Always love a good Carhartt jacket sale. The more distressed, the better!
Scavenger Life Episode 294: Finding the Valuable Caches and Going All In
In our career of scavenging, nothing is more exciting than finding a Cache. What’s a cache? It’s that huge box of items that you buy for one price at an auction or thrift store. Different caches we’ve found are grocery carts of old pens, boxes of pottery, piles of military clothing, rolls of fabric, buckets of old nails, treasure troves of trucker hats. Usually no one wants these items because it’s too much of one thing. Someone just wants to get rid of them and that’s good! This means it’s cheap! Martin over at Garbage Finds recently talked about boxes of perfume he’s found in the trash and is selling for big money.
The huge lot of items is always overwhelming and takes up too much space space, but if you are determined and methodical, then you’ll be making a ton of money over time. We call it “making a new pipeline”. These items usually sell slowly because we price them at what they’re worth. We can make several hundred dollars a month over several years. It’s the slow dime vs the fast nickel in action. So paying $20 for a box of military clothing might pay our electric bill for months and months.
In other news, we set up our payroll system to pay our first W-2 employee using Square. $30/month and the service takes care of withholding/ paying all taxes to State and Feds. It was scary and overwhelming at first, but setting up payroll has been easy and uncomplicated. There are plenty of other online services that do the same thing.
Couple of good conversations on the forum:
—Discussion about how to handle credit card charge backs and buyers claiming items didn’t arrive. The answer is always “look at the tracking”. If it says Delivered, you’re in the clear.
–Stuff My Mom Threw Away talked about the tension of being a minimalist and eBay seller. We also own very little stuff, but you wouldn’t know it if you walked into our house and saw piles of unlisted inventory. I think that tension is good because we never let these piles disappear into our house. That’s when you become a hoarder.
We had another solid week of sales on eBay. Hope you had a good week!
Join the conversation in the forum>>
Our Store Week January 15-21, 2017
Store #1
Total Items in Store: 5317
Items Sold: 42
Cost of Items Sold: $105
Total Sales: $1,839.84
Highest Price Sold: $200 (vintage guitar pedal)
Average Price Sold: $38.33
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 90
———-
Bonanza/Trugether:
Sold 2 items for $75 (jacket, vtg markers)
———-
Store #2
Total Items in Store: 963
Items Sold: 7
Cost of Items Sold: $12
Total Sales: $279.47
Highest Price Sold: $70 (Vintage military backpack)
Average Price Sold: $39.92
Returns: 0
Number of items listed this week: 0
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What Sells On eBay: Record stands, Lava Lamp, Jackets, 1933 Chicago Worlds Fair Lamp, Hot plate
Love that a hot plate/warming tray sold. We had to get some for when we had no kitchen during our house renovation and they were not cheap!
Scavenger Life Episode 293: How To Hire Your First Employee
This week we had a good meeting with our accountant to discuss hiring an employee and other things we want to do this year for our business. We cannot stress enough how helpful it is to have a knowledgeable person in business on our side. Since we’ve formed a relationship with his small accounting firm, he meets us for free and makes sure we’re doing things correctly when it comes to paperwork and taxes. It’s one small business helping another small business.
We took the big step towards hiring our first W-2 employee. The girl whose been taking photos/listing has become so valuable to us that we want to make her feel like she has some stability in our job. We worked with her since November and know that her help makes us money and our life easier.
- The IRS has a good summary of how to determine if your help can be paid as a 1099 contractor or W-2 employee.
- The Small Business Administration has a good workflow of how to hire your first employee.
- We’re using the online service, Square, to help manage her hours/pay + file the right paperwork each month with the State/Feds. There are a lot of online services that do payroll which is a huge benefit. It’s all done online. Our accountant says he could do it for us, but just laughed when he found out that Square does it for only $30 a month.
- We decided to pay her $12/hr. It’ll be about $13/hr after paying employment taxes. She was psyched when we offered her this pay because it’s a good rate in our area. We promised 15 flexible hours each week which is perfect for her since she’s still in college. We could certainly offer her much less, but it’s a good business move for us. We want her to come motivated and to stick around as long as she enjoys the work. We need her more than she needs us!
- Here’s a good link to how the US is built on small businesses. Interestingly most small businesses are sole proprietorships. You don’t have to make it complicated to open up shop.
Overall it’s a fairly simple process. Just took us time to learn and ask questions.
We had a good week on eBay. Hope these sales continue till the summer.
Here is a link to Ryanne’s Screenshots of the eBay Returns Program Beta.
We slashed our prices on Amazon to get rid of our inventory. Turns out if you sell stuff for super cheap, people will buy it! Unless we find a special kind of inventory for FBA, our Amazon experiment is over. Fun while it lasted.
Good conversations on the forum this week. Here’s a good thread debating what to do when another seller copies your listing on eBay.
And lastly, say congratulations to Nandry, the Teen Thrifter. She’s getting married to her high school sweet heart. You can listen to the interview we did with her here. She’s so smart and hard working that we know she has a bright future.
Join the conversation in the forum>>
Our Store Week January 8-14, 2017
Store #1
Total Items in Store: 5280
Items Sold: 60
Cost of Items Sold: $120
Total Sales: $1,985.50
Highest Price Sold: $200 (two vintage wool rugs)
Average Price Sold: $33.09
Returns: 4
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $20
Number of items listed this week: 180
———-
Bonanza/Trugether:
Sold 0 items for $0
———-
Store #2
Total Items in Store: 970
Items Sold: 7
Cost of Items Sold: $13
Total Sales: $290.97
Highest Price Sold: $125 (Set of framed prints)
Average Price Sold: $41.56
Returns: 0
Number of items listed this week: 0
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What Sells On eBay: Tori Richard Harley shirt, Candle stick, Alabama sweatshirt, Danner boots, Turntables
Love those Danner boots! A great brand to keep an eye out for.
Scavenger Life Episode 292: Busy Scavenger Week
It’s been a busy week. We shipped over 100 items that sold during the two weeks we were on holiday vacation. And now we’re just starting to get some returns from people who say items didn’t fit, etc. One of the items is the $1600 necklace we sold, so listen in to hear how we’re dealing with it. Easy come, easy go. There’s no crying in scavenging.
As mentioned before, we found another way to lower our monthly expenses. First we lowered our cell phone bill. Then we cut our monthly internet bill in half just by asking. Now we’ve lowered our insurance.
Car insurance for two people on two old cars: $404 (was $759) SAVED $355
Our home: $394 (was $631) Saved $237
Rental #1: $403 (was $667) Saved $264
Rental #2: $987 (was $1180) Saved $193 (This house is farther from the volunteer fire station so insurance is more)
YEARLY SAVINGS: $1049
The easiest way to lower our rates was to raise our deductible. Our home had a $100 deductible! We changed it to $10,000. We’re good savers and are willing to bear the risk if a problem occurs that’s under $10k. Why pay more each year so we can make a claim for a broke window? We’ll fix our own window if it breaks (and it probably won’t)! We just need insurance if the whole house burns down. MMM explains the strategy here. This savings is a house payment.
It’s also tax time for us. We like to get our numbers done early, turned in, and paid off. We already have an appointment with our accountant this week. Here’s a quick rundown of how we prepare our profit/expenses for him.
If you sell on Amazon FBA, long term storage fees start February 17. We’ll be paying an extra $400 to keep our stuff in their warehouses. Here’s a good thread on why Amazon isn’t a good match for our way of scavenging.
Hope you had a good week!
Join the conversation in the forum>>
Our Store Week January 1-7, 2017
Store #1
Total Items in Store: 5129
Items Sold: 32
Cost of Items Sold: $65
Total Sales: $1,406.20
Highest Price Sold: $150 (Bike Racing Jersey)
Average Price Sold: $43.94
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $8
Number of items listed this week: 0
———-
Bonanza/Trugether:
Sold 1 items for $24
———-
Store #2
Total Items in Store: 974
Items Sold: 8
Cost of Items Sold: $15
Total Sales: $320.07
Highest Price Sold: $86 (Blue jeans)
Average Price Sold: $40
Returns: 0
Number of items listed this week: 0
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What Sells On eBay: Souvenir photo, Easy Bake Oven, Civil War Reenactment boots, Under dash 8 Track Deck, Coffee pots
One of Steve’s highest sales was a pair of $100 Civil War Reenactment boots. We too have sold some of these items- pants, belts, holsters. People really look for that stuff on ebay!
Scavenger Life Episode 291: Our New Years Trash Elf Goals
Happy New Year y’all! The perfect time to talk about your goals for the next twelve months. Some of our goals include super fun things like paying off debt and figuring out how to properly hire our assistant. What are yours?
We mentioned that we got a Paypal Working Capital loan to help us finish our renovation project. It took less than 10 minutes to get a quote and then the loan itself. Amazing and so helpful for small businesses like ours.
Thanks to all who have given donations to help keep the blog up and running. We recently upgraded the server and hired someone to maintain the site monthly.
Remember that it’s the new quarter for buying eBay shipping supplies. Thanks to Dave for the handy tool Where’s The Coupon, you can get an email the moment you can buy supplies and a direct link to your coupon as well.
Join the conversation on the forum>>
Our Store Week Dec 25-31, 2016
- Store #1
- Total Items in Store: 5158
- Items Sold: 44
- Cost of Items Sold: $290
- Total Sales: $3,048.84
- Highest Price Sold: $1600 (Necklace)
- Average Price Sold: $69.29
- Returns: 0
- Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $75
- Number of items listed this week: 0
- ———-Bonanza:
- Sold 2 items for $50
- ———-
- Store #2
- Total Items in Store: 982
- Items Sold: 3
- Cost of Items Sold: $1
- Total Sales: $60.58
- Highest Price Sold: $28 (Vintage Patch)
- Average Price Sold: $20.27
- Returns: 0
- Number of items listed this week: 0
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What Sells On eBay: Colt Pistol grips, John Deere hat, Candle Snuffer, Star Wars books on tape
Vintage Star Wars stuff is always a big seller on eBay, but right now with the new movie, people are on the lookout!
Scavenger Life Episode 290: Experimenting with your eBay Store
We love the new Scavenger Life forums because of the ideas/claims that other sellers have about their eBay business. But many times sellers don’t have much actual data to back up their hypotheses (a theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and can be successfully repeated). So we like to run little experiments with our eBay store to see if we can improve, make our life easier, and hopefully earn more money.
Experiment #1: Free Shipping
We started this experiment last week when we put free shipping on over 1300 items. Most of these items are under 1lb. We raised each item by 10% so the total cost hasn’t really changed from the original price + calculated shipping. For the past 14 days we have seen no increase in sales on these items.
We’re going to let this experiment keep running, but we feel “free shipping” can’t hurt, but it also doesn’t turn on the spigot for increased sales. It’s just something you do to make yourself feel better to give you the illusion of control. Further data will bear out our hypothesis.
Experiment #2: Pay More for better quality items
There’s a common assumption that if you pay more for better quality items, you’ll work less and make the same amount of money. Instead of buying $1 items that will sell for $30, spend $25 on items that will sell for $100.
The issue of course is that there’s no guarantee that more expensive items will sell quickly and for as much as you think. It’s also not easy to find these higher end items that are not already priced close to their market value. Also, depending on eBay for a full time income means you must be able to consistently find and sell these high dollar items week in and week out.
This week we bought three items for $25 that we hope to sell quickly for $100 each. Stay tuned.
Experiment #3: The “I want my own selling platform” experiment
Every so often we get a seller who makes the case that just focusing on eBay/Amazon is a bad idea since you’re at the mercy of these corporations. The argument is that it would be a smart idea to put your items on your own website and sell directly to customers. You control everything and make all the money.
The problem is that we’ve never directly spoken to a seller who’s actually taken the time to do this and was willing to share their cost/profit. It takes work, and you still have to pay someone else to host your store.
So we tried to open a Shopify store. They have a two-week free trial period which is nice. They have an app that sucked in all our eBay listings. But our listings were all duplicated. Plus, they didn’t pull in all the info for each listing. Plus, they don’t sync with our eBay store when things sell. When we called Shopify, they said their importer wasn’t perfect and we’d have to update each of the 5000 listings by hand. Or we could pay for a third-party app that could import the items correctly, which tells us that Shopify isn’t a platform we’re comfortable with if they can’t do the simple stuff correctly. Mike from Atlanta had similar experiences and suggested that there are more expensive platforms to test.
If anyone has data from their own experiments, please share in the forum.
Terri pointed out that Shipping rates on all the carriers go up again in 2017. Still cheaper for us to print labels at home than go to the Post Office.
It was a slower week for us maybe because Christmas buying season is done and because we extended our handling time to fifteen days while we’re in NYC/Boston. Hope your week was good!
Join the conversation in the forum>>
Our Store Week Dec 18-24, 2016
- Store #1
- Total Items in Store: 5194
- Items Sold: 29
- Cost of Items Sold: $40
- Total Sales: $781.02
- Highest Price Sold: $52 (Pendleton Poster)
- Average Price Sold: $26.93
- Returns: 0
- Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $200
- Number of items listed this week: 40
- ———-Bonanza:
- Sold 0 items for $0
- ———-
- Store #2
- Total Items in Store: 984
- Items Sold: 8
- Cost of Items Sold: $15
- Total Sales: $310.71
- Highest Price Sold: $120 (Vintage Bell Bottoms)
- Average Price Sold: $38.83
- Returns: 0
- Number of items listed this week: 0
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