Sale of the week December 24-30, 2023

I tried a new strategy to end the month this time around. All year, I’ve been running auctions the last week of the month and sometimes twice a month. Most of my listings are in the collectibles category and a store subscription comes with all those free auction listings, so my thought has been, why not? It took a lot of tweaking but over the course of the year, I settled on an auction strategy that worked well for me:

1. Send listings without watchers (or maybe with 1 or 2) to auction, or any listing older than 90 days.

2. Start the bidding at around half of my buy it now, and turn on best offers.

3. As long as I’ve been listing fresh inventory recently, and not just recycling the same old listings, about 20% of the auctions sell.

4. Most of the items that don’t sell go back into my store inventory at the original price, or maybe I knock $10 off the price or my offer settings, which leads to a few more items selling. After a few weeks, start the cycle all over again. Anything that I think is stale or too cheap gets removed from inventory.

This is a fun way to sell, and also goes through inventory pretty rapidly. It’s less about maximizing every sale and more about making a sale.

eBay wasn’t as much of my selling focus in the last few months, so my store was down to a mere 300 listings by the middle of December and even dipped into the 200s for about a week. So I skipped creating my auctions this month and spent the last week of 2023 heavily focused on listing. I did a lot of organizing and picture taking and editing (with plans for more in the next few weeks) and I plan to carry that momentum through January. I would like to get up to 500 listings by the end of the month without compromising on inventory quality at all. I have plenty of quality unlisted inventory and items which I have in multiple quantity that are easy to relist, so I think I can get to 500 by January 31. I would love if all this listing keeps my sales numbers on par with December’s numbers.

As for last week’s sales, college basketball is heating up which means my cache of Kansas Jayhawks autographed photos are starting to sell again. I sold 4 autographs of current player KJ Adams Jr over the course of the month and hope I can do at least 4 more in January. It is amazing how short players careers can be, the vast majority of players are noteworthy in college or the pros for just a year or two and I’ve tried to get more aggressive about selling within that window. This often means lower individual sales (my net on this autograph was only $6, though the buyer bought two from me) but I have dozens more to list and those $6 and $8 profits add up when you sell five to ten of them consistently every week.

Big dollar sales are a cleaner way to make a buck, though. I did very well on this 2014 Panini National Treasures Honus Wagner bat card, with a sale of $170. Wagner was one of the great players of Babe Ruth’s era, and I really like selling items like this. Most ultra-modern cards have their value tied up in the design of the card and its individual rarity and desirability, but there are all so many Honus Wagner bats leftover from 100 years ago to be cut up and inserted into cards. I picked this card up during the weeklong Black Friday sale on the consignment site I use, COMC, for the about $80. The seller had a few more Wagner memorabilia cards and I wish I had bought all four, but I second-guessed myself and two of them sold before I pulled the trigger. Next year I’ll trust my gut more.

Finally, this was my last Barbara Bush signed letter — or maybe I have one more? Time for me to do some New Year’s organizing, maybe. I bought a handful of these from the same seller about a year ago (maybe more?) and all of them sold in the $50 to $75 range that I like so much. Get your store to a place where you’re making two or three sales like that most days, and your business will hum along pretty smoothly.

What did you sell this week?