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Working for yourself has it’s perks, like taking time to do other things (like relax) on any random day. That being said, we often forget to do it and
[See the full post at: Scavenger Life Episode 322: Don’t Forget To Make Your Own Weekends] -
Week July 30-August 5, 2017
Total Items in Store: 931
Items Sold: 20 (4 Amazon)
Cost of Items Sold: $66 (9.5% of sales)
Total Sales: $694.90
Highest Price Sold: $120 (2) (15 Piece Pipe lot & Ben Wade Pipe)
Average Price Sold: $34.75
Returns: 1 (damaged in mail, insurance claimed)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $750
Number of items listed this week: 51
Promoted listings test: 9 sales, $484.95 (69.8% of total sales), $34.17 fees (7.0% of sales)Another pretty good week of sales. I was out of town Sat-Weds, changed my handling time, and things didn’t feel this busy. Good to do the numbers and see everything continuing to work out. Also felt good to get back to listing – life has gotten in the way for the past 3-4 weeks and I hadn’t listed. To your point in the show – #teamlargeinventory 🙂
Big weekend of a pick and listing. Bought a collection of high end records (first pressings of Beatles, near perfect copy of the banned Rolling Stones Some Girls album, Star Wars original soundtrack with the inserts & poster, etc) from a guy that I’ve bought from in the past – guy took immaculate care with his records. I paid up ($750), didn’t get them for cheap by any means, but there’s definitely some meat on the bone. Listed the lot for a combined $2535.
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Holy moly. You really have become confident in selling LP’s to make that kind of investment. have you ever sold LP’s for that much before? Or is this the big play?
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It’s definitely a big play. I usually don’t spend this kind of money on LPs (51 for $750) – usually less than $3 each because that’s super low risk. But I’ve bought from this guy before, and his stuff has always been top notch. I’m a little nervous, but at the same time most of my other big plays/caches have paid off so I have to trust that I know what I’m doing every so often.
Here are some amazing examples:
Beatles Yesterday & Today – the first edition of this is the infamous “Butcher” banned cover. Instead of re-printing the covers, they just put the nice & tame trunk cover sticker over it. Also has A1/A3 matrix numbers (first pressing).
Beatles White Album – has everything you need to drive it up: embossed Beatles logo, stamped serial number, poster, photo inserts
Rolling Stones Some Girls – “banned” original cover in which they used celebrity likenesses without consent. Additionally, the cover & vinyl is in perfect shape.
Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here – Always a good one to find, but this one also has the original hype sticker from the shrink wrap included.
Star Wars soundtrack – super tough to find with the original poster.
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Yes, that’s it! After the printed the first pressing with that Butcher cover, they simply put a sticker on the new cover over that Butcher cover. There are services around the web to “peel” that sticker. A properly peeled cover can be worth thousands.
http://www.thebutchercover.com/
http://www.recmusicbeatles.com/public/files/others/butcher.html
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@Jay, quick update – I listed all those albums on Sunday morning and yesterday three sold for $110. Still a long way to go to turn a profit, but I’m starting to feel better about the investment.
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Brian, what strategy do you have in choosing the % for your promoted listings? Thanks.
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Initially (back in January), I started very low just to test – 1%-2% to get started. Once I started seeing traction, I actually now use the “Apply Trending Rates” feature which is unique to categories and items with specific keywords – the more competitive the category, the higher the rates. Some are high, some are low, but in general I’ve been averaging 4%-7% overall.
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Jay and Ryanne, the solar eclipse is going directly over our town just south of St. Louis. You are very welcome to be our guests. I already ordered the special eclipse-watching glasses. It will be a full eclipse here for 2 minutes and 14 seconds. It would be our pleasure to enjoy it with you on our hilltop in Eureka!
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Very Generous! Unfortunately Missouri is a little too far for us to travel right now. Im hoping there’s some scavenger who lives south of Virginia.
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That would be much closer for sure. Enjoy it somewhere! We are cutting a trip to Denver short so we can be here for the eclipse.
On another topic, Ryanne, when I call ebay I just wear my bluetooth earpiece while I wait so I can still work freely and walk around doing other things while I wait. Of course I call using my cellphone, where you said you call through your computer for some reason, so maybe that won’t work for you.
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Good morning! Great episode. Couple of notes…
1. In order to be eligible for the guaranteed delivery program you have to be selecting Immediate Payment Required on your listings. You can do this and still offer best offer.
2. Mystery boxes are actually against ebay policy. Not that you guys were going to do one just a side note.
Busy shipping here. We are now selling on Etsy and Poshmark along with Ebay so crazy shipping. 🙂
Have a great week!
Cyndi
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Good info. I thought Mystery Boxes were not allowed. Doesnt stop there being 17,000 mystery boxes for sale on eBay! https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p5508.m570.l1313.TR12.TRC2.A0.H0.Xmystery+boxes.TRS0&_nkw=mystery+boxes&_sacat=0
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Think they could be some of the money laundering schemes that we’ve talked about in the past? I checked completed and there are a few $1000 mystery boxes sold. I could see spending a few bucks on a mystery, could be a fun game like a box lot at an auction… but $1000? Crazy.
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Hi Cindi, can they still use the shopping cart and get guaranteed delivery with a muiti-item purchase from one store or do they need to immediate pay each item? Thanks.
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Total Items in Store: 336
Items Sold: 5
Cost of Items Sold: $102
Total Sales: $214
Highest Price Sold: $90 (Set of three new art plates that seemed to be blogged about or pinned somewhere, cost $48, purchased in Spring)
Average Price Sold: $43
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 5Tough week for listing. We attended the out of town funeral of a good friend our own age. Hope to never do that again. Overall, it’s been quite a hectic summer with a lot of kid transport and unusual stuff going on. I can’t wait until school starts and then the back to school business subsides by second week of September or so. It makes me chuckle when you talk about your nephews being exhausting and demanding and not conducive to working. Some kids are harder than others and in different ways, plus their needs and activity levels change over time. Your sister is a good mom taking them to the country and limiting their screen time.
On the upside, I can list a lot faster now than when I started Ebay a couple of years ago. On the downside, Ebay is starting to hammer daily with their listing improvement requests on 10-15% of my actives. I don’t personally find it very helpful for a few reasons. Mainly, they show me my own items, compare with items that are not really the same, flag items that are only 50% less likely to sell than competitors, show my brand new listings, recommend free shipping on everything including lower overall cost items vs. comparison sales, etc. Wondering if anyone else is noticing this or cares?
I really didn’t want to do free shipping because I prefer the shipping to be kind of a wash, but I’m now trying it on a few underperforming first class new items where the solds were higher than my overall price with shipping. No immediate sales resulted so far. You want to think buyers will just search by the overall lowest price, but Ebay is telling us they will treat free shipping items better in search for those who don’t plus maybe people aren’t used to filtering on the phones. I suppose I should listen to this now that I’ve become familiar with estimating shipping costs. As a buyer I do love free shipping and I’m getting used to getting it from major retailers. I guess the allure is that I evaluate the price independently before seeing the related shipping, and if I then see that’s it’s free shipping I’m like “hey – that’s a nice bonus”.
I just made my second free shipping order from Amazon since canceling Prime. Three weeks and it hadn’t shipped FBA products from the warehouse. Tried to cancel, they emailed “sorry, it’s too late”, then shipped later that day. This could be a nice opportunity for Ebay coming on the with Guaranteed Shipping program for the holidays. Have a great week.
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Hi Christine – It sounds like you have a very different experience with those listing improvement suggestions to me. I only ever have about a half dozen at any one time (fromnearly 1900 listings) The ones I do have are generally not helpful for me.
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Thanks to the elves who answered my questions above. Only some of my items pop up as possible promotions and I usually pick just a hair above the trending rate, or if that fee is too high, a hair above 5% (a round # I think other sellers might be choosing). Haven’t had great results yet and I wish more items were available to promote.
Regarding the improvement requests, others may not be noticing so much if they sell mainly used items. It’s all new items in my improvements feed. I think the recent increase is due to Ebay adding new categories and now NOS vintage items are showing up – mostly craft kits for me at this point. They are flagging items with no comparisons (no UPC) so I’m not sure how they know it’s 100% less likely to sell than competitors? The entire category maybe. So I’ve decided to try a free shipping experiment for the kits they pick on. The other new items are mostly things I have sold a number of times before (hence my own listings are used as comparisons) and the recommendation has more to do with my not offering free shipping rather than the price it seems. I’m just going to tinker with the price up and down on those if I have time.
I saw in the news that 67% of Ebay transactions are free shipping already, so I’m really considering doing more of it going forward as an experiment. A lot of my items cannot go first class or in a PFR, so I’ll have to up the prices if I really want to embrace it.
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Total Items in Store: 820
Items Sold: 23
Cost of Items Sold: $101
Total Sales: $622.75
Profit: $521.75
Highest Price Sold: $45 Bed Stu Boots
Average Price Sold: $27.08
Average Profit: $22.68Things picked up over the weekend after I started a sale. I have a couple of topics to touch on so I’ll break them out.
Good weekend of picking. Was at the first yardsale I’ve ever thought of making an offer on the entire lot. TONS of name brand clothes that were like new. This is a time I wish I had a helper that I could just buy it all and then hand the whole lot to them and say “have at it”. I ended up buying a couple bags of the Nice Nike Golf mens clothes. I also had a good day at a local Goodwill that I check in on every few weeks. They had two tag colors at 99 cents and I cleaned up on a large lot of nice men’s clothes obviously donated by the same person.
As for listing, my wife is really taking to photographing shoes. We learned Friday night that both of us can take photos of shoes at the same time on our photo table. We had a shoe photographing race which was really fun. This weekend I cleaned, processed, and created listings for 50 pair of shoes (4 full totes). She’ll take photos of them throughout the week. As she gets more confident I see our store really taking off.
I touched on the truck I bought a few weeks ago. Unfortunately the transmission started to go out several days after I started using it. Bummer! I finally got the title in the mail on Friday. I promptly listed it for sale and had it sold that same evening. The best part: I made $1000 even with the transmission bad! On Saturday I was trolling facebook yardsale and found another truck in pretty good shape. Ended up buying it for $600. It’s worth about $1500. I may end up selling it too since it isn’t exactly what I want. The law in WV is that I can sell up to 4 cars in a year without a license. Sell 5 or more and you need a dealer license. So I figure if I do this a couple times I can finance a nice truck for free! Scavenger style baby!
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There are blogs where guys talk about buying cars on Craigslist and flipping them same say for $200+ profit. I didnt know that some states made you get a license.
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Every state is different as to how many you can sell privately without a license. In order to do a same day sale you have to get the seller to leave the title open. That means have them sign the seller line but not put on the date sold or fill out any buyer info. Then you sell the car to someone else without ever paying taxes or registering it.
That is quite illegal but many folks do it all the time.I am registering, paying taxes, and driving the vehicle for a few weeks.
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Hi Retro T – It sounds like you might be developing a similar routine to the one I have with my wife. My wife washes, creates drafts and photographs hats for our eBay store and I do everything else. It helps me a lot because she wasn’t involved in eBay at all for the first 18 months I had the store. She works on the listings all week and then I give them the final look-over and click the button to list them. I’m hoping the next step will be for me to be able to give her things other than hats but for now, she’d prefer to just keep doing the same thing.
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Her main hangup is shipping. Figuring out the shipping terrifies her. Of course that’s not a surprise – shipping is why not everyone does this kind of thing.
So basically if I can supply her with a full tote of stuff that is already cleaned and a listing created, she will take the photos as she gets time throughout the week. It is a huge help!
Next we’re going to create a tag team system for clothes. I’ll have her take photos and take the measurements. I’ll create the listings and specify what measurements to take. Each item will get a tag with a number on it that corresponds to a 3 digit code in the title. That way she can just type in the code in the search bar of the drafts screen in the app to find the item.
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Listening to the podcast as I work on our admin tasks…
We agree with taking time when appropriate to avoid burnout. We try very hard to keep Sundays as time away from the business. We work in the garden, hike, spend time with friends, watch football (very soon again!), etc.
Amen on doing this with kids. Takes a LOT of time away from the business. We love them and wouldn’t have it any other way, but it does take time from the business. We always say, live your life your way, and own your life and your decisions.
And for Shirts and Suits, we are Team Mannequin. I see that the STR and ASP is higher when on a mannequin (or model, that is the best way when you are high end). Plus I’m faster than with flat lays. And for jeans, we see a LOT of people that wear the jeans…lots of women’s butts out there in the galleries!!!
On the mystery boxes, that is NOT ALLOWED by eBay. You can follow the link below for “Chance Listings” and it says under Not Allowed : “Mystery items where contents aren’t identified”
http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-bonus-prize-giveaway-raffle.html
On the scheduled listings, we try to list every day, and we see that when we are gone for long periods without listings, our sales drop off. So when we are going to be gone for a long time (like when we were at eBay Open), we had listings scheduled to list each day so that we kept up new listings each day. Another notch for SixBit…
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Anybody else having a problem with the best offer parameters on listings?
For example on a listing where I have had these parameters for months:
Buy It Now price $59.00
Automatically accept offers of at least $49.00
Automatically decline offers lower than $49.00I just got this message when updating:
It looks like there’s a problem with this listing.
The price for accepting offers cannot be lower than or equal to the price for declining offers.The only way I can get it to take is
Automatically accept offers of at least $49.00
Automatically decline offers lower than $48.99So what happens if someone offers exactly $48.99 ???
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It will be declined. eBay seems to work on an “equal to or…” basis. I have had items declined when the offer was exactly my decline value, and accepted when the person added a penny. I’ve had folks add a quarter too, so I’ve been getting odd “offer” amounts! LOL
An absolutely fantastic week for me in terms of movement, not so much in terms of money. I finally made 300 listings and Top Rated Plus status, in the same week! For the first time ever, I’ve made a sale a day each day of August. Unfortunately the sales have mostly been low dollar, but as new seller I was less discerning in my selections and am learning to search for better inventory. I’m just so excited to be seeing this volume of sales now, and very motivated to build my store!
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July 30 to Aug 5 2017
• Total Items in Store: 830
• Items Sold: 17 eBay 1 Truegether 2 Bonanza
• International 2 GSP
• Total Sales $927 $789 eBay $80 Truegether $58 Bonanza
• Highest Price $125 Schott fringe jacket
• Average Price Sold: $46.35
• Returns: 1 Fender amp $400 Changed mind (costly decision for him)
• Cost of Items Sold: $161
• Cost of items purchased this week $260The return hurt but he had to pay shipping and it’ll sell again.
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Week of July 30 – Aug 5
* Total Items in Store: 979
* Items Sold: 11
* Cost of Items Sold: $6.99 + $0 Commission
* Total Sales: $145.39
* Highest Price Sold: $45 Cappas Newsboy hat (but received return request this morning)
* Average Price Sold: $13.21
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $221.85
* Number of items listed this week: 26Crappy sales, but good sourcing. Seems like the prices at garage sales & auctions come down a bit in August. I went to an auction on Thursday, and the quality was better than normal and prices were not bad. Unfortunately, I had to leave early. I also got some quality art at an online auction, and some good stuff at a garage sale.
I got a return request for my high sale this morning, so the next biggest sale would be a vintage necklace at $17.
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You guys are welcome to come to Tennessee for the eclipse. I live right on the center line of the eclipse, just a mile from I-65. 2 min 40 seconds of “totality”. Not sure how much farther it is than SC. Cross Plains is the city I live in if you want to Google it. I may be parking cars in the yard that day if I think there is a market for it (which I believe there will be). My sister created an Airbnb account yesterday for her house. Solely to rent it for the eclipse. Just a neighborhood house, 3br 2ba. $300 night 2 night minimum. Rented within 8 hours!
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Happy Monday everyone. I just listened to the podcast and wanted to give a quick update. I called again after my initial rant and I saw Ryanne’s post. I had a member of leadership call me back after he re-listened to the conversations. He was very apologetic and did say the situation was not handled appropriately on the reps hands. I did explain that it did not feel good being talked to like I was doing something wrong and that we were business partners. I told him that because the rules seem really open to interpretation on a case by case basis that calling back and getting a second opinion seems only fair especially when I spend so much for the service. He did agree and did say that calling back is ok, but they are having problems with people calling multiple times until they get the answer they want. It is like Jay always says, “eBay is a big clunky machine”, and they are trying to solve the problem of call overload which is another reason he said that call times are higher. He did say that I was not even close to having action taken against me. I am just assuming but here it goes. I think I did call back too quick as you both mentioned and when the later took the correct action she was reprimanded by the other member of leadership for not looking at the notes. The lesson I am taking away from this is to NOT call back the same day/time. I think I will stagger the call, i.e. if I don’t get the answer in the morning I will call back the next night. But reflecting back the rep that took away the feedback and then called me back was definitely taking things personally and may have overstepped her bounds by making threats about removing privileges. My only guess is because she was scolded herself. Thanks for all you guys do. It means so much to have an outlet were people understand this crazy lifestyle. Most people I talk to either try to offer me a job (this just happened on date night this weekend) or just look perplexed like they did’t even know it was possible to make a living selling on eBay.
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Store Week 7/30/17 – 8/5/17
Total items in store: 1395
Items sold: 21
Cost of items sold: $21.15
Total sales: $777.91
Highest price sold: $100.00 (Vintage Mormon flannelboard stories)
Average price sold: $37.04
International Sales: 2
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory this week: $158.57A great week considering I haven’t done any listing for probably 2 weeks. I feel like sales are really starting to pick up again, and hoping it carries into the fall. I’ve had a couple difficult customers this week, but I think (hope), I’ve got them all straightened out.
Also, we had a whopper of a yard sale this weekend and unloaded some stuff that I’d bought for eBay and decided wasn’t worth much as well as tons of our own stuff that wasn’t really eBay material. It was a lot of work, but we made over $1100 in one day, so it was well worth it!
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RR Store Week July 30-August 5, 2017
Total Items in Store: 1,329
Items Sold: 12
Cost of Items Sold: $31.79
Total Sales: $473.90
Highest Price Sold: $150 (50’s barkcloth curtain panel)
Average Price Sold: $39.49
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $30
Number of items listed this week: 17When I decided to take some time to reset my life, I knew my sales would take a hit, but damn…what an awful week. My worst of the year. But learning to meditate, cleaning and organizing, taking walks, etc. have already started to positively affect my mental state, and I can feel my stress level going down. Implementing a schedule is the next task, and perhaps the hardest for me to begin and stick to. But it will be worth it, both emotionally and financially. As I continue to improve, so does my business.
My favorite estate sale people had another awesome sale this weekend. Great haul. Two dozen records, over a dozen pieces of women’s plus size clothing (many new with tags), and a bag of G.I. Joe action figures are the highlights. A whole box full of goodies for only $30 bucks. I Love those folks!
Off to listen to the podcast and get that box of gold listed.
*Paul*
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Keeping the personal life in order is PARAMOUNT. If you are hating what is going on, you get into a bad spiral very easily. Sticking to the schedule will be the hardest part, but my trick is to not try to cram too much into one day. I am keeping my morning rituals to help me win the day, and then taking 1 major thing to accomplish each day and focusing on that until complete.
FOCUS – Follow One Course Until Successful…
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You couldn’t be more right, T-Satt. I was doing literally nothing to bring my stress level down, which was through the roof. Now that I’ve implemented stress reducing activities, I’m already feeling better and less overwhelmed. It has also helped me to focus. All of this is starting to carry over into my business. I still have a long way to go, but at least I’m on my way. Schedule is next.
*Paul*
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Week of 7/30-8/5
Total Items in Store: 1,532
Items Sold: 44
Number of Items Listed This Week: 68
Total Sales: $1,206.08
Cost of Items Sold: $200.04
Highest Item Sold: $57.89 – Levi’s Red Tab Distressed Blue Denim Jean
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Troy wins the week, Veronica leads for the year 17-13.
Competition: Highest Total Sales: Troy leads the year $23.5k to $18.4kJuly 2017
Items Listed: 143
Items Sold: 210
Total Sales: $6,313.46 – Up 49% vs 2016
Total COGS: $1,076.25
Sell Thru Rate: 14% – Up 40% vs 2016We focused a good amount of time this week on getting some database work done in SixBit, and using that work to set us up for Guaranteed Delivery. So, we needed to get our purchase price for each item in SixBit moved from the Easy Auction Tracker, set each item up with a Shipping Preset and a Payment Preset. Once the Presets are done, we can change our handling time, payment terms, etc. very quickly. We also are using this time to move our Handling time from 1 day to Same Day. When we talked with eBay at the Open, we realized that we are doing things on a Same Day basis anyway, and by moving the time to Same Day, that will also help us in the Guaranteed Delivery search results as well. So we are now Same Day Shipping with a 2pm Mountain Time cutoff.
Also, we found out that for items to be enrolled in Guaranteed Delivery, we have to require Immediate Payment (Cyndi mentioned this as well – Thanks for the heads up Cyndi on the Facebook Group!). We initially thought that you could not have Immediate Payment and Best Offer on the same listing, but we found that we could. So while we are setting up the Payment Preset, we are turning on Immediate Payment (PS – For those that don’t know, the Immediate Payment only applies to the full price offer. If they make an offer and you accept, they can pay later, which we don’t mind at all.)
To answer your question on how to opt out an item from Guaranteed Delivery, we asked the same thing at eBay Open. If you change your handling time to longer than 1 day, then that item is NOT in the Guaranteed Delivery program. Also Jay & Ryanne, we were told that if you charge a restocking fee, then that item is NOT part of Guaranteed Delivery…
Unfortunately, another eBay change hit on Wed/Thur this week. I like to have an Auto Accept/Auto Decline at the same price. Suddenly, items were not relisting and we were getting an error message that they could not be the same price. So as we have been doing database work, we are also changing items to be $0.01 different. I wish they had not done this, but I’m sure there was a reason…
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Huh, nothing in their documentation said that a restocking fee would kick us out of the guaranteed delivery program. If true, we may sit this one out and see if the program boosts people’s sales.
It might just be another flop like the Free Shipping program.
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I hear you. Verify that with eBay. We kept seeing that in all our documentation, but we never saw anything about requiring Immediate Payment, and they never said anything about that at eBay Open. That caught us off guard this week.
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So up till now, you let people “buy it now”, but they could pay later? We’ve had immediate payment from the get go.
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This is from the details: “By choosing to use this feature, you are agreeing to accept the return of any order arriving after the guaranteed delivery date regardless of the cause of the delay or the party responsible. Restocking fees are not permitted for items returned due to a late delivery. Your buyer will be provided with a return label through the eBay labels platform. Where eBay is not able to provide a return label to the buyer, you may provide a return label and if eBay is financially responsible for return shipping costs, eBay will reimburse you for such amount.”
The way I read that, to be part of the GD program, your listing’s return policy CAN include a restocking fee, but you would not be able to APPLY the restocking fee IF the REASON for the return was “arrived late” But if the reason for return was just basic buyer’s remorse, you’d still be able to apply it.
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This is good info and thanks for the link to the eBay page.
Restocking fees are not permitted for items returned due to a late delivery.
I also agree that this just means we cant charge a restocking fee if returned for being late. Doesn’t say you cant have a restocking fee for other reasons. Would love to hear if eBay clarifies this.
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My source for the above quoted statement:
http://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/shipping/guaranteed-delivery.html
go to very bottom of the page and click on the “Terms and Conditions”, look under “returns”
The rest of my post above is just my interpretation. I could be wrong. Maybe it does mean seller can’t qualify if he has a restocking fee. If I get a chance I will ask about that at the webine on Wednesday. For more on the webinar:
Join us Wednesday, August 9, 2017, at 11:00 AM PT for an exclusive walk-through of eBay Guaranteed Delivery, hosted by eBay experts.
Register here:
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Jay, There’s no requirement that the buyer return a late arrival item. But it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where the item’s late arrival renders it useless to the buyer, so the buyer has the option to return the item simply because it was late. I’d guess in most cases, buyers will keep the item (assuming it is satisfactory in all other respects). So, for a seller who opts into the handling time version of the GD program, there are a couple possibilities, as ebay describes here:
When a seller chooses the handling time option and an item arrives late, who pays for the buyer recompense – eBay or the seller?
Sellers who choose the handling time option are required to guarantee same-day or one-day handling time, and eBay determines the delivery date. If an item arrives late even though the seller met their handling time and the package was scanned on time at the post office, eBay will refund the buyer’s shipping cost or pay for their return label. If the buyer wants to keep the item and shipping was free, eBay will provide a voucher to be used toward a future eBay purchase. In all scenarios, eBay will handle customer service. -
Finally winding down from the dad move/estate sale/house clean out. I have a whole new respect for people who put on an Estate Sale. Dad’s sale made around $1500, but I still had a boat load of stuff to deal with when it was over. If they are all like that, then they truly earn the 40% they charge! I am slowly getting the nicer things that didn’t sell during the estate sale listed on eBay. Some of them have sold right away and some are so weird they will probably take some time to find the right person. I have a Paul Jacoulet print of the Jade Lady I still haven’t decided what the best route is for selling. I’ve seen them listed for anywhere from $300 to over $1,000. Right now it’s hanging on my bedroom wall until I figure it out, lol!
Mac users, I need some help. My laptop has suddenly stopped recognizing my printer. The problem isn’t with the printer as my husband is merrily printing away on his laptop. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled until I am blue in the face. Outside of resorting to an old fashioned cable that connects the printer to the laptop I am out of ideas. Any suggestions? This is forcing me to consider getting a label printer slightly earlier than I had planned. Not really in my budget right now to get one, but after only one day hand writing labels and dragging packages to the post office is already getting old. Plus I miss my shipping discount! Any and all advice is appreciated.
I will get back to posting my numbers soon. Sales have been pretty slow, but with everything going on, that’s been okay.
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Hi R & J –
here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 1922
Items Sold: 38
Total Sales: $952
Cost of Items Sold: $94.78
Average Price Sold: $25.06
Average Cost of Item: $2.49
Highest Price Item Sold: $139.95 Sony 400 CD Player (paid $10). Second highest – Denon Receiver $175 (paid 10)
Number of items listed this week: 60
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 256
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 97
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 33
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.98%
# of Hats Sold: 30 (78% of sales)My week started off quickly with those pieces of electronic equipment. I find those kind of things to be a pain to test, store and ship but they are fairly profitable. (I had to replace the belts on the CD player too which was a challenge). The rest of the week was a steady stream of orders. Looks like this week is going to be more of the same (with 8 sales today alone).
My favorite thing to do on the weekend is to do eBay. I don’t mind one bit spending all weekend sourcing and listing. I’m just sad at the end of the weekend when I have to consider going back to the weekday grind.
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It’s cool that you’ve been keeping track of these numbers that most of us do not:
Average age of items in store (in days since listing):
Average number of days between listing and selling this week:
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling):Do you find that items are taking longer to sell the longer you have your store?
By this I mean, it’s impossible to sell as quickly as you list?I forgot if you are Team List-It-Forget-It, or Team Update-Listings-When-They-Dont-Sell-Quick (needs a better name)
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Pretty good week for sales.
Sales: CAD$514, 6 items
Notable item: Trail camera #2 of 3, bought for $25 each, sold for $200.
COGS: $126
Gross profit: $307
Expenditures: $201
Net: +$105
Hours: 15, hourly rate $7/hr (ouch!)
Listed: 14 items, worth $320+, total listings 211On Saturday I moved my entire eBay area to our basement from where it was on the top floor. That was a big job… but I am very glad to have done it. I also created a work area for myself for listing, packing, and shipping. Previously I had been storing stuff upstairs, measuring, photographing, & shipping on the main floor (but my shipping stuff was stored upstairs!), and printing labels in the basement.
Now I have my grandfather’s old student desk set up with printer, scale, & other tools… but I still have the problem that I’m always fighting my wife or kids for the laptop.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, cheap laptop (PC, our other ones are Mac but I want PC this time)? I don’t need too much out of it really, just internet, printing, and word processing. I was thinking about a Chromebook.
This move also motivated me to try and sell off some old inventory so I slashed prices on about 20 listings for things that take up too much damned space. This probably means the stuff will take exactly as long to sell and will net me less money when it does. Oh well.
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Back when I wanted some laptops for my kids and ebay, I originally bought a laptop new on black Friday. It was a complete cheap piece of plastic crap.
Then I remembered I’m a scavenger and went to facebook yardsale to find a laptop. I ended up getting a pair of former business use Dell laptops for $100 each. They have great specs (better than what I could buy new for $300-400) and have the magnesium alloy case for great durability. I recommend you look at refurb business laptops. They are designed to take a beating and most corporations change out all of their laptops every 2-3 years. Lots for sale on ebay in the $100-200 range.
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This will be week 3 of cleanup after the flood. I think the initial shock has gone away and now I’m facing a lot more depression and doubt. I’m looking at all the hard work we’ve done since that day and there’s still so much more that we’ll have to do to get back to normal. I’ve started ending my listings of items that I know were destroyed. There are still some that I’m unsure were salvaged or not. Everything is still so chaotic. But so far, my number of listings went from 955 to 571. What a hard blow. By goal of 1K by September was so close…
The garage is now clean at least. We’ve got almost everything that was saved back down into the basement. Shelves have been put back together too. The problem we’re facing now is rust and mold. Even with everything dried out, the wet weather we’ve been having is keeping our concrete damp. The landlord said they’ll get us a dehumidifier to replace the ones we’ve lost, but I don’t think that will be soon enough. I might consider going out tonight and purchasing one.
My day job has been both a blessing and a curse. I really appreciate the steady paycheck through all this, and the support I received from my coworkers was nice. But I could be doing so much more at home if I wasn’t sitting here for 9 hours a day. This has really brought out the impatient side of me. But still, I’d rather have the security now than anything.
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Jay – how about list-it-and-forget-it vs list-it-and-attend-it?
Simon – you sell hats? I’m listing 100 of them. What kinds of hats do you sell and what’s the secret sauce to sell so many? Super interested! 😉
Doublythumbs – there’s an Afrikaans word “sterkte” (pronounce it phonetically) that is used for folks in your situation. It’s an odd word, in that it means ‘strength’ as a basis, but in the terms of may you find strength, have strength, receive strength and comfort. There is no English equivalent. It is generally used as an encouragement for folks going through a hard time, like a death in the family, or a catastrophic event. I can’t think of any more fitting wish for you other than that – may you find and receive strength to get you through this. The Elves are behind you!
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The printer is an HP Officejet Pro L7700. We’ve had it for years and it’s always been a great printer. My husband thinks it’s 6-7 years old, but I think it’s much closer to 10 years old. I’m using a MacBook that’s about2 years old and he’s using a Dell laptop. When I run a printer network report it’s shows it’s connected to the network wirelessly. I’ve worked through the HP troubleshooting page and nothing worked. I even entered the IP address of the printer through Chrome on my mac and got to the printer. Safari and the print function of the mac seems to think the printer is offline or doesn’t exist. The printer worked great with my mac right up until this week, so I’m really stumped.
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Printers are cheap. Might be time for a new printer. Sometimes driver software isnt updated. If you updated your Mac OS, it might have caused the issue.
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I have a MacBookPro and recently bought a new printer, a HP Envy 4520 all in one. It’s normally $100-$120, but I got it on sale at Best Buy for $60. It’s been a great little machine – wireless connectivity for all laptops as well as tablets & smart phones. Not the top of line by any means, but appropriate for my mid-seller tier needs.
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Another great episode!
I was wondering about the guaranteed handling time. In one of the seller updates earlier this year EBay mentioned being able to set up a cut-off time for what counts as a day. Basically a way to set your schedule so that you could say that you won’t guarantee something that comes in overnight for shipping the next day. Or that you could say its fine M-F, but not on the weekends, or some thing like that.
I’ve looked for this a few times and haven’t been able to find it. This would help me out in terms of the new guarantees, so I wonder if anyone has seen it / used it?
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We use this calendar, and it is only for if you put Same Day shipping on an item. So if you are shipping with 1-day or longer for handling time, this calendar won’t matter. We just moved to Same Day handling, so that we can gain an extra day when eBay is calculating Guaranteed Delivery time.
To manage this, go to Seller Account \ Site Preferences \ Shipping Preferences \ Order cut off time for same business day handling. From there, you are setting the cutoff time for each business day (M-F, and they may add Saturday later as many sellers ship on that day like we do) that if the item is paid for before that time, it will ship on that day.
So we have 2pm Mountain Time as our cutoff, as our post office picks up at our house no earlier than 2:30. So we start our shipping process around 1pm (earlier or later depending on what and how much we have to ship) so that we are ready to print labels at 2pm. At 2:01 or so, we print the labels and put the packages out for pickup.
This was essentially the process we were using all the time anyway, and we confirmed with eBay that if the buyer pays after our cutoff time, then it does not have to be shipped until the next day.
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I had the same printer issue a couple of months back. I tried everything but my laptop would not recognize the printer. It was on, I could test print but my laptop said off line.It was a Brother but didn’t have the option of going directly to my laptop. After 2 days of trying everything that Brother suggested and tech support for Time Warner suggested I called Brother one last time and they said no problem. Do this, this and boom it worked. Turns out that Chrome had an update that affected my older printer AND it does make a difference who you talk to in customer support. Some know it and some just read from a script. Call your printer support and they should be able to help, eventually. I just updated my old printer with another Brother and this one has the ability to connect directly to my laptop if I ever have the same problem again.
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I made a great sale on 11 pair vintage new in package JC Penney pantyhose I just got at an estate sale this last weekend for $3 each.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/112516219325
I had shipping options as 1st class mail and USPS Priority Flat Rate Padded Envelope, with quantity 11 for $19.99 each.
One buyer bought all 11 pair and paid right away. She was able to select USPS PFRE and pay only $7.20 for 11 pair! But uhhhhh, 11 pair will not fit in a PFRE!
Anybody else have this problem? In the past if the buyer paid on a multiple item purchase, they were charged for the individual price x the number of items, and I would then have to refund them in PayPal.
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Beverly, did you accidently enter “0.00” for each additional item on “each additional” in the shipping setting? That will cause that to happen.
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Whiskey: No, I don’t have anything specified for additional items.
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Beverly, that could be your problem. When you list with multiples for sale, you set the shipping amount on the first item. For me, Ebay defaults and puts the second one (and each consective one) to “0.00.” I have to manually change that or I would ship all units for the price of one.
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Thanks for the ideas, but the additional cost box only shows up when doing FLAT shipping, I am doing CALCULATED, no boxes show up.
In the past I know it has multiplied the calculated shipping by the number of items and I had to do a partial refund via PayPal.
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I called ebay customer service this morning and got the response that I needed to message the buyer and ask for more money to pay for the combined shipping … I THINK NOT! She even offered to send the message herself … NO!
It took me about 30 minutes to get through to her that there is a software problem, that charging for shipping 1 item when 11 were purchased needs to be fixed. She finally agreed to open up a ticket with tech support to look at it.
Anyway, watch your multiple item listings.
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Andrew; on my shipments page it now shows me the time by which I need to ship an item. It says something like “must be shipped by 11:59PM PST” (can’t remember exactly and I’ve shipped all my orders.) It turned up recently and I think it’s a cool feature. Perhaps it’s in anticipation of the new GS program.
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July 30- August 5 2017
Total items in store: Etsy 510 // Ebay 475 (Items not crossposted I list different types of things on Etsy and Ebay)
Items Sold: Etsy 8 // Ebay 11
Cost of items Sold: Etsy $17.34 // Ebay $27.01
Total Sales: Etsy $66.80 // Ebay $171.90
Highest Price Sold: Dr. Martens Sandals for $30
Average Price Sold: $12.56
Returns: 0
Number of items listed this week: 27 (Listed at $504)I feel like the weeks are starting to blend together. Nothing out of the ordinary to mention this week.
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Hello,
I thought it might be helpful to share this directly from the eBay website.
https://ocsnext.ebay.com/ocs/homeJust type handling time into the search bar for specific content results.
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Total in store: 543
Sold: 19
COGS: $63
Total sales: $625.99
Highest price: $60
Average price: $32
Returns: gave a $10 refund to woman who had purchased expired ink from April 2017 for $25.50; I like to raid the home offices at estate sales first and get ink. She said the black ink worked but the color cartridge would not be recognized per the computer message because it was expired. Weird but she was happy with $10.
New inventory:$60 (estate sale)Highest price was a piece of green glass called a “flower frog”. I had no idea what it was but picked it up at estate sale for a quarter. I put it on thmy forum here a month ago, but no ideas really! I put it on the Reddit forums and had two people say it was a flower frog to arrange flowers. I put it on auction since I had no idea and it got ten bids to $60. You can see it in sold items at: lowcountryfashionfinds
I live 90 minutes south of Charleston in Port Royal SC, and just bought my family’s eclipse glasses. We don’t have a spare room or even a yard since we live downtown with two kids, but there are a lot of cheaper airbnbs here since we have a big tourist market – the Marine Corps Recruit Depot brings in several thousand visitors a week. You could also camp at the SC state parks! We have about three or four beach campgrounds at least. See: southcarolinaparks.com
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Congrats on the sale. Ive seen those flower “frogs” around, but didnt think theyd sell for that much. Wonder if you had a special one.
I think your area is right outside the total eclipse. Not ideal, but will still be cool: http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/states/SC.htm
I think you may be surprised how many people will be staying in your area the day of the eclipse.
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Jay & Ryanne, you should catch the replay of the Guaranteed Delivery webinar. I listed out all the specifics as I understood them (including no Restocking Fee), and Griff and Greg read through them.
Regarding the Restocking Fee, it appears that you CAN have a restocking fee, just not if they are returning the item for late delivery. Again, I would double check that, but it appears that you CAN have a restocking fee on the item, but you have to waive that if they want to return the item for late delivery.
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T-Satt, Jay—To add to that, that is correct: A listing is not disqualified from the GD program because you have a restocking fee. However, if the return reason is “late delivery” the restocking fee can not be applied. But if the reason is buyer remorse, then you could apply it as usual.
Similarly, you can have Make Offer on a listing and it still qualifies, but if the buyer buys through make offer, the purchase is not covered by the GD program. This will be communicated to the buyer by ebay.
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Yeah, that second part caught me off guard in the webinar. I would rather that the Guaranteed Delivery was available based on when they pay, regardless of if it was Best Offer or not.
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We opted into Guaranteed Shipping. I dont think we were put on a waiting list. We have all the qualifying pieces that eBay requested (next day shipping, return policy, etc)
How do you know if your items are in the program? Is there some messaging on the listing? Our items all looks the same. Can someone link to an item where its clear its in the Guaranteed Shipping program?
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T Salt,
But remember that ebay is not guaranteeing just a time frame (say, three days from payment), but an actual DATE (say, Aug 13th). If the buyer waits a day or two or longer to pay, there is no way for the package to get there by the specified date. Same goes for the sellers who use the door to door option: they are promising a certain date, and a late paying buyer means there’s no way to meet their promise.
As a seller, I kind of prefer this. If the buyer really does need the item to arrive quickly, he probably is willing to pay full price to get it, rather than muck around with Make an Offer (especially since the seller might not accept his offer, or someone else might grab the item while the seller is considering his offer, etc. This way, even if he’s tempted to make an offer, he may pay full price rather than take a risk.
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If you are going to go somewhere for the eclipse, you might as well go to the beach!
Myrtle Beach will have a 99% eclipse. You could drive 25 miles down the coast and get the full 100% if you wanted to.I was actually looking at taking our family vacation that week so we could watch the eclipse on the beach.
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I really dont think you understand how crazy the crowds are going to be. Highways and roadside rest stops are going to be parking lots. If you guys really do plan on going, make definite reservations now.
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That’s why the beach at a resort would be perfect! You just walk out and stand on the beach or hang out on a board in the ocean. No cars needed.
We opted for the first week of September. As always we bought our vacation on ebay, scavenger style! There is a week on ebay at myrtle beach seawatch plantation resort still for the eclipse week. It’s a little pricey at $1500 but if you message the seller they are negotiable.
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Jay, The program is being rolled out in phases. The first buyers won’t be able to see anything until about mid Sept, and all buyers should be seeing everything by Oct sometime.
When you were “opted in”, were you asked to choose between door to door and handling time? That would be the first question you’d see if you were opted in. Otherwise, you got a message that told you you were put on the waiting list.
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Understood. We did choose which method we wanted to be judged by in Guaranteed Shipping Program.
I guess its just weird that after we signed up, there’s no evidence that we’re in the program. I was hoping there was a way to see if any of our items didnt qualify, so we could change settings.
I guess we just wait till October to see how it rolls out?
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A few more things about the GD program.
Although it will not effect search placement in regular Search Results, there WILL be a notation in the result entry for a GD item that will say something like “Guaranteed Delivery by Mar 2nd” (Of course, each buyer will see only those items with a guarantee to his location). So, where there are very few search results, a buyer could just eyeball the regular search list to see which listings have GD. If there are a lot of search results, it will probably be easier to use the GD filter.
When a sale is made that is covered by GD, that information will show up in the Orders list…so the seller will be able to tell which of his orders have GD and which don’t.
Once this launches, there will be some advertising promoting it, although just how much and what type I don’t know. But it won’t be confined to onsite promotions.
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Jay, Yes, that’s pretty much the whole point actually. There will be a filter so a buyer can see which items will arrive within four, three, two or one day (depending on the time frame the buyer cares about). Of course, if a seller hasn’t opted into the program, his items won’t show up in the filter. My guess is, filter usage will increase the closer we get to holidays like Halloween and Christmas, and sellers who aren’t in the filter will likely be at a competitive disadvantage. Which is why I’ll opt in as soon as they move me from the waiting list.
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