Steve seems to be the king of being able to find and sell blank audio cassette tapes at a great price. Keep it up!
Scavenger Life Episode 275: When Do You Scavenge?
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Hey ya’ll, we just landed in San Francisco after traveling all day, but we were able to record the podcast this morning before we left. So I’ll keep it short, as the time zone difference is catching up to us (Jay is snoring as I write this).
Links we talked about-
- The article Flim sent us, Why It’s Nearly Impossible To Stop This Amazon and eBay Scheme
- eBay’s 5 day return policy in writing
- B-Rock mentioned the 401k program for self-employed people. It’s called the Solo 401k.
Hope you had a good week.
Our Store Week Sept 4-10, 2016
- Store #1
- Total Items in Store: 4,142
- Items Sold: 42
- Cost of Items Sold: $90
- Total Sales: $1,564.00
- Highest Price Sold: $160 (jewelry)
- Average Price Sold: $37.23
- Returns: 0
- Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $60
- Number of items listed this week: 40
- Amazon FBA Store
- Number of items sold: 11
- Amazon total sales: $210.94
- Amazon FBA Fees, COGS, Returns, Shipping: $100.99
- Net profit after COGS: $109.99
- Sold 0 items for 0
- Store #2
- Total Items in Store: 1066
- Items Sold: 12
- Cost of Items Sold: $37
- Total Sales: $500.91
- Highest Price Sold: $200 (sink)
- Average Price Sold: $41.74
- Returns: 0
- Number of items listed this week: 0
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Bonanza:
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What Sells On eBay: Mathes Cooler Fan, Ray Charles Program, Libbey Glass Mugs, One Lone Ferragamo.
What a great sale in that Mathes Cooler fan. Never seen one of those, but they sell for great prices. And of course, you gotta love the one lone Ferragamo sale.
Scavenger Life Episode 274: We Don’t Care About eBay Watchers
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Each of us runs our own store using different techniques. One thing we do is ignore if a listed item has watchers or not. All we do is research the item, list it, and then wait for the right buyer. Every year or so we go through older items to see if they can be tweaked, but we know our items are long tail so just need time.
Why do we ignore the number of watchers on an item? What if an older item has ZERO watchers? Shouldn’t that tell us that we’ve done something wrong?
Let’s look at the numbers.
This week we sold 35 items.
11 of those items had zero watchers.
Most of those items have been listed more than a year.
So that’s more than 25% of our sold items with no watchers, selling at full price.
If we had stared at the number of watchers, fretted and second guessed ourselves, then we may have ended up selling items at a fire sale because we might think no one wanted our stuff.
We have a healthy amount of items with large numbers of watchers that haven’t been bought in over a year. If so many people are watching an item, why doesn’t someone pull the trigger? Who knows. What we do know is that someone will eventually buy it. And as long as items are selling each day, it doesn’t really matter what item it is.
This week we mentioned the following links in the podcast:
- Shane sent us this article about “fast fashion”. Some companies are putting out new clothing lines every other week, creating a huge stream of unwanted clothes. The US is sending millions of tons of good clothes to the landfill because of the lack of demand.
- The eBay 2016 Fall Seller Update is out . Make sure you read it. Takes about ten minutes but keeps you up to date on the small changes eBay is making. These updates come every Fall and Spring.
Hope you had a good week. Happy Labor Day, Trash Elves.
Our Store Week August 28-Sept 3, 2016
- Store #1
- Total Items in Store: 4,173
- Items Sold: 35
- Cost of Items Sold: $587
- Total Sales: $2,229.32
- Highest Price Sold: $1000 (artwork)
- Average Price Sold: $63.69
- Returns: 2
- Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $50
- Number of items listed this week: 42
- Amazon FBA Store
- Number of items sold: 16
- Amazon total sales: $592.60
- Amazon FBA Fees, COGS, Returns, Shipping: $209.81
- Net profit after COGS: $382.79
- Sold 3 items for $80
- Store #2
- Total Items in Store: 1080
- Items Sold: 5
- Cost of Items Sold: $10
- Total Sales: $141.96
- Highest Price Sold: $40 (vintage leather purse)
- Average Price Sold: $28.39
- Returns: 0
- Number of items listed this week: 0
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Bonanza:
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What Sells On eBay: Pizza Oven, Mid Century Percolator, Telefunken Radio, Wrangler Denim
Always a cornucopia of interesting sales from Steve. Check out those vintage Telefunken radios (amazing name, should totally be a Kraftwerk cover band). Some go for upwards of $1000!
Scavenger Life Episode 273: What’s Your eBay Emergency Plan?
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Cyndi of Amazing*Taste said that her ebay partner/ husband had to go to the hospital last week. As far as we know he’s fine, but she did bring up a good question: what would you do if your eBay partner is out of commission? Could you still run the business alone? Or if you already work solo, how would things work if you couldn’t list and ship?
We certainly depend on each other. Each of us does certain tasks each day to keep the store running. Ryanne could more easily take control of the business herself but at much less volume. Jay would have a learning curve when it came to shipping. Our business certainly would change if one of us got sick.
But if you do depend on eBay for your income, it would be wise to have an emergency plan if something did happen. Maybe find a family member and teach them to ship. Definitely try to put enough away in savings so your expenses would be covered for at least three months. Selling on eBay is living without a safety net unless you build the net yourself. There is no sick leave on eBay.
This week we also discussed an interesting conversation going on in the Retail Arbitrage world on Amazon. Cynthia wrote a blog post that warned that Amazon may be ending the ability to sell retail arbitrage. This means no more going to Walmart, buying out the discounted items, and sending them into FBA. She backed it up with sources and her logic. But then Ryan from Online Selling Experiment (who we interviewed several years ago) responded with a well-reasoned argument why Amazon would continue to let you send in items you buy at retail stores.
The bone of contention is the fear that Amazon thinks that retail arbitrage items are often discounted, clearance items that are not in new condition. Because sellers say they are new, customers are returning these items more frequently and having a bad experience. No one knows for sure what will happen, but it is interesting conspiracy theories are not just in the eBay community. It would be a game changer for many FBA sellers.
For us, we continue to sell used items on Amazon and have learned to list the as such. If Amazon did stop allowing “like new” items to be shipped into FBA, I can only see this as a good thing for eBay since those used items would be sold there. Ryan did say that Target no longer allows him to buy up all their discounted items in huge lots. Not sure if this is nationwide or just his local store.
- We also mentioned some seller’s issues with VERO claims. Please educate yourself on this because eBay does not fool around with accidentally selling counterfeit items on designer labels. Often these claims can be made in error and can still cause headaches fighting it.
- Check out our post this week on how to make your listings mobile friendly This is an evolving situation as eBay slowly tries to get us all to improve the look of our items online. We’re always keeping an eye out on the new practical tweaks.
Hope you had a good week!
Our Store Week August 21-27, 2016
- Store #1
- Total Items in Store: 4,171
- Items Sold: 28
- Cost of Items Sold: $53
- Total Sales: $1,201.60
- Highest Price Sold: $150 (Small wool rug)
- Average Price Sold: $42.91
- Returns: 0
- Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $250
- Number of items listed this week: 62
- Amazon FBA Store
- Number of items sold: 9
- Amazon total sales: $161.56
- Amazon FBA Fees: $77.45
- COGS (shipment to FBA included): $20
- Net profit after COGS: $64.11
- Sold 1 items for $20
- Store #2
- Total Items in Store: 1088
- Items Sold: 12
- Cost of Items Sold: $15
- Total Sales: $332.89
- Highest Price Sold: $40 (vintage wall calendar)
- Average Price Sold: $27.74
- Returns: 0
- Number of items listed this week: 0
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Bonanza:
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Are Your eBay Listings Mobile Friendly?
Thanks to a tip by Jamie, you can use eBay’s Mobile Friendly Test with any of your item numbers to see if they’re up to snuff for people shopping with Androids, iPhones, Tablets etc. None of our listings were passing the test, despite having recently transformed them all into plain text with no active content or html. The great thing is, it’s easy to bulk edit their code right into your listings, just follow the tutorial above posted by fellow eBayer Mesha Travesser.
The most obvious question is why aren’t listings generated on the eBay website that just use plain text passing this mobile friendly test? The asnwer is: I have no idea. This is clearly a run-up to when eBay discontinues the ability to put active content into your descriptions. They want every description to be pure, plain text for mobile users. Hopefully, next year this code will automatically be part of their internal code for all listings. But for now, it won’t take long to bulk edit, so you might as well give it a try!
What Sells On eBay: Dickies Denim Jacket, Shot Bags on TrueGether, Technics Turntable
Some real bread and butter sales from Steve this week (us too). Always keep an eye out for the elusive Canoe Muffin flatware!
Scavenger Life Episode 272: How Much $ Should You Risk On Your Inventory?
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When we started selling on eBay in 2008, we had no idea what we were doing. If there were online tutorials or Youtube videos about eBay, we didn’t know about them. There were the eBay Forums, but they were mainly full of negative stories of how eBay was actively trying to destroy sellers. (It never made sense to us that people were selling on the platform if they actually believed this.)
So because we were ignorant, we were looking for a low risk way to begin. This meant we chose to spend very little on our inventory. We found local church thrift stores overflowing with donations that had “bag day” sales to move their inventory. We found yard sales with many items for under $1 because people just wanted the stuff gone. We found auctions where entire households were sold off in a couple hours, and we could buy boxes of stuff for under $10. We found estate sales that discount 75%+ on the last day, allowing us to fill our car for the cost of a meal.
This is why we called ourselves Scavengers because we often were buying the items that no one else wanted. But this didn’t mean these items were worthless. If we did the research and put these items in the right context so the right buyers would find them, we could make serious money. We became very good at selling something for $30+ that we bought for $1 or less. And every month we would even sell items for over $100 that cost us just as little.
Since we’ve always been frugal and rarely go out to eat in restaurants, we always have $30 to spend on inventory. We’ve never wanted to buy an item and not had the money. We’ve never been in the position of needing to liquidate inventory so we could have more cash to buy more items. We’ve never put inventory costs on credit cards. This is how we discovered our “list it and forget it” strategy. It doesn’t matter to us when any particular item sells, as long as something sell each day. We learned that if we had a large enough inventory, then items do sell every day. Our experience since 2008 has proved our strategy to be effective.
Time is our big investment. It takes time to take a pile of “junk” and figure out the value of each item. Takes time to photograph. Takes time to write a proper description that will attract the right buyer. This is certainly much more work than just scanning and sending into Amazon, but the profit margins are incredible with very low risk.
One question we’re always asked is: “If you could buy an item for $50 and make $500 quickly, wouldn’t you do it?” Of course! But we find these opportunities very rare. Could you jump in your car right now, go to a thrift store or auction, and buy up these miracle $50 items that will sell for $500? For some reason, people are willing to give away items worth $30, but items worth $200+ have too much value to just let go. We do find these deals from time to time, but they’re rare for us.
Some sellers really know a particular niche and have learned to pay big money for lots of specific items. They know how to part out the gear, or refurbish it, or simply know the items true value. They may pay $1000 for a box of items, knowing they can make $5000. Knowing a niche deeply is a real advantage.
Our point is simply that not spending much money on inventory takes one less stress out of running a business. Your miles may vary.
Here are the links we mentioned in the podcast:
–This is the blue tooth scanner we just bought to scan books for Amazon:
KDC200i
—Chris the Dollar Flipper sent us a link to this video of a kooky eBay seller.
Our Store Week August 14-20, 2016
- Store #1
- Total Items in Store: 4,134
- Items Sold: 32
- Cost of Items Sold: $55
- Total Sales: $1,315.81
- Highest Price Sold: $175 (Golf Bag)
- Average Price Sold: $41.11
- Returns: 0
- Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $25
- Number of items listed this week: 80
- Amazon FBA Store
- Number of items sold: 16
- Amazon total sales: $209.35
- Amazon FBA Fees: $71.31
- COGS (shipment to FBA included): $25
- Net profit after COGS: $113.04
- Sold 0 items for 0
- Store #2
- Total Items in Store: 1104
- Items Sold: 2
- Cost of Items Sold: $3
- Total Sales: $139.99
- Highest Price Sold: $100 (vintage lamp)
- Average Price Sold: $69.99
- Returns: 0
- Number of items listed this week: 0
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Bonanza:
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
What Sells On eBay: Black & Decker Space Saver Coffee Maker, Vintage Rotary Telephone, Sony Trinitron Mini TV
Such cool sales this week from Steven Schultz. As he shows, you have to look out for those Black & Decker Space Saver Coffee Makers, especially if they have the mounting hardware.
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