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Hi there,
i thought a lot about contributing something useful to this forum, but couldn’t find any topic where i actually know more than the more experienced sellers here, so i thought an individual sales report of my humble self might be at least beneficial for the bloody beginners.
Let’s go!
Some short background story:
I got a business background (accounting-related), plenty of free space for which i don’t have to pay rent and i tried out Ebay the first time around the beginning of May (with a lot of initial success, might be the reason why i sticked around instead of leaving Ebay after a few failed trials).The true start of my Ebay Adventure would be around end of may
(i define the real start of Ebay for myself with my switch from auctioning off to BIN/Best Price offer)So far i sold ~ 180 items for 4400 € ~ 5000 $, i’m operating at a 50 – 60 % profit margin (my modus operandi is that i at least try to double my initial investment after fees, shipping + shipping material).
June and July were BRUTAL disappointing months, lol. Slow summer sales isn’t a myth.I’m sitting on a 200-item inventory with a ~ BIN highest bid worth of 9500 $ atm.
What do i sell:
At the beginning i sold everything i had around my house, which i don’t need anymore.
Bulk of it was clothes, building tools & old DVDs/Games/consoles.
After most of this was sold i thought about re-investing my capital in other stuff, i targeted the following niches:– clothes
cheap to source in real life as well as online + my relatives gave me their stuff after they heard i made a killing on eBay, lol. Another advantage of clothes is they are very easy to store and don’t take away too much space.
First I used some old cardboard boxes to store my clothes, but things got messy/chaotic after a short period of time (where did i store this item?) and the cardboard box wasn’t an eye pleaser as well.
I bought some see-through boxes for cheap from Aldi (it’s the German company which also own’s Trader’s Joe in the US), which have a lot of advantages, for example:- See-through
: if you didn’t already mark the containers with signs, you can spot the brand of the jeans/clothes very quickly literally through the box.
- Easy to pile / doesn’t look like a shitty cardbox
self-explanatory
I had and have a lot of success with these items, it’s rather easy to make a profit of at least 20 $ with each one.– tools/special equipment
I’m a bit disappointed in this regard with the experience I made with tools / special equipment.
I should disclose that the stuff i sold / still try to sell so far is very niche, but
a) I’m the guy with the best price around the block (best price on the internet, worldwide)
b) although i’m able to source it rather cheaply (20 % of the original price) it still amounts to a lot of dead capital / extreme slow mover in my inventory.
I don’t want to go too much into the details, since I would dox myself, but let’s give you a rough example:
At my work place i was able to buy a special equipment tool, which goes for roughly 2000 USD at retail in the US, Europe and elsewhere. I’d say that it isn’t neccessarily something which is in extreme demand at all, but there are still electricians who would probably need it (especially if you are like I do, sell it worldwide + free shipping).
I bought it for 225 USD and offered it for around 1600 $. Now it almost sits for 4,5 months on my shelf without any success at all. I might had around 300-400 visitors so far, only one extremely rude offer (150 €) by the only professional (!) German Ebay seller of these sort of tools (he sells similar stuff at the beginning price of 1600 $ upwards)
Before i bought it i did my research and something similar was sold by a private buyer on Ebay for 1500 €, so i’m kind of disappointed that it sits that long on my shelf.– consoles & video games
I was an avid gamer in my youth and still had a lot of oldschool games from this period in my basement (we are talking Sega, Super NES – era of video-gaming)
Very fast mover, almost no low ball offers, but rather hard to source + people really know the value of the stuff they are selling in this particular niche.Other selling related-experience/advice/suggestions:
After the first sales, I bought a portable Amazon Photo Studio. BEST! MONEY! SPENT!
I’m the type of person who is competitive and wants to outscore his opponents, so looked for a competitve edge: 90 % of all ebay sellers in my niches, private or even professional do have rather shitty pictures of the stuff they are selling.
Having good and plenty of pictures (I do at least 6) is a HUGE advantage, imho.Second best purchase:
Electronical scaleThird best purchase:
Clean and ready-to-go cardboxes from a personal vendor.
I might be against the (thrifty) consensus here, but i dislike to source cardboxes for free, because a) it costs me time b) it annoys me c)new cardboxes are clean d)you choose the perfect size right from the beginning and don’t need to find a work a way.
Yes, it costs money (0,30 $ per box, could be lower, but i don’t want to buy bulk atm), but it saves me time, nerves and embarassment.Shipping:
Well, i made a decision for myself, which i don’t regret so far (shipped 150 items with it)
I go most of the time with uninsured, untracked shipping. I sent packages to Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Albania (!) and Russia (!!) with this method and never had a complain so far. All of ’em arrived savely and rather quick (Russia took the most time ~ 2 weeks)The reason why i do this ?
Germany doesn’t offer the luxury of affordable, tracked and insured shipping like the US does.
If you want to insure & track a package, it’ll at least cost you 6 $ for 1kg weight and the price continues to rise from there.I don’t see the point to insure & track items, which cost me 10 $ and which i can flip for 40-50 $, only to reduce my profit margin by offering free shipping, which takes away 6 $.
I do (!) offer insured & tracked shipping on items, when they did cost me 50 $ and more.
If it’s less than 50 $, i ship it for 3 $ domestically or 10 $ international (everywhere)
Sourcing:
I do source online (eBay, of course, as well as other outlets) and IRL.
Germany isn’t that big on professional Goodwill stores, from my experience, but there are two i visit at least once a week. Those offer great deals on brand clothes, everything else is hilariously overpriced and begs the question if the manager of the store is either extremely dumb or extremely greedy, since the prices on electronics are so high that you could straight buy a non-branded new item.Documentation of the sales:
Although i have a business background, i ABSOLUTELY hate Excel spread sheets and my initial goal was not to use them at all for by little Ebay adventure.
I’m kind of sad that i reached a lvl where it actually makes sense to use ’em.This leads to the questions for all of the users who use 30-days-listing:
How do you keep track in Excel of items where you changed the item description, pictures, titles, etc. ?
Do you always create a new entry into your spread sheet or do you simply keep track of the items by one fixed description (article number, e.g.)?Another question:
Is it possible to some how predict the possibility of a sale by tracking publically available infos ?
T-Satt mentioned that he can predict sales some how, but i (forgive me) forgot the details of his method.Overall time effort i put into this:
I think i never spent more than 20 h a month to source, create offers & document stuff, I also don’t plan to do more than this (unless it results in big bucks)
Taking 6+ pictures of a jeans, measuring it, creating an item description for said item takes me at max. 10-12 minutes.Does anyone do this in a quicker fashion and if so, would be so kind to share infos on it ?
I don’t really measure my time sourcing, since I either do it on my way to shopping for myself or on my laptop, when i do watch sports.
Same goes for shipping:
With the ready to go boxes, i don’t have to spend a lot of time with duct tape or whatever.
Preparing a box for shipping takes me about 20 sec. (watch this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FtjvN_mhC4)
I do still write the adress by hand, thinking about buying a thermal printer soon.
I do have the luxury of having a post office on my way to work, next to my work and another two at two gas station i pass by (and which are open to 10 p.m), so i don’t count the “bringing parcel to the post office” into my time calculation, because i really do it on the fly.What’s next:
Well, i had a lot of fun doing this so far and i definitely want to scale it up, esp. because it was such easy profit so far (I do regret all the time i spent in dull student jobs, i’d have made double with half the time if I’d have started eBay much, much earlier)Are there any suggestions from the more experienced scavengers ?
I’m looking into going into pallet sales / liquidation sales & auctions, BUT of course, being in Germany, the mother country of rules, regulations and prohibitions, it looks really really hard to get into, also I might be a little bit too early with such an endeavour.
Does anyone has some experience with going bulk, when it comes to purchases ?
I believe it’s probably associated with (initially) a bigger time investment, but on the other hand the problem of running out of stuff to newly list should disappear or am I naive in believing so?Thank you all for the help i recieved through this forum and I hope this helps some even more inexperienced than me sellers at the beginning of their scavenger career.
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–Congrats on getting up and running successfully. Like us, you’re experimenting to see what sells. Sometimes the stuff I never think will sell is the best stuff. And my “sure things” are duds.
–How big of an inventory can you handle? Beyond using a spare room, we had to really think about storage as we grew.
–I know that buying in bulk is the big dream. Lots of Youtube videos about people who do wholesale, private label, or auction purchases of returned items. The pitfalls is buying items in poor condition without being able to inspect. And if you have to list each item individually, does it really save time? And what is the profit margin buying these items?
I’d love to see if there are scavengers here who buy these auction lots of returned items.
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Sorry for a lot of typos in my initial post, y’all.
Regarding experimenting:
I had an interesting experience with some completely new, Italian fashion brands, which i was able to source cheaply in Milan, Italy.
My initial thought was that it would be a non-brainer to buy them for cheap and move them fast for 3-4 times i paid for, but to my utter surprise, I’m still sitting on a rather stylish jacket, which seems to fly out of the shells in Italy, but doesn’t move at all in my home country.
Same experience with a sports brand, which is actually highly popular in Germany, but it took me 2,5 months to sell and then it went to Greece, out of all places, haha.How big of an inventory can you handle?
I got about 100 sqm of free space availabe right now at my hands, probably could free up additional 50 sqm of space in case i truly need it.Youtubers with a focus on Ebay-reseller-related content
I still can’t really recall how i found you guys, but what i truly know is that there are very, very, very few other people who are worth following, because the majority of Youtubers, who focus on this topic, are extreme BS artists.
I just follow craiglisthunter and another Ebay-powerseller couple who does scavenging as well as buying bulk, from time to time.
I’m also on other reseller forums and it’s pretty hard to get some useful informations out of the known bulk sellers/purchasers, because (i can understand this, actually) no one wants to make his sources/his methods public, because the danger of being pushed out of this business at this level might be too big (?)-
From what I’ve seen, bulk purchases and wholesale buying is tough because margins are thin. Plus if its easy for you to purchase in an online auction, its easy for anyone to do it.
I’ve mentioned before that I tried to buy lots of used military equipment. I learned that there were huge sellers who would fill tractor trailers every week so would price me out. I bet they made less than $1 an item. That’s a tough business.
Many of us here use the strategy of fining items that would be difficult for others to find. Scavenging takes time and thats the barrier to entry.
As exciting as it sounds to just “click click” to get inventory, you then enter a much different marketplace.
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Thanks for sharing your German reselling experience! It sounds like you have figured out so much so quickly. Regarding the expensive tool you were able to get from work, it will sell. Sounds like a very specific item with a small audience of buyers.
I always try to think of my homefield advantage as in – just being in Europe opens you up to a host of things Americans don’t often see. For example since you’re in Germany, are you able to source BMW / Mercedes things cheaply in Germany that will sell well globally online? French linens are HOT sellers on ebay if you have the right eye. Search solds and be amazed at the prices. Italian espresso machine parts, etc etc. You have a lot of goodies in the EU the world wants in their homes. Made in Germany is synonymous with quality and high end – go find it and make some Euros! 🙂
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@Jay:
From what I’ve seen, bulk purchases and wholesale buying is tough because margins are thin. Plus if its easy for you to purchase in an online auction, its easy for anyone to do it.
Yeah, what you say is probably right and I need to think about it.
Thank you for your kind comment!
are you able to source BMW / Mercedes things cheaply in Germany that will sell well globally online?
It’s funny that you mention it, but another failure of mine are car & motorbicycle parts.
Having a lot of family working in the car industry sourcing stuff cheaply was one of my first moves, but up to today I’m still waiting for the first sales of those replacement parts (new & much cheaper than the competitors, replacement parts are either for Mercedes Benz or BMW)Although (mostly American) eBay sellers on other forums told me & others quite often that it doesn’t matter to the buyer if you are a certified expert on the stuff you are sellin’ or not, i strongly doubt this opinion.
I actually can only speak for Germans, but trust in degrees, certificates and other paper work, showing your qualification, was, is and will forever be at an all-time high here, so I wouldn’t like to move further into the car parts area, risking capital.
But your suggestion made me curious & I’d like to know what other products from Germany / Europe would be interesting to American buyers?
I always thought food-related items would be the most demanded goods, which are an (obvious) no go for me, cars are a bit to bulky to ship, haha.
Other interesting, small and easy to ship “technical” stuff from Germany would be knifes/razor blades from the city of Solingen, which rank at #1 together with knifes/razors from Japan, but i doubt that there is either a) demand for this b)there isn’t already one major distributor for these in the US.
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So far I’ve just heard you discuss buying new items to resell. Have you considered or tried scavenging for vintage German items?
Ryanne and I did well when we visited Amsterdam and bought vintage Dutch items at flea markets. It takes research to see whats valuable, but if items are cheap enough (under 5 euro), it’s worth a shot.
In the US, its popular to decorate your house with older items. Do Germans decorate this way?
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Hi Ostap!
Re parts for Mercedes/BMW cars. There’s a lot of those in my neighborhood. However, I doubt whether any of the owners do their own servicing, so If you’re going to sell parts here (i.e. the UK) you’d be offering them to the trade, and competing against trade suppliers. There may be a market in small independent garages.
Motorbikes might be different, since owners are probably more inclined to do their own servicing.
There’s a market for cut-throat razors- I’ve sold carpenter’s sharpening stones to razor enthusiasts. Knives are a different thing. The trend in chef’s knives seems to be towards the more utilitarian. Also there may be problems in shipping to the US.
Camera lenses may be good for you. Digital cameras can use c-mount lenses from movie cameras. Other lenses can be used with adaptors. Lenses with brass barrels (Voigtlander for instance) are worth checking, as are early Zeiss and Leitz. It’s one of those markets where vendors (e.g. flea markets, thrift shops) price both the rubbish and the good stuff high-ish because they don’t have the knowledge to distinguish between the two.
Most 20th century film cameras should be avoided now, unless they have a good lens. The collectors are dying off.
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Ostap: “This leads to the questions for all of the users who use 30-days-listing:
How do you keep track in Excel of items where you changed the item description, pictures, titles, etc. ?
Do you always create a new entry into your spread sheet or do you simply keep track of the items by one fixed description (article number, e.g.)?”I have always just used a single row for each item. Best way to keep track of each one is to use the Custom Label/SKU field, using a unique number for each listing. Then when the item sells, you can easily find it to enter your info. Even better, purchase the Easy Auction Tracker spreadsheet for $50 per year. It will link to your eBay store and do everything for you.
“Another question:
Is it possible to some how predict the possibility of a sale by tracking publically available infos ?
T-Satt mentioned that he can predict sales some how, but i (forgive me) forgot the details of his method.”The best way that I do this is to look at the number of items for sale in your search compared to the number of SOLDS for that same search. So if 1000 are available and 1000 are showing as sold (eBay shows 90 days of sales), the you should expect a sale in 90 days. Just keep in mind seasonality (looking up coats in summer vs in winter).
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European beauty products are always of demand to American women – esp skincare. Find the niches, check solds.
I would have to agree with the other ebay folks who say a USA buyer won’t care so much if you are “official” dealer as long as the product is legit. I recognize in Germany the provenance of and rules, but I think you would be just fine in this arena frankly. -
Jay:”In the US, its popular to decorate your house with older items. Do Germans decorate this way?”
Reminded me of a builder who lives maybe about 25 miles away from me. He was interviewed for a national newspaper, where it was revealed that he has the world’s largest collection of portrait busts of a certain corporal. Also 4 Panther tanks, 3 Tiger tanks, an E-boat and some 300 armoured fighting vehicles.
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So far I’ve just heard you discuss buying new items to resell. Have you considered or tried scavenging for vintage German items?
Maybe to your surprise or to the surprise of the others: No.
To be quite honest, there is some inner barrier in me which doesn’t make me want to go to flea markets and so, could possibly be my Ex-USSR-upbringing.I’ll try to get into it, in order to diversify my inventory and test new niches.
Do Germans decorate this way?
Yes!
Actually another brilliant idea of yours, Jay.
I didn’t think of this, because I’m more of a pragmatic, minimalistic sort of guy when it comes to decoration (almost no decoration in my household)@Antique Frog
Camera lenses may be good for you. Digital cameras can use c-mount lenses from movie cameras. Other lenses can be used with adaptors. Lenses with brass barrels (Voigtlander for instance) are worth checking, as are early Zeiss and Leitz. It’s one of those markets where vendors (e.g. flea markets, thrift shops) price both the rubbish and the good stuff high-ish because they don’t have the knowledge to distinguish between the two.
Thank you for the suggestion, Antique Frog. That sounds interesting, but wouldn’t it take a rather big amount of time in order to get a good feel for what sells and for how much I can source stuff ?
The best way that I do this is to look at the number of items for sale in your search compared to the number of SOLDS for that same search. So if 1000 are available and 1000 are showing as sold (eBay shows 90 days of sales), the you should expect a sale in 90 days. Just keep in mind seasonality (looking up coats in summer vs in winter).
Thank you, T-Satt!
Another guy told me the same, some weeks ago and i also follow this approach by now.What makes me curious, nontheless, how narrow do you define the search term in the “currently available” and “sold” category?
I’ll give you a pragmatic example:
Let’s say i got some merchandise by Diesel (Italian fashion brand),
i’d type into the eBay search bar the brand, the particular model and now i get about 2000 currently available items (Diesel Zathan)
I do the same for the “what sold” category and now I have about 500 sold items.
So this should mean that i can “predict” that my item will move out of the shelf inside of 12-month period, right ?Now:
Let’s say i type into the search bar the brand, the particular model, the measurements, the color, maybe even the fabric. (Diesel Zathan W40 L34 bordeaux 100 % cotton)
I’ll have much fewer items currently available and depending on how “extreme” (i lack a better word for what i want to describe) the other features of the item are, i’ll also come up with a much, much lower number of already sold items.
Let’s assume i’ll end up with currently availabe: 90 items and already sold: 45 items.
Relying on the above mentioned prediction model, it’d mean that i can expect the merchandise to move in a 6-month window.So, which approach of these both examples am I now able to trust ?
The more general approach or the very specified one?
The “error” / difference between both results is 100 % and depending on what’s your sourcing strategy is, could have extreme consequences for you (Imagine sitting on some capital-intensive item, which you predicted to move inside of a 90-days window, but which actually moves only in a 12-month window)European beauty products are always of demand to American women – esp skincare. Find the niches, check solds.
Interesting coincidence, but I have an Assyrian friend who told me the same about females from the Middle East. A friend of him buys literally the cheapest beauty products availabe in Germany, before he heads home to Lebanon and sells them at home for a rather extreme 200-400 % mark up.
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Ostap Bender:
Your process is correct for determining the estimated STR for your item. As to which is correct…it depends. I try to keep things more generic (brand and model), but sometimes important factors are added, like fabric. Measurements, color, and pattern are other factors to add in to get more focused.
For me, it will depend on the number of results as you dial in. I would say you can trust your market research if you say with at least 100 current listings. If you get smaller than that, I’m not sure you have enough of a sample to make a reasonable estimation.
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As regards lenses, I thought about it, and I concluded that perhaps the most useful advice is a) to spend as little as possible! b) don’t buy lenses that have the following faults
Fungus: looks like translucent tree branches, most likely inside the lens. Bad, because it etches the glass and (apparently) is contagious- to other lenses!
Balsam separation: where the optical surfaces of the lens have been glued together and are now separating. Kind of a misty area with a bit of a rainbow effect sometimes.
Oil from the mechanism: not fatal because the lens could be dismantled and the surfaces cleaned.
Bad grease: difficult to move the focus on the lens barrel. Again not fatal.
Scratches on the glass.
Digital cameras also suffer from fungus, on the sensor, or more commonly dust which shows up as out-of-focus areas in the photo.
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