The Numbers: Week of November 19-25, 2023

Items in Store: 2877
Items Sold: 45
Total Sales: $2,416.00
COGS: $223.00
Total Profit: $2,193.00
Average profit: $48.73
Average sales price: $53.69
New Listings: 112
Items scavenged: 22
2023 weekly new listings Avg: 46

Surprising numbers as the week seemed kinda dead  after Wednesday. Clearly I was able to get plenty of listing done with the extra time off work. I’m back on track to hit my listing goals. I’m also keeping the $70k dream alive.

This is only the 7th time ever that I’ve listed more than 100 items in a week. 5 of those occurrences have taken place since June of this year. The downside of listing 100+ items in a week is dealing with the inventory side of 100+ items. My current system is I keep a folding table in my garage for “outbound” listed items. Normally I move all the listed inventory from the week into storage on Sunday. Yesterday I opted to spend my time listing more instead. Gotta pay that piper at some point!

So I have my sales and listing goals mapped out for the last 5 weeks of the year. I’m gonna hit it harder than ever. At the beginning of the year I planned on shutting things down at Thanksgiving, but plans change!!! I also had zero energy at the beginning of the year with a bit of lingering long covid symptoms. I’ve dropped some weight, greatly improved my diet, and I have energy levels close to what I had prior to covid and no more breathing issues. I’m practically BUZZING with energy! I can do all the fun things with the family I want to do and still have energy for getting some work done. Lets GOOOO!!!

Premium Hoarder update:

Paid: $12441.00

Sales Minus fees: $ 20071.35

Total Sales: $23137

Items Sold: 200

ASP: $115.69

PROFIT!: $7630.35

I crossed several cool barriers this week – $20k in sales after fees, 200 sold items, and $7500 in profit. This is a pipeline that will make 2024 even more successful than this year. How cool would it be to hit $100k in sales in a year? Another marker of growth is that I redid my W4 to withhold extra taxes from each paycheck for state. I’ve always been able to cover my Schedule C state tax burden with the withholdings from my day job. I’m definitely gonna cross that threshold on state though next year. Definitely not Federal as I get 6 child tax credits! My state has very few deductions so I always owe money.

Total Items in Store: 1,141
Items Sold: 19
Gross Sales: $860.55 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $563.71 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $79
Highest Price Sold: $79 Needlepoint kit
Average Price Sold: $45.29
Returns:  0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $15
Number of items listed this week: 6

I wasn’t able to get to Ebay much last week.  It was a week of highs and lows outside Ebay.  We had a nice holiday with family and I hope you all did as well.  Went to the funeral for a teen girl last weekend in the Bay Area.

I’m looking at my sold list and it’s a variety of stuff – one really stale death pile 2014 purchase I got listed with my daughter last summer, things I got at estate and school rummage sales super cheap, and my Target RA.  So my store is going well on most fronts.

My garage is looking a little hoarderish.  I decided to start running another sale today.  After the holiday listing push I will do some reorganzing and need to cut back on buying.  I also want to reevaluate my prices and move toward a faster nickel approach on some of the merch I’m less enthused about.  I still have death piles to get to but I learned some more about which type of items are moving and I’m steadily losing my taste for large breakables.  So just doing lot of thinking about where I’m going with Ebay and how I’m getting close to the storage I want to devote to my business.  I expect that it may be challenging for sales next year, so hopefully I can pivot in a way that eeks out the most possible sales and move some more of what I have.

Parting out the dishwasher – GREAT idea!  Our dishwasher died after 2 years and because Lowes couldn’t get us the right replacement part within 2 months, they had to give us an entirely new dishwasher.  We kept the old one intending to fix and sell it but we will make so much more selling it for parts!

My Store Week November 19-25, 2023

Total Items in Store: 835
Items Sold: 21
Gross Sales: $608.37 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $300.72 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $62.34
Highest Price Sold: $59.95 (Ariat Jeans)
Average Price Sold: $27.00
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $272.87
Number of items listed this week: 35

$ Amount Listed this week: $1464.30

I allowed someone to install a malicious app on my computer on Monday, which messed up a lot of my free time for the following day or two. I’m very good about being vigilant about possible scammers, so shows you that anyone can be a victim.

I turned off my computer quickly and got it right over to Best Buy, so I should be OK. They are copying my hard drive to an external drive, so I hope I don’t lose much. However, I didn’t have my spreadsheets with me to calculate my COGS for last week. I am using my laptop in the meantime.

Ebaymom suggested that I try out promoted listings, so I set something up last week that ends today. I already had markdown sales set up for December, so I didn’t want to keep it going. I do think it made a difference starting on Sunday, so it isn’t part of my numbers for last week. I could decide each month whether to do promoted listings or markdown sales, but I don’t like doing both at the same time (which is what I have set up for this experiment).

Week of Nov 19 – 25
Total Items in Store: 1750 eBay, 35 Etsy
Items Sold: 10 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $5-ish + $70 Commission
Total Sales: $268.29 eBay, $0 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $50 Gorham Sterling Silver Ornament Mount Vernon Dove
Average price: $26.83
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 13

Bad week of sales for us.  Way below average for this time of year.  Losing the lead over last year that we had built up.  More like a summer week than Christmas season.

Week Ending 11/25/23
Gross Sales(w/o shipping & tax): $289.82   (eBay $178 / Etsy $112)
Net Sales: $216.97
Total Items Sold: 12  (eBay 8 / Etsy 4)
Total Items in eBay Store: 1172 / Etsy: 567
Cost of Items Sold: $19.49
Highest Price Sold: $59.95  (Christmas Tree Star Topper)
Average Price Sold: $24.15
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 7

Average Days Listed: 540
Longest Listed: 1171
New items listed: 10
New Listings Value $274.50

Running these numbers can be very educational. My numbers don’t look like anything special but this was a really good week of sales for me considering these factors:

1. I had 200 listings — basically half of my eBay inventory– at auction all week. All those sales will be in next week’s numbers since the auctions ran from last Monday the 20th to this Monday the 27th, except for one auction which sold for a best offer late last week. The other 27 items that I sold last week were all from my BIN/BO inventory. That’s an excellent sell-through rate for the size of my store.

2. I didn’t create a ton of new listings, since I was mostly focused on my Black Friday sales on the consignment trading card site I use. I tried to make a few new eBay listings every day, but I missed a day or two. I think something like 4 or 5 of my eBay sales were items that were listed last week. Usually it’s higher than that.

3. I haven’t really scavenged a ton outside of my trading cards niche since my Chicago haul in early August. Based on how eBay works these days, I think this means that my listings in other categories are falling lower and lower in the search algorithm.

With that in mind, $1200 gross sales ($800 net – COGS) is a really good number. I think there’s a few reasons my numbers were so strong.

1. This is the busy time of year for online buying, period.

2. I ran a 25% off markdown sale and frequently sent offers to watchers for another 10 to 15 percent off on top of that. This worked especially well on $50+ items. I would really recommend this to those of you who want to sell a bunch of items quickly or clear out old inventory. 35 percent off feels like a real bargain and 40 percent off is hard to say no to, psychologically.

3. I’ve focused a lot more this year on curating my ebay store with items which I think will sell quickly, or for a nice price, or both. I’ve gotten a much better sense of how to do this in the last six months which means I have some nice weeks. I expect that to continue at least for the next month or two as I have lots of interesting, high quality inventory on its way to me or sitting in shelves and in bins until I get it photographed and listed.

4. I’ve got a nice routine down where I send a listing to auction (regardless of category) after about a month of no sales, offers or watchers. I start the bidding at around half of my BIN price. Then if the auction doesn’t sell, I send the listing back into my store inventory and often I lower my BIN price and offer settings. After about a month, I’ll do the same thing all over again. Sometimes things sell randomly after two or four months, and sometimes you want to price high and wait, so it’s a balancing act. I have some inventory which I exclude from this process. But most listings under $5o or even $100…sometimes you just want to sell, even if it’s for $20 less than I’m hoping or 50% off of the “value” I think the listing has.

I’ve found that I like it when I move through inventory faster through any means possible. Even if that means pulling some stuff that doesn’t sell from my inventory and selling it in a bulk lot, or donating it, or throwing it away. I started selling full-time (no other jobs) two years ago and I’ve lived with a lot of clutter since then. It’s kind of crazy to think about how messy my life (my apartment) got at various points. I’m space limited and I sell things online as my only income, so some clutter is inevitably going to be part of my life. But it was too much.

However, I’ve made a lot of progress this year and I know I’ll make even more progress this winter because I work on eBay more when it’s too cold to enjoy being outside. I’m a lot happier because I can see the progress in my bank account and in my better organized, higher quality inventory. It’s nice to have that spring in your step especially in the winter.

11/19/2023 to 11/25/2023

Listings: 349 (down from 405 the previous week)

Items sold: 28 (14 via best offer, 9 via seller initiated offer, 18 via promoted listings)

Gross sales: $1208.10 (down 50% from one year ago)

Net sales: $805.58 (down 52% from one year ago)

Average sales price: $43.15 (down 41% from one year ago)

Highest price sold (net): $118.61 — Hans Knappertsbusch Opera Recordings 43 CD box set

One of the last big items from my Chicago classical music haul. It’s been so much fun selling these and can’t wait to find another big score like this in a new place sometime next year. I also need to make a return trip to the same library’s annual sale to see if they get another incredible collection donated!

Lowest price sold (net): $9.93 — Jauan Jennings Panini Prizm silver autograph

One of my favorite ways to scavenge the last few years has been buying cards with points through the Panini Rewards website, basically I buy the points (which are randomly inserted in all types of Panini card packs) on eBay and then it’s a waiting game to see what cards they drop each week. I got really into this during the early part of the pandemic when Panini Rewards Points values dropped a lot while everything was shut down.

Sometimes there are great deals, other times the points to value ratio is all out of whack. I’ve had a lot of success with lower cost cards like this one, where I buy them in the max quantity of 5 which makes my net cost in points + shipping is about $3 to $5. I list and sell them in the $10 to $20 range and when one sells, I grab the next one from my inventory, scan it and make the new listing. When I get a huge number of these cards, I will buy cheap base rookie cards of the player in bulk for $0.25 to $0.50 each and include one or two in the package as a bonus. I get a lot of happy customers and even some repeat customers this way. It’s like a micro pipeline and I really enjoy it.

Is anyone else having trouble printing shipping labels from the ebay website?  I keep getting a “Something went wrong” message. I tried it on 2 computers, different browsers. Still have the issue.

Thank you

I’m a week late.  Thanksgiving was a crazy week.  I moved my parents out of my AirBnB house in NC over the holiday, into their new house down the street from my AirBnB (in New Bern, NC).  I spent two days cleaning out the detritus from having residents in there for 18 months.   And I interviewed a new cleaner, whom I hope works out.

Karma was a great boyfriend this past week.  On Thanksgiving night about 7 pm, some downtown friends messaged me and said there was a dumpster outside the local Civic Theatre.  My family said “go” to me deserting them – and I jumped right in!  I took out several art prints, about 8 vintage suitcases, and a human-size beaver costume with a great head-piece.   On Black Friday I went to the Salvation Army and bought a $69 MCM Dixie dresser, gorgeous.  I thought about selling it, but my AirBnB is MCM/70s, so I will save and figure out if I can use it.

Then when driving around last week, I was wondering what to do about a tree.  On Sullivan’s Island trash day, I found a fake tree from Fraser Hills Farms, probably about $300 new.  It was perfect and pre-lit.  I’ll bring it to my AirBnB for next year.

I only sold about $170 in ebay that week.   Locally on FB, I sold two mirrors for $60, a suitcase for $20, a bookshelf for $85, and a wine rack for $50.  They were all free finds, so $230 from FBM.

Last week I scavenged for free – bathroom skinny shelving unit, a washable 3×5 rug, a large 1×3 art print, two Ford pickup mats.    From FB, I bought three Xmas needlepoint stockings for $30 total.  If you have never looked at “solds” for needlepoint stockings, check it out – both completed ones and kits.