Scavenger Life Episode 437: Calculated Risky

2019-11-10 – 2019-11-16

Total Items In Store: 3374
Items Sold: 25
Cost of Items Sold: $ 80
Total Sales: $ 871.77
Highest Price Sold: $ 51 (Boots)
Average Price Sold: $ 34.87
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0
Number of items listed: 56

Gut Sales Report for the week: Started out a very Slow week, but ended very strong. By Thursday, it started feeling like the busy season. Sales were up about 25%. so I will take that.

Challenge of the week: I still have a lot of items I need to process and list, but I am making progress.

Mark S

Hello all, I’m at the good job right now that I still think about leaving, so this week’s podcast is especially interesting to me.
We are definitely putting our house up for sale the top of next year to really cut our costs, and then we will look at our work lives, and our lives in general. All good, we are taking the steps, eager for change and more freedom.
I just knew, as probably most of us did, that your sales numbers would rebound Jay and Ryanne! Nice!

11/10 – 11/16/19 (no cross listing is done between platforms)

eBay store: totommyto

Total store items: 871
Number of items sold: 11
Total eBay sales (not counting s/h): $591.50
Cost of items sold: $24.50
Highest price sold: $200 – Vintage steel Hallowell shop cabinet drawers – A bear to ship! Paid $5
Average price sold: $53.80
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: $50
Number of new items listed this week: 5
Sell through rate for the week: 1.2
Number International sales: 1

Etsy store oldfleatoymarket

Total store items: 648
Number of items sold: 4
Total Etsy sales (not counting s/h): $75.50
Cost of items sold: $4
Highest price sold: $23.50 – vintage galvanized chicken feeder – paid $2
Average price sold: $18.90
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: $32
Number of new items listed this week: 0
Sell through rate for the week: 0.7
Number International sales: 0

Nov. 10 – 16
Total Items in Store: 2660
Items Sold: 28
Total Sales : $854
* Below yearly average of $940
Highest Price: $120 (Antique Silver Lake 1905 Heisey Ruby Glass Souvenir Creamer)
Average Price: $30
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $38
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 37

My sales picked up a little bit this week. And now that I’m feeling better, I thought I would be listing a whole lot more. But I was feeling quite unproductive throughout the week. Hopefully my mood will change this week.

I did spend an afternoon going back through GoDaddy Bookkeeping and my posts on this forum and I created spreadsheets for 2018 and 2017 with all kinds of useful information. I wanted some hard figures to compare to. My hunch was correct that I’m technically doing slightly better than I did last year, but the numbers aren’t showing much of an increase in relation to the growth of my store. I’m choosing to believe that this year was just a bummer for everyone and that things will pick up in the future. It’d be interesting to see the profit data from big box stores. That might show if there is an issue exclusively with eBay or if it’s a wider selling trend.

Not much else to report. No scavenging again last week. This Wednesday, I’ll be checking out an industrial business liquidation auction. I don’t know what I’ll find, but it’ll be interesting.

Ok Jay.. Let me get this straight … In summary “we are born, grind out 60 hour a week jobs for 35 years, retire with whatever, start buying and selling used “stuff” online somewhere along the line, die and that is it!” and then nothing ….Ohhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. for eternity.

Jay, boy you do have a way to just cut to the meat of the matter.

Mike in Atl. 🙂

Hmm, glad I copy/pasted this before editing.

Week Nov 10 – Nov 16, 2019

Items in store: 4545 Listings for 7344 Items
Items Sold: 84 transactions for 101 Items
Gross Sales: $6559.83
Highest Price Sold: $350 M-51 Fishtail parka
Lowest Price Sold: $9.98….Shoelaces
Average Sale Price: $64.95
Cost of Goods Sold $445, Plus consignment payout, roughly $1130
Number of new items listed this week: 26
$$ spent on new inventory this week $0
International Sales, 19%
Returning Customers 10

Grrr, tech issues kept listings levels quite low again this week. Finally got my listings caught up today, but those listings will have to go on next weeks report.

Met with the accountant this week. Mixed results…. His projections basically put my spending on hold for a while. He estimates I’ll owe an additional $25K in taxes by the end of the year, in addition to the quarterlies I’ve sent in. I hope he’s overshooting it a bit. Ooof. On the bright side, he said we’ve hit the level where we can save about $4K a year in taxes, after accountant fees, by switching to an S Corp for next year.

Also met with my investments guy this week. We’ve decided to switch our life insurance policies to Term Life (pending physical exams) and save a little money each month, while more than doubling our death benefit. Plus we can cash in our current whole life policies for the $8000+ cash value, without penalty…..which may come in handy for that $25K tax bill….or more preferably to invest in our future retirement.

My wife starts her masters program in about 6 weeks, and I will likely be back on my own for this endeavor. She doesn’t do a whole lot really, but every little bit she does is a huge help in my eyes.

4th quarter finally seems to Have hit! Stellar week…looks like next week might be on track for more of the same..

My Store Week Nov 10-16, 2019

Total Items in Store: 649
Items Sold: 22
Gross Sales: $2304.26
Cost of Items Sold: $222.84
Cost of helpers: $0
Highest Price Sold: $198.50 (Vintage Houston Rockets jacket)
Average Price Sold: $104.73
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $22.04
Number of items listed this week: 18

Who are these people that say we are going to die? 😀 😀 😀

Items in Store 1308
Items Sold 31
Total Sales $1,194.50
COGS $108.00
Total Profit $1,086.50
Average profit $35.05
Average sales price $38.53
New Listings 52

Great week for me. I had projected a $941 weekly average for 4Q and I’m FINALLY hitting those numbers the last 2 weeks. I’m just gonna keep on listing and hope for the best from here on out. This week I’m going to try and get some toys listed from my death piles.

Morning guys, thanks for the podcast and the much needed memento mori.

I had a so-so week on ebay. Surprised I’m not selling more given how much I’m listing lately, but I’m sure it’ll come.

Sales c/w shipping: CAD$1456, 10 sales. COGS: $199, Fees: $203, Shipping: $212 –> Gross profit: $1054
Expenditures: $719 –> Cashflow: $534
Hours: 12
Listed: $748, 61 items
Notable sales: speaker thing $300, toners $300, plumbing rough-in $200.
The rough-in came from a little $10 box of random plumbing supplies at our dump thrift store. I must have listed like $600 worth of stuff out of it.

This weekend I did a lot of infrastructure work too, mostly shifting inventory from our utility room to make way for a deep freeze we intend to get soon. We’re hoping this allows us to do a better job of meal prep and be more frugal with food, which has been a weak point for a long time.

Something to consider for your storage system: consider giving any mobile storage (e.g., bins) its own location in your spreadsheet, in addition to locating items within the bins themselves. I am embracing the idea that I can move bins from home to storage and it’s making my life a lot easier; previously I was trying to keep all bins at home.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast.

Still feeling like Q4! I have 50 items shipping out today, 25 packed & ready to ship tomorrow. 3 items to go out Wednesday. 22 or 24 items shipped out Saturday. I try to ship out items as quickly as possible, but without a car and relying on Uber for larger ship-outs I reach a limit on how much I can ship out in 1 day.

Sales were down by 10 orders from last weekend. I slowed down severely on listing this past week, so I’m to blame. No worries. I might try to list more like normal this week.

Buying woes for the week: tried buying 20 boxes of books from an online auction. With 8 hours left to go, they were at $50. I thought yay, I can probably snag these for $100! Nope. They went for over $500. Nothing special. Just decent Amazon stock. With estimated delivery fees, buyer’s premium, tax, etc,. I would’ve paid roughly $800 for the stock. I don’t know what the highest bid was even. It could’ve easily been $900. Only a few books were even visible in the photos, so it would’ve been risky to bid that much money blind. I passed.

We spent nearly $600 on stock a few weeks ago that has paid back nicely with 3 boxes left to list from, but at least I knew exactly what I was buying. For this? No way. We suspect it was most likely shill bidding, as other items went for nearly Ebay prices. It was crazy.

Went thrifting this past weekend and another thrift store has raised prices on books. This one is now mainly $5-10. I still bought stock, but I’m having to be super picky.

There are other places to source from, so I’m not worried about running out of stock or having to pay exorbitant prices forever. It’s just really annoying how expensive everything has suddenly become. I admit that it’s easy to get used to sources that have otherwise been good, so a lot of it is just laziness on my part. Still, I have suspected that a lot of these places would eventually go up in price or close and I’ve been slowly changing the way I run everything just in case. Just in case is here.

I’ve done really well sourcing over the past few months otherwise, and I believe the new stock & backlog is now up to roughly 90 boxes of stock. Still have new stock coming in. It’s not all bad. Just have to shift the way I run all of my businesses in case these changes are permanent. I will work more through the backlog as well as the newer stock obtained while prices were cheaper and wait out all of these price increases. I’m patient. I’m sort of grateful that my Amazon stock hasn’t sold, as I thought it would be cheap and quick to build up a small fast-moving inventory. Nope. At this point, it would take a lot of work and time to build up to even 5,000 listings with these expensive buying conditions.

Great podcast as usual. I’m pretty sure that the visibility of the buyer’s note on the orders page has been there quite a while. Maybe even a year? I guess if you don’t get many buyer’s notes, then you wouldn’t notice it so much.

Better week for me:

Week of Nov 10 – 16
* Total Items in Store: 1524 eBay, 36 Etsy
* Items Sold: 19 eBay; 1 Etsy
* Cost of Items Sold: $21.69 + $20 Commission
* Total Sales: $435.20 eBay; $32.95 Etsy
* Highest Price Sold: $100 NWT Vintage Hartmann 4 suiter luggage
* Average Price Sold: $23.41
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
* Number of items listed this week: 13

My sale on Etsy was interesting. I have priced everything there with free shipping, but the sale was international. This meant I kept the amount that was allocated for US shipping. I also used Pirate Ship’s simple first class international postage and made another $10. Realistically, I should just reduce international postage cost based on the difference between what I’ve allocated and Pirate Ship’s cost. I could get more international sales that way; however, I think I will wait until the beginning of next year.

Speaking of threats to the scavenger way of life, I don’t see how the USPS can continue to function. They’ve maxed out their borrowing and have racked up 10’s of billions of $ of debt. I think the USPS does a great job, but at some point this model is going to have to change drastically.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/cagws-leslie-paige-usps-non-stop-bleeding-potential-impact-holiday-deliveries

* Total Items in Store: 260 Ebay, 30 Mercari
* Items Sold: 5 Ebay, 3 Mercari
* Cost of Items Sold: $47
* Total Sales: $151 Ebay, $55 Mercari
* Highest Price Sold: $80 BO Ebay, two Restoration Hardware New Shams
* Average Price Sold: $30 Ebay, $18 Mercari
* Returns: 1 $30, Ebay didn’t like
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
* Number of items listed this week: 4

Old listings are continuing to sell over on Mercari, including Christmas stuff I had thought about deleting. Over on Ebay, I’m selling the newer listings mostly. I don’t know if that’s because of Terapeak guidance or ?

One of my teens has a lot of personal growth going on, so it wasn’t a great week for listing and full of highs and lows. Hoping for better listing opportunities this coming week. I’m working on selling off some of my kids Legos and toys on Facebook to move them out quickly.

I’m interested in the conversations about why Ebay might be slower. Still need to listen to most of the Podcast. Have a good week.

Thanks for the podcast.

Here are my numbers for this week:

Total Items in Store: 3412
Items Sold: 42
Total Sales: $844.61
Cost of Items Sold: $80
Average Price Sold: $20.11
Average Cost of Item: $1.93
Highest Price Item Sold: $99.95 4 Porsche Wheel Center Caps
Number of items listed this week: 51 worth approx. $1190
YTD Sales: $44011
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +7%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 424
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 313
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 211
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.23%
Hats sold this week: 30 (71% of sales) worth $506.77 (60% of sales $)

Just a typical week for my store.

I’ll be curious to hear what the latest R&J secret project is when you’re ready to share. I started guessing what the “expensive machine” was and a commercial expresso machine was the first thing that came to mind (for a coffee biz).

You’ve certainly taken a different approach with your investments than me. I didn’t grow up in a household that invested in real-estate (other than the family home) so I’ve never explored that area. My dad invested in the stock market and I’ve always felt more comfortable putting my retirement savings there too even though he didn’t really push me or educate me in that area. I think I have some of his accountant-ways even though i didn’t become an accountant.

Hope everyone sells lots of trash this week.

Great listen as usual… Solid week dollars wise thanks to a big ticket item selling (vintage handbag.) Number of sales were slightly down. I’m using a new system of listing by creating batches on the PC of similar types of items. Then adding photos and finishing touches through the app. This workflow is MUCH better. The app can be brutal if you’re trying to list 20-30 items at a time.

We reorganized our inventory area in the basement. Items are mostly clothes so we have stacks of bins and racks of jackets etc. I’m really starting to cut bait on things that aren’t worth my time. If I can’t make $20 in profit I wont’t pick it up.

I have been swamped at my full time gig and can’t wait to get out… coming to terms that I need to be patient and continue to ramp up over the next 8 months.

Nov 10-16
Items in Store 707
Items sold 20
Gross Sales 858
COGS 82
Highest Price Sold 340
Average Price Sold 43
New Inventory Costs 264

Last week was a solid week for sales, after a dismal week prior to that. And this week is pretty good so far. I don’t know if I shared, but 2020 is going to be an expensive year, with a new car payment and a doubling of the cost of health insurance. So I’m trying to get what I can out of this forth quarter and build momentum for next year.

Here’s my week: Nov. 10-16
Items Sold: 14 items, on 6 Ebay, 7 Poshmark and 1 Mercari
Items in stores: 160 Ebay, 157 Poshmark
Total Sales: $ 250.xx before fees and quite a bit of free shipping
COG: Lest than $10. There was a $10, pair of jeans that my daughter wore for 3 months and outgrew, and I paid $3 for a music box. The rest were freebies or from big lots.
Highest priced item: $47 (best offer) for a kitten music box from Limoges
Most surprising sale: $10 plus shipping for a 1960s Little Bo Peep Ammonia bottle. It was in a large lot I purchase, so someone was saving it on purpose. I listed it high at $20 based on comps, and it was worth it to not have to trash it and still get it out of my stash.

Poshmark has picked up for me, especially with jewelry. I sold several pieces of holiday jewelry, and the only sweaters I had in my store.
On Ebay I sold three collectible books, including one that was returned a couple weeks ago.

I’m also trying out a new cross-posting service that is in beta testing. It’s allowing me to relist items relatively easy on Poshmark. I think that has been helping to drive traffic and a couple of sales.

And in what I hope is a very positive move, I actually signed up for the ebay starter store. I was about to run out of freebie listings, and there’s still time in the month to go, so I decided it was worth it.

“Scavenging is getting trendy so it won’t be as profitable anymore” = “Nobody eats there anymore, it’s too crowded”

Popularity of scavenging affects both our buyer base and our competition. Buying used goods on ebay IS a scavenger move, and if more people are doing that, so much the better. More selling on ebay is of course more competition. Assuming scavenging gets more popular, how does the ratio wash out?

My take:
-More buyers = a bigger pie for everyone
-More sellers = more competition BUT PRIMARILY on things that actually have competition (esp commodity goods). If Bob wants a vintage nut bowl, and you’re the only listing, it doesn’t matter if 3x the number of ebay sellers exist now as did in 2010.
-More sellers DOES NOT equal less stuff to find. At least, not in any significant/systematic sense. What’s a trillion minus a billion? A trillion. Now take the overflow of North America’s prosperity – the mountains of “waste” that are our items, and subtract the amount dealers get their hands on. And then double, quadruple, 10x that outflow if you like. It doesn’t matter. The dung beetles are worried there’s too much competition in the elephant paddock.

11/10/19 – 11/16/19
Total Items In Store: 832
Items Sold: 10
Net Sales (Total Sales – Selling Costs): $319.56
Highest Sold Price: $60 – King Sized Liz Claiborne Quilted Blanket (paid $7 thrift)
Average Sold Price: $31.96
Cost of Items Sold: $9.50
Returns/Refunds: $0
Money Spent on New Inventory Last Week: $10
Number of Items listed last week: 20 or so

Hate seeing numbers this low, but it’s sadly been the norm since March or so. Trying to get my numbers back up, but also trying to balance item prices. After having a mental plan to not sell anything under $30, I’ve listed lots of stuff under $30 this year, some on easy to list multiples, some on things that I’d rather not donate or toss. Many of these items came to me free, so there’s been an impetus to earn whatever on them since it’s all profit – somewhat faulty thinking. I still have to store all these items tho, and that’s where my limitations are. So, after I list my current death pile, I’ll get back to more mindful and active sourcing.

Just added a sleeper couch to the burgeoning office/guest room. As long as I sit on it while working on my computer, it’s deductible, right? 😀 Might have to take a nap on it from the exhaustion of not having many sales….

Have a great week all.

SIMON – I also think J&R’s expensive piece of equipment has to do with coffee. Jay says they want to invest in the town and do things that are fun…I’m guessing they are going to open a coffee shop. Any other guesses? Coffee shop naming would be fun!

In a mile radius of my store, there are now 6 coffee shops. One is a Starbucks, the rest are indies. All the indies roast their own coffee beans. I was curious what they thought about there being so many of them so close together, and all of the new owners have told me it is actually good for their business to have a cluster of shops. More coffee drinkers will come since there is a wide variety of choices. The only one that was concerned was the one who’s been in the neighborhood for decades. We’ll see how they do.