Scavenger Life Episode 451: How Longtail Are You Willing To Go?

Yay congrats on such an awesome sales week!!!

I feel so happy for you guys and I hope its the start of a new trend.

Also I wanted to add that Paypal experienced a bug the last few days where if you did a refund when your account is at zero it denied the refund. This is not normal it should just take it from the connected bank account.

I empty my PayPal account to zero every single night right before I buy my shipping. That way when I buy my shipping it charges it to my default payment method which is my PayPal credit card. Since I buy between $100 and $200 of shipping a night I’m getting back 2% on all of that in cash back rewards.

So this caller (and anyone else) doesn’t have to stress about keeping money in their PayPal… what he experienced the other day (it happened to me as well) was a glitch. There was a post about it on Reddit.

I have to wonder if the $0.10 has anything to do with the fees PayPal takes out on the tax.

(Side note on taxes is that I believe the new sales taxes that Ebay is charging buyers is part of why the end of 2019 was so bad for a lot of sellers.)

Thanks for the shoutout! I’m not here to just get information (though that always helps) but because you guys are my people! I don’t even like talking about flipping with people because they think it’s like a scam or something. Why don’t they go to the thrift store/Nike outlet instead of buying from you from a marked up price? don’t you feel bad making a profit off of people? If lowes could only sell that grill for 250 why do you think you can sell it for 500 (a Brickseek flip I sold this morning)? People in my life just don’t respect the hustle. But I’m pretty sure you guys here on this forum are my tribe!

NikeGuy

2/16/20 – 2/22/20

Total Items In Store: 3301
Items Sold: 20
Cost of Items Sold: $ 55
Total Sales: $ 564.18
Highest Price Sold: $ 57 (Sweater)
Average Price Sold: $ 28.21
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 15.07
Number of items listed: 2

Gut Sales Report for the week: This was an average week in terms of sales. But pretty good considering I didn’t have time to do much more than ship.

Challenge of the week: Get organized. Personal life took over last week and need to get organized this week.

Scavenge of the week: Picked up a vintage pair Red Wing Western Boots with a Goodyear sole for real cheap.

Personal News: My alarm clock and Lamp both broke on the same day. Went to my favorite thrift Saturday. Picked up a great alarm clock for $1 and a Lamp for $1.25. Can’t beat that.

Mark

Items in Store 1506
Items Sold 27
Total Sales $728.00
COGS $90.00
Total Profit $638.00
Average profit $23.63
Average sales price $26.96
New Listings 38

Ah well it was a good run! I made over $1k in gross sales per week for 11 weeks straight. I haven’t listed anything this month and it caught up with me finally. I started to get back on the wagon yesterday with plenty of listings and immediately sold a rock band drum kit I listed.
I mixed it up a bit yesterday and did some retail arbitrage at TJ Maxx. There are some hidden gems there if you go through the clearance racks. Yes COGS are higher than thrifting, but I like to have a mix of new stuff in my store as well.

I’m going to try and buckle down with some serious listing this week.

In other news, another cool benefit of having a large ebay inventory is that when I lose weight I can shop in my own store! I threw out 2 more trash bags of big guy clothes this weekend, including ALL of my shorts. I knew I had a tub of Ralph Lauren shorts to list this spring so I hit it up. I was able to pull out a couple pair of size 38 shorts that fit right now, and a pile of size 36 shorts that I can technically wedge myself into but will fit perfectly in about a month. I never thought I’d be wearing size 36 pants ever again in my life, yet here I am.

“How longtail are you willing to go?” and “what do you do with old inventory?” are questions for the ages.

I have an answer, which may also help explain a phenomenon Jay has mentioned, whereby resellers/forum-goers seem to be doing fine and then drop off the face of the earth.

In short, I think the key factor is storage costs (and secondarily, the logistical hassle of storage).

I am willing to go as longtail as I need to on a very small item. A large item needs to justify its existence much more, and in fact I am currently in the process of blowing out a lot of big, old, not very high dollar items. The annoying thing is that, as we all know, they aren’t even that price sensitive, so I may just have to take them to the dump come spring. The alternative is getting another $150-200/mo storage unit (I’m already at $365 for 2) and I don’t want that monthly drag on my business, especially with layoffs coming soon.

Why does this dynamic maybe explain the missing resellers? When you first start reselling, it feels like free money, so much that a lot of us can’t believe everybody isn’t doing it. That’s because something in that equation IS in fact free at the margin – storage space.

Most North Americans have excess storage capacity in their homes, that is not being used for anything productive. Resellable stuff being essentially free, you can use that space for ebay! And it’s practically free money. Until the space is gone. THEN you start having to actually pay the market rate for storage, at which point a business that was doing OK with free storage may not be worth it anymore. If you’re paying $150/mo for storage and your part time ebay store is making $300/mo, it starts looking less and less attractive. And the more longtail stuff piles up, the more storage you’ll need… without some pruning, the monthly expense just grows inexorably.

Jay and Ryanne got out of this trap by living rural and building a large storage building. But I think many sellers just give up when they hit this wall. A $150/mo storage unit needs to be worth it and if it’s full of $20 items that will “maybe” sell “in a year or two” it’s harder to justify. And that’s before we consider the feats of organization (spreadsheets, shelving, bins, inventory SKU systems) you have to do to actually find your items once you pass 500 or so – which not everybody has the discipline for. So, this may be the reseller Bermuda Triangle.

Anyway, I had a good week on ebay.

Gross sales c/w shipping: CAD$2,854, 12 sales, COGS: $827, Fees: ~$390, Postage: $515 –> Gross profit: $1,123
Expenditures: $1,858 –> Cashflow: $606
Listed: $5,680, 71 listings
Hours: 16
Bid on a BIG pallet of electrical supplies. Scavenger high! – my proxy bid was $3100 but I only paid $450. There were 15 identical items in there that sell for $500-900 each. That was 1/100th of the lot by volume. The rest is just gravy… some of it is marginal (lightbulbs, conduits) and I’m trying to give it away locally to get rid of it, but there are tons of little easter eggs too, that I never knew I was getting.
Decent sales this week, one good item was an ebay buy – a small kit of surgical tools sold for $1400, I paid $700. A little higher COGS ratio than usual but I’ll take it.

Big picture is a little gloomier: the month isn’t over yet, but so far I’ve made less than half the gross sales in Feb as I did in Jan. I have been listing like a MADMAN for two solid months and would have expected a much bigger bump in sales from all that new inventory.

simplicio,

I agree about storage and long tail…Amazon found this out pretty quickly when they first opened FBA to sellers—-many sellers rushed to send in long tail stuff since they assumed it could just sit in Amazon’s warehouse until it sold. Amazon quickly changed its fees to try to reduce the amount of long tail in their warehouses. And it’s also one reason drop shipping is so attractive to some sellers…

And as you also and J&R also note, the added issue is, much of this stuff is not really price sensitive, so discounting—the most common retail lever to clear out old stock— is often not very useful.

And thus for many, the long standing conundrum: How does one increase sales velocity for long tail merchandise, which, almost by definition, is slow moving?

ebay has had a lot of success with long tail merchandise precisely because ebay does not own it, and does not have to store it. But ebay sellers do have to buy and store it, and that adds up.

Hi Everyone,

Congrats on the good week R&J.

Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3624
Items Sold: 56
Total Sales: $1265.41
Cost of Items Sold: $171
Average Price Sold: $22.6
Average Cost of Item: $3.07
Highest Price Item Sold: $109.95 Vinntage Garmin GPS 12
Number of items listed this week: 88 worth approx. $2336
YTD Sales: $7764
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +25%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 444
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 255
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 93
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.55%
Hats sold this week: 39 (69% of sales) worth $654.59 (51% of sales $)

I had a really good week which was surprising as I took a business trip and had long handling times for most of the week.

New things on eBay: I shipped 5 international sales through the new eBay SEND / Standard Delivery program this week. Instead of shipping to Kentucky, I was shipping to Southern California. Recently my international sales seemed to slow right down so it was good to see them pick up a bit. I hope it continues.

As I’m in the process of getting a new cabin installed and built up, I’m going through all my inventory and deciding what to pull out of my store – mostly the stuff I got when I was an eBaby and didn’t really know what had value. Once I’ve done a stocktake of all my listed items and packed them into the new storage in the new cabin, I’ll be sorting through my Death Pile with a very jaundiced eye and disposing of items that aren’t worth my time to photograph, list, pack and ship. From this point on, anything in my storage has a GTC range of “until I die.” The joys of country living! 😀

How long-tail are you willing to go? Having only been at this (eBaying) for 2-1/2 years, I think I have one item (German brewery table and chair set) left from my initial foray into online selling. I use the table and a chair as my desk, so I’m not too unhappy it hasn’t sold yet. As Jay has stated often, it all comes down to storage. I have a largish basement, and it’s barely adequate for my 500-item store. Lately I’ve been focusing on sourcing small items like car/truck parts such as filters and hyraulic fittings. (I have about $800 worth of that kind of stuff in one bin!) Also ephemera such as posters and magazines. Still, I feel like I’m nearing capacity. Not sure I have enough space to accomodate 250 more items. I’m not stressed, just wondering what my next move will be.

Week of Feb 15 – 22

Total Items In Store: 509
Items Sold: 9 eBay
Total Gross Sales (includes S/H): $213
COGS: $5
Highest Price Sold: Tie between two $25 items – Architectural Digest Magazine Nov 2002, Silverplated Pastry Serving Tongs
Average Price Sold: $24
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $25
Number of new listings: 61

Gut Sales Report for the week: Totally blase. Continuation of February slump. This is as slow as I’ve seen it in many months. I can’t pin it on anything.

Scavenge of the week: Bought two boxes of Architectural Digests at auction for $5. There may be worth $800 or more. That is, if and when they all sell.

Wife and I are heading to New Mexico and Arizona for a couple of weeks. Hope to get in some sourcing.

Regarding the Paypal call:
I was surprised by both the question and the answer to it.
I routinely empty my Paypal. My account is linked to my checking, so if I need to spend money on something and there is an insufficient balance, Paypal takes the difference automatically out of my checking. I assumed that everyone had it set up like this; I would recommend that everyone just do this instead of having to calculate how much money to leave in their Paypal.

I just listed something as high with make offer – kind of what Jay & Ryanne did with the antique shirt, but at a much lower scale. I bought a vintage Detecto baby scale, but what I can find on eBay are all older models. I did find one of the same model, but it is missing the tray. It sold at auction on eBay for $8. The one I have doesn’t work properly, but, still, I don’t see anything similar. I’ve listed it for $59 or best offer. Does anyone want to venture as to whether I’ve priced WAY too high, or if I’m doing the right thing?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/184184954482

Week of Feb 16 – 22
* Total Items in Store: 1452 eBay, 34 Etsy
* Items Sold: 20 eBay
* Cost of Items Sold: $32.75 + $16.43 Commission
* Total Sales: $388.80 eBay
* Highest Price Sold: $44 for 1960s Nonworking Zenith Trans Oceanic Royal 3000-1 radio
* Average Price Sold: $19.44
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $57.50
* Number of items listed this week: 20

I went to an auction on Thursday. I bought a wood walking stick for $5, but they accidentally charged me $50. I did not include the extra amount in the “money spent on new inventory” above assuming that they fix the problem quickly. There is no way that I bid $50. I had to pay the bill, and they will refund me the money after they check their video.

It’s just annoying because, at the smaller auction in my area, they will immediately fix the problem. It happened to me once, and they watched the video and fixed my bill before I paid.

Feb 16 – 22
Total Items in Store: 3223
Items Sold: 29
Total Sales : $1,832
* Above yearly average of $909
Highest Price: $500 (Antique Temptation Chocolate Yard Long Lady in Frame)
Average Price: $63
Returns: 1
Cost of Goods Sold: $401
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $333
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 53

I had a crazy week of sales last week! Sold a few items over $100, but my major sale was an old advertising print from the 1920s. It was a bit of a gamble since I paid a hundred dollars for it at an auction, but I knew it could bring good money. My COGS this week are high for another reason. I sold a Hudson Bay blanket for $210, but I paid $225 for it. It was a dumb mistake on my end but I’m just glad to recoup some of that expense.

I went to an auction on Saturday. Filled my van up to the brim for about $300. It took me 3 day just to get it all sorted and inventoried. It seemed like it was a lot of junk from another reseller. Box lots full of stuff that just wasn’t worth the time to list and store. But I did find some gems. The buy of the day was a box lot of eight fiberglass MSA helmets, some practically brand new. Selling one of those will more than make back the $40 I spent on them.

Hello all, it’s been a busy week, listened to the Podcast on Sunday but am just now getting a chance to reply. Great job on that shirt, I actually saw you guy sold that the day or so before the podcast dropped and was blown away by the price, very cool. I found the idea to buy poshmark interesting, but not something that I would want Ebay to buy right now. It’s funny, I think we all look at the future of Ebay with a bit of bias whenever things feel slow. You guys want them to buy poshmark and push vintage/used clothes, a youtuber I watch who has over 20,000 listings thinks the solution is to remove all listing fees(of course saving him a bunch of money in doing so), and I personally think they should focus on the collectors market. It’s kinda like whatever our personal niche or business model is, we think that the key to the future of Ebay is focusing on that specific market. Like anything in life, the answer is most likely a mix of all these things. Good job on sales this past week, I know you guys have been listing a lot recently so it’s nice seeing the reward for the hard work.

2/16 – 2/22

Total Items in Store – 14,462
# of new listings – No idea, I’m just now getting to my numbers on a Tues night, don’t remember how many I had at the start/end of the week.
# of orders – 109
Total # of items sold – 139
Gross Sales – $2,937.92
COG Sold ~$18
Inventory Bought – $103

Sales last week were good. Not really a lot to speak of, most of the orders were magazines again. I sold a few other things I got from that estate as well. Along with the magazines there were a few bins that had empty/flat cereal boxes in them. We’ve had some good sales with them so far, but this one was torn it ended up going pretty cheap. We also sold a few 64oz Thermos from the estate. I paid for these at the estate’s auction. I paid $2.5 per bin of thermos, each one had 10-12 mugs in them, so I’m estimating $0.20-$0.25 a piece for COGS. I sold some vacuum tubes/pins/patches/records, same stuff I feel like I talk about each week here lol. COG for these items run less than a dime or so piece.

Highest COG item sold this week as a Sony Time Lapse VCR that I bought years ago, I *think* I paid $7.5-$10 for this item, but it’s been so long, I can’t be 100% sure without looking through receipts. The typewriter that I sold a few weeks ago was returned yesterday. For the first time in my Ebay career, I had a return that was very visibly a different item than was sold. The one I sent was used, clean, and fully functional. The one returned was rusted and all the keys were locked. I have free returns so I just reported the buyer, provided a 50% refund, didn’t refund original shipping, and moved on. I paid a few bucks for it, so the transaction was still profitable. I just tossed the machine, I’m trying to get rid of big junk like that anyways. I sold a mug that I’ve had up for years as well. Anyone remember the ‘mug life!’ craze that was all over youtube 4 or 5 years ago? I’m pretty sure I still have mugs listed from that period in my store lol. I sold a Marx Jane West lot, which is just about the last of a big lot that I paid $40 for last summer. I sold a Geronimo Indian for $45 a few days after that purchase, so all the sales from that lot since has just been pure profit.

My comment about my numbers last week was deleted due to an editing glitch I wasn’t aware of, but I had made a comment about some stuff I bought last week. Included in that was a box lot of antique books that I paid $2.50 for. I just got around to researching and picturing those items this past week and will be listing them soon. One of the books in the lot is a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Vegetable’. I should be able to get $200-250 for it, maybe more.

I’ll be heading out tomorrow to pick up items I bought from an online local auction. I spent $103 total, including taxes and the 15% buyers premium. I shouldn’t be buying really, but I’m getting a bit sick of looking at magazines everyday. Plus, I can’t ever escape this nagging feeling that one day I’ll run out of stuff to list, even though I know that’s completely irrational.

Anyways, that was my week on Ebay. We also completely reorganized our storage unit, which I’ll probably upload pictures of later. I also did some nerd shit this past weekend, which is why I’m so late to the boards. I got one of those ‘Street Fighter 1up arcade machines a few years ago and it’s just been sitting around unplayed, so I decided to do something with it. Me and my son stripped the machine, pulled all the arcade buttons and installed an entirely new system. We threw a 256gb retro game image into a Raspberry Pi 3b+, installed new LED light up buttons, drilled new holes into the board to install additional buttons, converted the VGA output to HDMI, and installed a new audio amp into the cabinet. Our new arcade holds over 22,000 games now, ranging from Atari 2600 all the way up to N64. So now I just have to find a way not to play the darn thing nonstop now and get back to listing.

As always, hope everyone had a great week in sales 🙂

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by WabashValleyRelics.

First week of listing seriously. Don’t have much stock yet, so I only have 33 items active so far. I do have my first bid! I listed several items at auction for low prices to get things going, it’s all stuff I got for free from random relatives and I want to get some sales/feedback going to help motivate me. Hoping for some actual sales reporting next week!

Inventory purchased – Goodwill buy for $24, got 10 items
Buy of the week: Briggs & Riley luggage bag for $3, think I can sell for $60+

Thanks for a great and timely podcast! Since I’m terrible with clothes – though still try – nearly all of my store is rather long tail, and it’s taking it’s toll. I see the same things every day, pass over many when I’m plucking out the Solds, and am generally trying to reclaim personal space from the sprawling inventory.

I recently started a steep sale (40% off) on some older items, and items that I’ve gotten for free and feel their cost + shipping fees are holding sales back. A few days in, and I’ve sold several sale items, including a huge rug I’ve had for 3 years. I’m not interested in operating at a scale that would require off-site storage, so I’m trying to use my office and our basement wisely. Considering making a gallery wall of the art I have for sale, so I can get it off the floor. The minimalist in me would love to see more clear floor and surfaces! Thank goodness we have a basement…

January was, and is historically, my strongest sales month. Had one really low week since then, but weekly sales numbers have been higher recently than they were most of last year.

2/16/20 – 2/22/20
Total Items In Store: 725
Items Sold: 17
Net Sales (Total Sales – Selling Costs): $754.81
Highest Sold Price: $320 Kilim rug on Best Offer
Average Sold Price: $44.40
Cost of Items Sold: $206.30 (most of that was the rug, bought at an estate sale, plus having it cleaned))
Returns/Refunds: $0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of Items listed: 10-ish

Week of 2/16-2/22
Total Items in Store: 3,296 (Up 15% YOY)
Number of Items Listed: 39
Number of Items Sold: 64 (Down 35% YOY)
Weekly STR: 8% (Down 47% YOY – PY STR 16%)

Total Product Sales: $2,206 (Down 22% YOY)
Sales Volume Variance to Prior Year: Down $986
Sales Price Variance to Prior Year: Up $350
Cost of Items Sold: $382

Sorry for the hiatus. Been busy…

Nice to see a little of a bump back in sales this week, but the next week not so good…