offers within the first few days simply because the eBay algorithm likes to see new listings.
There’s a point of diminishing returns with end and sell similar, you can’t do it all the time. But once a month, or once every two months, will allow you to sell some stuff that was sitting in your store. Especially if you combine this process with other inventory strategies like repricing, promoted listings and sending offers or coupons. Maybe the stuff would sell anyway, there’s really no way to know, but once you get your process down, the whole thing only takes a few minutes. In my mind, even selling one item each time would make it worth it. But I usually sell a handful.
I sold these weird calendars last week because of end and sell similar. Or at least that’s why I think they sold. Who knows, maybe my buyer just didn’t browse eBay for the last six months but would have found my listing no matter what. But I think it’s more likely that my buyer had a saved search for new listings, and didn’t check the old listings because they didn’t have the time or assumed it was all overpriced. That’s often what I do as a buyer because the best bargains are either in auctions or recently listed items.
End and sell similar is also a great trick if you’re busy and don’t have time to list. The eBay algorithm loves consistent new listings, and I see people posting on here all the time that sales are slow so they haven’t been feeling motivated to list. Which I totally understand! But when sales are slow, that’s the perfect time to look at your oldest listings and try this strategy. It’s not a substitute for developing a process where you’re consistently listing good, quality items, but it’s been a nice supplemental strategy for me to get a few extra sales here and there.
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Hi Craig, Thanks for taking the time to talk in detail about your strategies and link to your older posts. I am going to go back now and check out your data from a few years ago over a glass of wine. I really appreciate you sharing your promoted listed strategy… and like you, I found turning it on was giving me much better results, so I have just left it on. The few times I have turned it off, well, the sales halted. I am still running dynamic, but I do like your idea of a tiered and timed plan where you start smaller and build up the % over time. I will have to switch back to standard and come up with a consistent game plan to try out over time. I also think the ability to keep new “hot” listings unpromoted at least for 48 hours or perhaps a week or two to see if there are people ‘searching’ can allow the items a chance to sell on their own first. Looking forward to going back in time to check out some more of your past experiments. Cheers!
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I’m still doing 4% for everything at listing time. It would be interesting to try promoting older items or low view items at a higher percentage. I have a new few clothing items for example that have been sitting and I know clothing has become so much more competitive since I listed those. If I had a crystal ball, I would look in it to see if changing the price would work better than upping the promotion percentage.
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@debitendcredits – I’ve been wondering about increasing the promoted listings percentage as well. I’ve noticed that the suggested amounts has steadily increased and that my percentage of sales (at 5% promoted) have steadily decreased. I used to routinely get 50% of my sales via promoted listings and many weeks I’m getting 10 – 20% now. I’m going to test out the floating rate with some of my higher priced listings and see if there is a difference.
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I am looking forward to the expansion of the Jay and Ryanne coffee shop empire. Then in ten years maybe I will sell my Broad Porch summer vibes tee on eBay for $100 plus shipping to some vintage coffee nerd. They can pry my small victories long sleeve from my cold dead fingers though. Bury me in that sweater, y’all.
It is a rainy day here in New Jersey, but eBay is the best when the weather is bad. I have been listing all day and reflecting on my scavenging life. I just hit my two year anniversary of doing this full-time, no other jobs to help pay the bills, and it’s going better than I could have imagined. The most important thing that I’ve learned that I enjoy thinking about how I do things day to day, changing my processes and modifying my goals. Posting on these forums helps a lot with that. I’m looking forward to putting in some good Q4 work, and writing some good posts, over the next few months.
10/1/2023 to 10/7/2023
Items sold: 26 (5 via auction, 15 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 16 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1541.68 (down 26% from one year ago)
Net sales: $848.59 (down 45% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $59.30 (down 3% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $113.73 — Charles Barkley 2019-20 Panini Illusions autograph
One of the true NBA greats from my childhood with an all-time great nickname: the Round Mound of Rebound. It’s not mean, he’s a beloved Hall of Famer and a respected commentator.
I picked up three of these autographs from the Panini Rewards site when they did a limited drop a few weeks ago. They cost me 1500 points each which is about $40. I’ve sold two of the three autographs, both to Australia. Aussies are nuts for basketball.
Lowest price sold (net): $15.01 — lot of 2 Frank Frazetta 1980s wall calendars
Won these in June 2022 for $0.99 and $0.99 as part of a large order with one of the biggest trading card consignment sellers. Let’s call it $5 with the combined shipping. Really it was just a few dollars gamble based on: A) browsing every single auction listing from this seller B) seeing the picture of the calendars and that initial reaction of “that’s cool” and C) $0.99 start bid with no bids when I found the auction, which led me to Terapeak and seeing they had value.
I wouldn’t have bought these if they didn’t look cool and I never would have listed them, they would have sat in a bin until I got the urge to clean. I can’t just sell anything. I need to care about the thing I’m listing beyond hypothetical profit.
It took a few months and more than a few rounds of auction, sell similar, lower the price for these to sell, but the calendars are in their forever (?) home now, and I know a little more about another type of item that I would have skipped over not too long ago.
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Week of 10/1 – 10/7
Total items in Store: 406
Items Sold: 6
Gross Sales: $146.88 (before eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $33.30 (including consignment commissions but not the original cost of family castoffs)
Highest Price Sold: $43 plus shipping (US Navy SPAWAR Systems Center Challenge Coin)
Average Sales Price: $24.48 (before eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of new items listed: 0 (but did 12 end and sell similar)A tough week, and this one just ending is about identical.
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Congrats to Jay and Ryanne on their new venture! I know it will go well. No moss growing on you guys. 🙂 I’ve never been to Harrisonburg but will have to make the drive once it opens. I know that is the “big city” for your area. If you can make it there…
Week Ending 10/7/23
Gross Sales(w/o shipping $ tax): $373.75Â (eBay $329 / Etsy $45)
Net Sales: $307.50
Total Items Sold: 8Â (eBay 7 / Etsy 1)
Total Items in eBay Store: 1206Â / Etsy Store: 523
Cost of Items Sold: $55.87
Highest Price Sold: $99.95Â (French Cookbook)
Average Price Sold: $46.72
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 2
Promoted Percentage: 25.00%
Average Days Listed: 280
Longest Listed: 1227
New items listed: 16
New Listings Value $844.00Slow sales for this time of year. Hmmm… I’ve been busy with family things and hadn’t even really noticed. Just getting to numbers two weeks late.
Big sale of the week was a French language cookbook by the chef that originated the idea of pairing wines with food – Alains Senderens. I bought a huge lot of books in French from the estate of a chef of a local French restaurant a few years ago. I stuck a box of books aside and forgot about them and revisted them since books have been selling so well for me lately. This cookbook was in the box. Sold in less than a day.
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