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I realized this morning that I have no death piles, functionally speaking. I have an Excel spreadsheet that I use to track all my items, and it now has only 8 items waiting to be listed. After that, I could always scrounge around the house for things my family isn’t using anymore, but that’s it!
Some perspective: I have a small, Basic-level store. I am very part-time with this – I spend an hour or so a day on Ebay, in addition to my FT job and family responsibilities. Like the rest of you, I’m having a mid-summer sales slump, so lately that hour a day has been spent doing more listing than packing. This morning I got to the bottom of a box of vintage t-shirts, and that was the end of the road.
Getting through one’s death piles is surely a cause for celebration, but I now find myself overwhelmed trying to decide what comes next! Take some time off from work and go hog-wild with sourcing? Strategize to selectively buy some higher-end items? I have a few thousand dollars set aside that I can re-invest into inventory if I choose.
What have you done, or would you do, when you kill off your death piles?
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Whoa, wish I was in your shoes! Congrats. It’s a very good time of year to do retail arbitrage both in stores and online. Stores are stocking Fall and back to school items and summer clearances are winding down. I’m in the minority on the forum of those who enjoy selling both vintage and RA. New items are nice because there are no returns basically and it’s very often easy to ship in the same packaging you received it. I mostly sell discontinued items or colors that people are grateful to get as replacements or because they like it better than the current retailer offerings. Just a thought. When I clear my piles (if ever) and family stuff, I’m totally hitting estate sales.
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Interesting, I have never given any thought to RA. I can see how now would be a good time of year for it.
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Soon as my death pile clears up, I go back out sourcing – for me this is a normal cycle.
I always list what I have, then go scavenging again – that way I’m making my inventory available for sale without too much of a backlog.
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I like this approach – I’ll try to stick to it going forward. I really hate the idea of death piles. I often tell myself “I will sell 0% of anything that’s not listed yet.”
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My wife and I each have a large Rubbermaid bin with “To List” on it – once they are near full (or when we have time) we tackle them – when they are full, we don’t buy anything else until we deal with them. It’s easy to toss items in the bin as you find them to keep them organized.
The bin can have 10 items, or 100’s of items in it depending on size of the item, but it is a good way to keep things looking clean in our room until we tackle them.
We also find that a bin is about half a day of photography, and half a day of listing – so if we are motivated we can empty a bin and have it for sale in a long day.
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HistoryNerd, your problem would be like a dream come true for a lot of us! If you have a Goodwill Outlet where you could source you could solve your problem of lack of inventory in a few hours with about a $20 investment. Course once you go you might end up with the opposite problem – LOL!
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Love your optimism Amatino!!!
HistoryNerd, I did wonder at first if you were bragging or had a real dilemma – LOL. But that’s just envy talking on my part. I am totally not hating on you – instead I’ll be using you as my inspiration! Good job on tackling and conquering those piles, especially since you’ve had some of it for that long; it’s not easy to get up the motivation to list something you bought that long ago!!!
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