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Hi everyone, I don’t post much, mostly lurk but I’ve been thinking about the past 5 weeks stuck at home with no estate sales, garage sales or thrift stores.
My sales are slow but steady and I’ve worked through my death pile and audited my listings which didn’t take long because I’m a super small seller and I don’t have a lot of room for a huge inventory. Lately I’ve been thinking about where I go from here in terms of finding things to sell and what kind of seller I want to be. I sell because it’s fun and I can turn things I find into money to buy things I want but with no scavenging sources what to do?
I really started thinking about what it is that I like and where my expertise lies and how to find the things in my niche areas. For instance I love wacky cryptozoology, sci fi and fantasy and weird flying saucer publications so I started hanging out in internet forums researching and writing down names, authors and keywords and using those to tailor ebay searches to pull up books and ephemera and photos. I also started hunting down facebook buy sell trade groups that are fast moving and have the kind of material I want to buy. It’s kind of working. I’ve bought some great undervalued unusual things and am having success at turning them over for a profit. Stuff I could probably never find at a random estate sale or thrift store. I think I’m finally ready to specialize but I’m always going to keep an eye out for fast easy sales of more mundane things too.
So, is anyone else experiencing a shift in how they see scavenging and selling? This is my second time trying to post this so sorry if a repeat.
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For me I have realized just how few spots I have scavenge, and if those few spots get closed how thankful I am for my death piles, which I have decided should now be called LIFE piles…
Over the past 6 weeks I have been spending way too much time online reading and learning from other resellers and realize there are basically two trains of thought, toss a huge net and sell what ever you get or specialize in something you enjoy. For now I’m tossing the biggest net I can find… -
Book Hawk, Since even our death piles have death piles, we don’t need to source right now. However, I admit, for us, the sourcing is a lot of the fun of this….not just finding neat stuff, but talking to people we meet, looking at old houses, etc. But….that said….I’ve been thinking about just the sort of thing you are talking about. I already have a lot of stuff on my ebay “favorites” list, but most of it is stuff I’m personally interested in, and very rarely does it show up at a price that is a good price for resale. What I’ve been thinking is I really should add more stuff to the list, stuff that has a better chance of showing up under-priced….And I should look at other online sources, such as FB. I’ve seen some of the YouTube “gurus” have started using YouTube to sell their stuff directly on YouTube….and of course, a lot of people use Instagram to direct sell as well.
We are in the high risk group for Covid, and so even when my thrifts re-open, I’m not too sure how quickly I’ll go back to my old haunts. But I really believe there are a lot of buying opportunities on line as well. Just hard for me to justify doing it when we have so much here to list….
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@MyCottage “even our death piles have death piles” …. that made me laugh! I’ve got a 16×8 foot shed packed with my DPs, and that AFTER the Purge of November 2019, so I’m just shopping in my own personal thrift store. No change for me!
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Amatino, I’ve been going to the basement, putting away the snow shovels and such, and each time I come back up with something from “the Basement Thrift Store”. But I don’t really have to go there….the first and second floors have stuff too….and that’s not to mention the storage sheds….so, no urgency to source, but the desire is strong……for us, that’s the real fun.
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I live in a 2 bedroom condo and I share the second bedroom with my husband’s guitar hobby. He is only semi tolerant to clutter so I don’t have any room for piles that don’t get immediately processed and stored away. Luckily I like books photos and ephemera which are fairly compact. Everything I sell makes room for something new and it feels good taking packages out of the house and seeing space open up but the not sourcing was killing me. Oh and I finally opened a buyers account! I’ve been meaning to to that for a while. I had to transfer all my saved searches and re ‘watch’ all items I’m stalking so the offers come to the right account.
BUT…my thrift stores are open now! I’ve been to 5 in the past week and I’ve got a fresh pile of stuff and now I have online sourced things coming in the mail. Now the plan is keep pushing out the old stuff, keep up the quest for specialization and hunt for fast profitable sellers to fund new purchases.
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Bookhawk, This is a great question. I had been thinking a lot about ending my “thrifting” way before the pandemic. I get so tired of seeing things and am constantly moving furniture in my house, “re-organizing” (I use that term loosely) and de-cluttering only to find myself buying more. So, I thought to myself “what’s the point?”. I love going to thrift stores and finding that one item everyone overlooked/didn’t know was worth such and such, and then turning a great profit on it. But,I finally decided that I will not step foot in another thrift store-for at least another year-maybe never again. I have a 4 car garage with 1 car in it and lots of boxes with thrifted things and my own junk. That’s enough! I’ll sell off what I can, then donate what stays behind. I know I’ll miss it, but I have many hobbies, so I should be ok.
Since the virus hit, I began making and donating masks to medical workers and started getting requests. Then I began charging, selling on etsy, ebay and to neighbors/friends, etc. I made so many masks, (literally a couple thousand) and I truly love sewing-so therapeutic and relaxing. But I realized while I love thrifting, I will stick to sewing and maybe selling fabric like I used to.
Also, Bookhawk,there is a place in Chicago that sells items like you are interested in. I don’t think I can mention the name here in the forum, so I won’t, but certainly you can find it online. I’ve been there 1x and it kinda freaked me out what they sell there. While not in a hurry to go back, the owners are really cool people and I have fun posting comments with whoever runs their Instagram, (I think it’s the husband and wife). They always reply and we joke back and forth. But it is an interesting place to be sure!
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Hi Daisy,
that’s so cool about the masks! There is a place in Denver that sells Oddities that are mostly cool decor, secret society stuff and not very scary. There is also a place called the ‘lost room’ or something like that that I don’t go in because sometimes taxidermy makes me sad. I really went down some rabbit holes searching for the kind of BST facebook groups to become a part of. Sometimes you have to be in the group for a few days to see what they are all about. I left a few because I am positively never going to be interested in raw animal parts for crafting or taxidermy. I’m looking for ghost photos, self published booklets, books and magazines. Not eyeballs.
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