When we hear Amazon sellers talk about their million dollar businesses, it’s pretty impressive. They tell stories of buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from a factory in China. Maybe even traveling to China to make a big play on some private label merchandise. Or maybe they are sending employees out to buy retail arbitrage at big box stores all over their region. They have a busy warehouse and multiple employees. We imagine a person sitting in front of several computer screens, pouring over spreadsheets that has everything laid out to the last decimal place. They’re basically mini-CEO’s competing with larger corporations.
This isn’t us. We’re scavengers and have more in common with the guys at the flea market who sell out of their cars. Only difference is that we sell online. We know how much we spend each month and how much we need to make. We are frugal and save extra money to invest in things that will make us more money (like rental property). We have often said that we’re probably don’t have much in common with a Harvard MBA graduate, but we do have imagination. Even though we are not masters of spreadsheets and P/L reports, we do know how to turn trash into cash.
Imagination is our biggest strength because we can walk into any situation (flea market, thrift store, auction, estate sale, yard sale) and see where the money is. We’ve learned that we make money by constantly changing. Instead of going out into the world searching for specific items, we just see what is available and then imagine how we can sell them. Finding these overlooked objects is where our business lies. Some eBay sellers seem to want to find a formula to know exactly what they should buy, how much it’ll sell for, and then never deviate change course. Having imagination when scavenging is what excites us and makes us money. We never know what we’ll find, but we know we’ll always find something. Sitting in front of spreadsheets won’t help us. We have to go out and scavenge!
This is why we love the weekly “What Sold” thread every Wednesday. We love seeing what other scavengers are finding and selling. We see how people’s imagination have sometimes run wild and paid off.
Here are the links we mentioned on this podcast:
–eBay is going to roll out a voluntary program of guaranteed three day shipping.
–An interesting series of short portraits of how different Americans get by.
–Here is that embed code for videos that you can copy and paste (hope it works!)-
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<object type="text/html" allowfullscreen="true" data="http://www.youtube.com/Hope you had a good week!
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Our Store Week March 19-25, 2017
Store #1
Total Items in Store: 5,667
Items Sold: 72
Cost of Items Sold: $110
Total Sales: $2,260.12
Highest Price Sold: $125 (Set of sheets)
Average Price Sold: $31.39
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $20
Number of items listed this week: 20
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Bonanza/Trugether:
Sold 1 items for $?
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Store #2
Total Items in Store: 1228
Items Sold: 11
Cost of Items Sold: $25
Total Sales: $544.20
Highest Price Sold: $135 (Leather purse)
Average Price Sold: $51.21
Returns: 0
Number of items listed this week: 40
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Home › Forums › Scavenger Life Episode 303: Failure of Imagination
Tagged: delayed shipping