Scavenger Life Episode 483: Finding Fun

Don’t forget to post the link – for your coffee sales.

Great podcast, as usual Jay and Ryanne. I realized I have missed out on a great opportunity. Today’s my mom’s birthday and we were listening to the podcast together and I realized I could have had an easy Bday gift with some Coffee! She loves coffee, and will just have to settle for getting some in a couple weeks. The shoutout about the neutral feedback made me chuckle – I actually haven’t responded to it on ebay yet, but the buyer went silent after messaging what I posted. I did happen to see the listing again and realized there was a picture of us holding the item afterall in it- c’est la ve. Life goes on.

This week was murderous for sales. Nothing sold for more than $20. And I had several days of no sales. I actually just took a $15 offer on a $25 item because I literally haven’t sold anything all day. (edit: and I just received a cancellation request for the item as I was typing numbers. Woof) Tonight’s also an auction night, so I’m seeing a lot of good potential.

Side note, any idea of what to do with a john deere lawn mower attachment? It’s a leaf attachment, I am now the proud owner of it for a whopping $1 (my mantra is you never loose money on a dollar bid) but on the flip side, I’ve got no idea how to get rid of this thing quickly other than FB, which has been throttling my listings I think, but thats mostly a conspiracy theory than anything else (I know we hate those. )

Amazon has been kicking ass this week- several $50 books, and my total sales have gone up about $500 in the last week. Thats with starting to send in books once a week about 3 weeks ago. It’s a very small time money machine, I just have to keep doing it.

Numbers for this week:

Items in Store 620

Items Sold: 7 – 5 Ebay, 2 Ebay

Total Sales: $115

COGS $4.50

Total Profit $110 minus fees

Average profit $15

Average sales price $16

Highest Priced Item: $20, lot of 30 otherwise worthless porcelain dolls (pulled all the good stuff for ebay already. $3 total investment for 45 dolls)

New Listings: 119

Lots of new listings this week, but about 77 of them were ephemera and some costume jewelry rings I bought for cheap, so I feel like the number of listings is deceiving.

Interested to see how everyone else’s sales went- it feels like every platform was slow for me this week. I didn’t even really have watchers to send offers to. 2 or 3 a day instead of 6 or 7.

Great episode! I’d have to add about auctions, the only time I like to use them is when I need the item to be gone by a certain date. In late August I sourced some homeschool workbook sets, and I did them by auction just because I knew if they sat until September they’d probably sit for a lot longer. I paid to have them shipped all Priority and had the auction started at a comfortable price, profit wise. Otherwise, I’d agree to generally avoid them.

I’m new but I’m going to attempt to do some numbers for this week. I’ve been doing cash accounting, so I’m going to estimate what my cost of goods sold is, but a lot of the items I’ve sold are Amazon recalls from when FBA stopped functioning in March.

Numbers for this week:

Items in Store: 1252

Items Sold: 37

Total Sales: $1351.10

COGS: 140ish?

Total Profit: 869.1

Average profit: 23.49

Average sales price:

Highest Priced Item: 456 dollars for a lot of Telecommunications Goods that were gifted to me. They really saved my bacon this week.

New Listings: 135

As a toy seller, I’m trying to get all my toy listings live before the end of this month, so my listing numbers are not usually this hardcore. I did choose to not open my stall this weekend since it was 93 degrees out, so I pushed some of that time into listing.

My Sales Week Ending 10/10/20

Notes: Better focus. More listing.

Total Items For Sale: 55

Profit: $21.39
Items Sold: 1
Items Listed: 4
Average Profit: $21.39
Highest Profit: $21.39 Calvin Klein Men’s Dress Shirt w/ Tags
Cost of Items Sold: $0
Returns: 0
$ Spent Sourcing: $0

Items in Store    1512

Items Sold           26

Total Sales          $867.00

COGS    $96.00

Total Profit         $771.00

Average profit   $29.65

Average sales price          $33.35

New Listings       70

Man I hope 4th quarter starts to pick up soon. I keep hearing all the stories that online holiday sales are gonna blow up huge and early this year. I really hope so. Having said that, my year over year numbers are way higher than 2019 and 2018 for October. My typical uptick doesn’t happen until Thanksgiving. I’m greedy though – I want it NOW!!

I had a fun listing yesterday. I was in a mood to start grabbing random things and listing them, and happened across a bag of new cross stitch kits. They always sell and are easy to list, so why not bang them out real quick. They typically don’t sell for alot. Well I got to this one bigger kit and typed in the UPC. I got nothing, so I typed in the brand and some relevant keywords and sorted by highest price. Holy crap, there were multiple $200+ sales! I hadn’t even paid attention to what the kit was so I flipped it over make sure what I had was the desirable kit. It is a Christmas tree skirt cross stitch kit. I have the only one of this pattern on ebay, so I went big.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/264895827702

For the record, I audibly gasped when I realized the potential value of this kit! And to think it’s been sitting in my “not interested in listing” bin for years…

Not much else going on in my world. Still freaking out about how much unlisted stuff I have. Still conflicted on if I should keep sourcing.

Have a great week everyone.

Total Items in Store: 329
Items Sold:  7
Gross Sales: $293
Cost of Items Sold: $58
Highest Price Sold: $69 (Tie, vintage Sascha Brastoff bowl and new Rejuvenation door knocker)
Average Price Sold: $42
Returns: 1 (I sent the wrong item and they repurchased, took a shipping hit 2 ways)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $4
Number of items listed this week: 0

We are in the thick of college application season but I’m now starting to sleep a little better so really need to kick into gear.  I have some seasonal fall RA that NEED to get listed this week.  Went thrifting one time. A favorite indy thrift has opened a new location I avoided the opening for multiple reasons but still found two little items later in the day.  They also got rid of my nemesis older redhead pricer and have college kids working there now.  They had the coolest vintage coffee bin sort of like this: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/60657926201380339/  that made me think of you guys and your shop.

@RetroTreasures stitchery kits are my favorite thing to sell.  Not the most exciting to pick but they are such reliable sellers, easy to list and ship, and sometimes worth great money.  Also overlooked by some scavengers in these parts.  The few times I make it to garage or estate sales, I always check that out.

Have a great week.

Selling toys this time of year is likely super smart since xmas present will be needed by all.

You said FBA stopped working in March? What is it like now?

I have pulled all of my stuff from FBA, just because of how they handled it. They stopped shipping out my orders because of coronavirus, and it wasn’t just like a two week readjustment, it was months. I gave them until May to get things in order and they just made a bunch of new rules without fixing their shipping times. They changed how much inventory space you could have and those calculations, based on sell through rates, and then they tanked everyone’s sell through rates by taking 3 weeks to ship out items my customers wanted (but still taking all of their fees.)

I still have some straggler items that sell (because they can’t find them to ship them back to me), and the time from pending order to shipped can still be two weeks.

I’m glad I got off the sinking ship though, to be honest. Fees were going up, and I every January I’d be hit with a tsunami of returns.

Listings in Store: 745
Items Sold: 13
Gross Sales (includes shipping): $308
Highest Price: $40 – 3-Pack 18″ Wall-Mount Safety Grab Bars
Average Price of Solds: $24
Cost of Goods Sold: $45
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 30

Thanks for another great podcast! The most rewarding part of reselling for me is that you have to figure it out mostly by yourself. Of course you learn from others. But there’s no one source. Finding better ways to ship items or re-arranging my work area to make it more efficient are almost as enjoyable as the payouts. But then I do this part-time so I don’t feel high pressure to produce cash.

Another meh week for sales. This has been a 3-week trend. Maybe this is normal and the spring and early summer were just Gold Rush days.

Great to hear from you guys again.

I had a great week on ebay.

Sales: CAD$4981, 17 sales, COGS: $770, Fees: ~$673, Postage: $448 –> Gross profit: $3090

Expenses: $42, New inventory: $119 –> Cashflow: $3699

In addition to the above, I had my largest sale ever: $9000 for a set of 6 fire detectors. They were used and I feel there is a high risk of return so I am not including them in my numbers yet. I believe I paid $800 a year or so, now the die is cast and we’ll see if it pays off.

10/3/20-10/9/20

Total Items In Store: 2062
Items Sold: 24
Gross Sales: $514
Highest Price Sold: $100 (GE Oven Control Board)
Average Price Sold: $21.41

Returns:  1 $26
Money Spent on New Inventory: $12
Number of items listed: 19

• Very low week in sales. Only hit about half of my $1K weekly goal.  Looks like it might have been fairly slow for other sellers as well.
• My high sale of the week for $100 was found in a pile of free items at a yard sale that I stopped at when I was on my way back to the airport from our trip to Maine.
• I’ve been a little slow on getting new items listed. I had one of my rental homes come available and have been doing some remodel work on it to get it ready for the next tenant.  Should be done this week and be able to get some serious listing done.

I’m Scavenger Life famous this week, hehe.   Thanks for the shout out.  Quitting a steady paycheck during a pandemic and potential country-wide economic collapse not typically a smart move but mentally I have to do it.  Living in a constant state of anxiety is no longer tolerable. I’m counting down the days.

I still have moments of “crap! what am I going to do for money?!”  But I can do it, I just have to be treat my business like a profession and not a hobby.  Thanks everyone for the support!

The journey to my eBay business started with an online thrift store called Swap.com. The website had originally started out as a place for kids to trade DS and similar games, but you can imagine how well that turned out. Many kids never completed their part of the bargain. My daughter (now an adult) had me sign up for it, but she never swapped anything. Years later, someone bought the site address and the email list, so I found out about their new online thrift when they set it up. When I decided to try my hand at being a reseller, I started sending in huge boxes of kids clothing and toys. They listed everything and took just a 20% commission to photograph, list, and sell the items.

Fast forward to this year, and they are very picky with what they choose to list, and their fees are huge. They also get so backed up that sometimes they won’t upfront the cost of the shipping (which comes out of your profit), so you have to ship it at your own expense. They don’t even take  toys anymore. However, last year, I ended up with bags of free clothing, mostly modern, and I really wasn’t excited about listing them.

At the beginning of the year, I looked up Swap and found that they were accepting clothes and providing shipping labels again. Per their strict instructions, I washed all the clothing and checked each one for quality and wear. I sent in only the good stuff that would be in season once they were listed.

The box arrived the very beginning of March, and then the shit hit the fan. IN ADDITION, they moved their warehouse from Illinois to South Carolina sometime during the spring. FINALLY, my stuff started to get listed last week, and they rejected about 20% in spite of my careful judgement. Most of the inventory went directly to a 50% off sale because it is now out of season. Two items have already sold, which is going directly to paying for the shipping label. Between the high fees and the low sale prices, I think I won’t get paid anything for a few weeks.

Nevertheless, I am happy to have someone else list and sell this stuff. At this point in time, I would have given the stuff away. I am now one of their “preferred sellers”, so I can continue to send in clothing items that I manage to get for free from downsizing friends and family. It takes some time to wash and box all the items, but it is not that big of a deal. I’ll have to do the numbers at some point to decide whether I want to continue to send items in. If all I get is $100, is it worth it for me to do the few hours to ship the items in? Maybe, I’ll have to think about it.

Week of Oct 4 – 10
Total Items in Store: 1341 eBay, 33 Etsy
Items Sold: 20 eBay, 2 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $21.50 + $66.50 Commission
Total Sales: $384.10 eBay + $78.90 Etsy = $463
Highest Price Sold: $47 Vintage Glenfiddich whiskey pitcher
Average price: $21
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 14 (+16 on Swap.com)

Not a bad week. I don’t have much listed on Etsy, but most of it is from my whiskey pitcher haul. I set all my prices for free shipping within the US, which is different than how I do business on eBay. What is a great sale is when someone international buys an item and then has to pay the shipping to their country. This is what happened last week. I sold two Glenfiddich whiskey pitchers to the someone in Spain for $78.90. I get to keep the additional I added for domestic shipping, and I was able to buy international shipping for over $10 less than what he paid.

Thanks for the podcast.  I have been having the same issue with my postal claims.  They are denying the past 4 claims and saying that the item and packing must be presented.  This includes one that they damaged and the tracking even says “damaged”.  The up side is that very few of our many orders have damage, the down side is that I can’t trust that the insurance is valid, it is like shipping without insurance.

Week of Oct 4-10

Total Items in Store: 109
Items Sold: 9
Gross Sales: $143.65
Cost of Items Sold: $23.52
Highest Price Sold: $29.99 (this was a tie between 2 PS2 games – Half-Life and The Suffering Ties That Bind )
Average Price Sold: $15.96
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 27

This is my first time posting my numbers.  I’m sort of in rebuilding mode for my eBay listings since I’ve just started selling online again after being on hiatus for about 6 months.  So I thought it would be fun to join the forum and track my progress here after years of listening to the podcast.  I’m also changing up how I source and am pretty much limited to online auctions for now.  So I don’t think I’ll ever get the margins Jay and Ryanne do or what I used to get sourcing from in-person auctions, but it’ll be a fun experiment.

Health issues.  It’s the same reason I’m doing online sourcing.  Going out to source with the current state of the world isn’t the smartest idea for me.

I’m getting nervous about sales. I’m down 20% from a month ago. Ebay is saying the general market is down 3% from last year. I remember this time last year stuff was selling very well from mid-Oct to end of Nov (I sell mostly women and children’s pre-owned). Last week had a cancellation of a high value item and I also canceled from a buyer I ended up blocking.

This Canadian buyer had bought from me once before (what are the odds since I sell one-offs?) and both times has messaged me multiple times during the day asking tons of subjective questions and requesting additional pictures about pants that are less than $30. Eventually around day 3 he asked to cancel because I didn’t respond quickly enough (I only answered his questions once a day) and he “found the process tiring”, lol! I was happy to cancel by the end of it.

@Jay & @PBJelly I am another small potatoes seller who pulled out of Amazon over the last couple years. I was mostly dealing in retail arbitrage and books. Books were fun because it was a hybrid between eBay treasure hunting and big Amazon sales, but grew into an extreme amount of competition. Lots of scanning software and territorial sellers. More Amazon fees and regulations, which made it difficult to keep on top of and analyze as a hobby seller. Retail arbitrage was similar, but became harder to do as more brands began to assert their official Amazon presence and lock 3rd party sellers out of their items.

@Sharyn Thanks for the background on swap.com; I didn’t realize that’s how they started out. I currently have a box with them now but yeah they are a PITA to consign with. For the last year or so they have been closed to new consignments. I also squeaked in at the beginning of the year when they re-opened, and 40% of my box was rejected. They charge a rejection fee for that on top of the shipping label. That being said they are the only place that takes low-end men’s clothing, which not even brick and mortar consignment stores are likely to accept.

Hi all,

On the podcast a seller describes a situation in which his shipping page defaults to a more expensive method of shipping.

This has been happening to me too. I sell items that mostly ship First Class or Media Mail. When I go to the shipping page, it automatically upgrades it to Priority Mail or sometimes Fedex Ground (for books). It does show the buyer selected a cheaper option.

So far it’s only been an annoyance for me. I’m guessing  Ebay is trying to “help me” provide a better buying experience for my customers.

Thanks for the Podcast.

@Jay &  @PBJelly I am another small potatoes seller who pulled out of Amazon over the last couple years. I was mostly dealing in retail arbitrage and books. Books were fun because it was a hybrid between eBay treasure hunting and big Amazon sales, but grew into an extreme amount of competition. Lots of scanning software and territorial sellers. More Amazon fees and regulations, which made it difficult to keep on top of and analyze as a hobby seller. Retail arbitrage was similar, but became harder to do as more brands began to assert their official Amazon presence and lock 3rd party sellers out of their items.

It was really lucrative while it lasted. I did 130K last year in gross sales and the year before that I was in the 200k of sellers. I made a lot of money, but I had grandfathered rights on a lot of brands. I don’t think opening an account today would afford someone the same benefits.

10/4/20 – 10/10/20
Total Items Listed (3 different IDs): 327
Items Sold: 5
Gross Sales (not incl shipping): $97.98
Highest Price Sold: $48 plus shipping – ‘80s military tiger stripe camouflage shirt (sold on a 20% off sale)
Returns:  0
New Items Listed: 33
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0

The total items listed numbers does not quite match up with listed and sold since eBay ended one listing for a violation and I had to delete a few listings of coins from one store because it’s being moved to Managed Payments. I called to ask for a waiver from eBay for the switch-over due to the coins but they said they’ll only waive it if the store is 90% or above in coins (or adult items, etc., that Managed Payments won’t accept “yet”). I didn’t get all those relisted elsewhere.

So I’m back up to three IDs:  a Basic Store, a Starter Store, and a non-store selling ID because both stores are Managed Payments. A very slow week for sales but I got more listing done than usual.

Some of the new listings last week were average condition, very common US silver coins at auction, starting at a little over the spot silver melt value for such coins. Auctions are a thing with coin collectors. There are many local auction houses that do coin auctions and many eBay coin categories have more auctions than BIN listings. They all ended last night and all sold, with a few pleasant surprises. Mostly low dollar, but easy to list and ship.

@Ryanne – Just listened to the podcast. To offer a refund without a case being opened up, go to the Orders page. Click on the pull down menu to the left of the sale (the one that has print shipping label, cancel order, etc.) and select “send refund”. You will find that the process is very similar to PayPal.

Sept. 27 – Oct. 3

• Total Items in Store: 4,013
• Items Sold: 25
• Total Sales :  $581
  • * WAY BELOW yearly average of $1,013
• Highest Price:  $100 (Vintage Bentley & Simon Religious Clergy Choir Robe)
• Average Price:  $23
• Returns:  1
• Cost of Goods Sold:  $22
• Costs of Goods Purchased this Week:  $452
• Number of New Items Listed this Week: 50

I’m a little late posting my numbers this week. Steph and I took a trip to Black Water Falls in West Virginia. Working for ourselves allowed us to take our trip in the middle of the week which was so nice since the crowds weren’t crazy. It was perfect!

Sales were quite slow this time around. I, too, think it has a lot to do with the political atmosphere that we’re dealing with. I’m really hoping whatever outcome we have that things will quiet down and sales will pop back up after all the dust settles.

I had a few good scores while scavenging. The online auction I mentioned last week was a success. I got a whole bunch of cuckoo clock parts that seem to do quite well. I also landed a Singer sewing machine with the cabinet and treadle from 1919. It seems to be in decent condition and just needs a new belt. I also went to a live auction and got a van full of a wide assortment of stuff. Lots of good treasures in that load, but the best was a machinist cabinet absolutely packed full of machinist instruments and doohickies. I should make back what I spent on the whole auction with that one lot.