-
Search Results
-
Thanks Steve. I love Donna Summer!
Dropping in to say I just love those moments when you are sourcing and can’t decide on something so you look it up and then solds come up over $100. And you’re like “whoa!” and then grab it and run to pay.
Bolo this 1980s Nancy Thomas folk art https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=nancy+thomas+folk+art&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1 I just pick up 6 of these plaques at Goodwill for $3.99 each. The first one (October) sold even though it’s all rusted and scratched up.
In reply to: Any Luck with Bakeware?
Omg. icequeen, I recently gave away a ginormous contractors bag of Tupperware. I have never liked Tupperware, did not like going to demonstrations, did not like drinking out of plastic cups, eating out of those plastic plates, etc. lol. When I look at some of the prices that stuff goes for! I know some was valuable, I just did not want it around.
Thanks for the bolos though. I’ll look out for some of the Star Wars stuff for sure.
Wow! Nice job on the game! (as I add Big Trouble In Little China” to my BOLO list….)
If you happen to have a Michael’s near you check out their shipping supplies. The Duck brand is on clearance which I found next to the framing department. I purchased some 14x14x14 boxes for $1 and bubble mailers for $.50. I know if you buy bulk you probably get a better price, but I’m not there yet. They also had tape and bubble wrap but it wasn’t as good of a deal.
By the way.. A search on Worthpoint brings up over 4,000 items. The angels go for $1,500. 1,100 of the items listed go for over $150 to $175 all mostly home decor made out of various hammered metal techniques. Certainly a BOLO item. Look for the small button medallion welded on each item.
mike – MDCGFA
Great sale on that turntable, Steven! That was super convenient to have all of the original packing components. I had a really good week last week. Here are some highlights…
I bought this WW2 helmet liner from an online auction for a dollar. It was included with a pole lamp that I was really looking to buy. I didn’t think much of it until I went to list it and did some research. Prices for these things are all over the map. When that happens and I don’t have a lot of knowledge about something, I usually set it up for auction. I started it out at $75 and it sold for $160. Way better than I expected!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/303479689614I bought a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner at a yard sale for only $15 because the lady couldn’t remember if it worked or not. It didn’t to no surprise, but I knew I could sell the parts. And they’ve been steadily selling. This top face cover part sold for $20. So far I’ve sold almost $100 in parts and I’ve got a lot more to go.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/303476344272Here was an unfortunate learning experience of why I should listen to my gut instead of big sold numbers. This Hudson Bay blanket was up for auction. I knew about HB, but I wanted to quickly check some comps before they started. Past solds were showing $400+ on these things. So I bid it up to $225 and won. Later I found out that sold prices greatly depend on the number of “fingers” these blankets have. Mine was of the lower end variety in terms of worth. I did manage to sell it for $210 after a long time. Lesson learned, don’t bet big if you don’t have enough knowledge.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/303050966516In contrast to the blanket, here’s my big winner of the week. I acquired this nice framed 1920s chocolate advertising print at an auction for $100. I trusted my gut with this one and it paid off! It sold a few days after listing it for $500!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/303493200788Here’s a quick BOLO for everyone. I run across these McMaster-Carr catalogs every now and then. They’re about 3 inches thick with tissue thin pages full of illustrations and information. They push out a new one every year, but people are after the old ones. This particular catalog dated 1994 and earned me $43. I’ve previously sold one from 1962 for $100. They’re easy money if you get them cheap enough.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/303302880407All small bread and butter sales for me except for one BOLO item which I sold for over 40% off for $60 – vintage Escada bolero blazers from the 80s/90s. The more heavily bedazzled the better. I could have held out longer and gotten closer to my initial asking price of $109 but after spending weeks moving my ebay office across the house, I just wanted to clear out as much inventory as possible. https://www.ebay.com/itm/264582055383
In reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 445: We Went To An Auction!
Loved hearing about that magazine cache! So excited for your future earnings, and what they’ll be able to accomplish for you. 🙂
Thanks for a great podcast. It was a bit jarring to hear my “name” but glad that what I’ve noticed is worth sharing. I’ve been following minimalists (relative minimalists? aspiring minimalists?) online for a while, and in the last year have been following a bunch of sewists and capsule wardrobe adherents. There are many shared motivations behind their purchasing choices – be more environmental; fight the social (and environmental – and mental, I should add) injustices of fast fashion; reduce their amount of clothing so that dressing is simpler & less of a daily chore; and go for fewer but better pieces of clothing. FWIW, a bolo with this crowd are current brands that are going the extra mile WRT the above considerations (Madewell, Everlane, Eileen Fisher), as well as natural fibers and well made items. There is a lot of recycling/upcycling of good fibers into new items (linen tablecloths into shirts, eg). I imagine that this is still a very small proportion of the population though.
Had a great sales day today, with an auction of vintage LEGO pieces and partial sets going for $370. I had started to try and put sets together, saw that there were missing baseplates, realized I didn’t have the time it would take to sort it and figure out what was what, so lotted it all up and put it on auction. Was a little worried when the bid this morning was around $70, and I was expecting in the $300 range. So, spot on when the hammer fell, and so grateful. Will see how that looks in next week’s overall #s.
Last week’s # dipped a bit from the previous week, some of it due to my solds including commission items that I’ll have to pay out on. Holding steady around #s of items sold and amount earned over the last year – averaging around $500/wk, 15-20 items. Would like to bump it up, of course, but perhaps that is showing me what a natural baseline is for 1/2-3/4 time work at my pace and input. Burned out a bit on estate sales in recent months, but hope to get back to yard sales in the Spring, and travel for some auctions/thrifting in coming weeks. Need a change of scenery, and a boost of eBay-vation.
1/5/20 – 1/11/20
Total Items In Store: 781
Items Sold: 19
Net Sales (Total Sales – Selling Costs): $553.86 – 129.48 in commission sales
Highest Sold Price: $75 Vintage LL Bean Plaid Wool Blanket
Average Sold Price: $29.15
Cost of Items Sold: $21.98
Returns/Refunds: $0
Money Spent on New Inventory Last Week: $0
Number of Items listed last week: 10 or soYou bet Sonia. No harm, no foul. I too didn’t mean for anything to be negative. Actually I started out with the link that referenced the clothing industry in general and the impact of China and the diminishing market. Hope you read the article the link went too.
It made us well aware that we were glad to have given up on the used clothing market years ago, other than a few shoes, hats and couple of coats.
Check that article out. I just wanted clothing people to think about that market a little more broadly and longer range, than buying an item from a BOLO list or from what a YouTuber Hauler may post.
Then as far as BOLO’s go sure doesn’t hurt to have a reference list, but in my art and art print market and Asian Home Decor we seem to well guided from our own Master of Fine Art Degree, 35 years in the printing and art publishing industry and years of reading Kovel’s Antique Pricing Guide and studying their web site. Then we throw in enough general stuff as we see fit. Like my wife used to say at our Antique Booths, we need to have something for the kid’s too! 🙂
mc @ mdcgfa
Mike, thanks for your polite and thoughtful response. You say you didn’t comment on BOLO lists, but you responded with a strong “Amen” to the post/comment on BOLO lists, laziness and incompetence. I guess that was not your intention, but that’s the way it read to me. Anyway, my comment on positivity/negativity was not made in response to just one comment/post by you or anybody, but to what has become a string of comments whose focus seems to be on how stupid and lazy and wrong-minded many clothing resellers apparently are, and I found it quite a downer, particularly since I do and/or support some of the “lazy” and “wrong” things that were mentioned, and they work for me. Re: your J&R-based BOLO list – I’m totally with you on that one; wouldn’t be where I am now without it.
Sonia.. I didn’t comment on BOLO lists.
My reference to the clueless and blind, was a personal experience sharing what I heard and observed at a family gathering of people talking about doing online selling and yes, they were clueless to the process, sharing tons of mis-information and guidance suggestions.
I apologize if the wording of how I shared that experience here on SL bothered you, but it doesn’t change the fact of what I saw, heard and my opinion of it. That group was the epitome of running off about things they were clueless about and yes, they were all blind to the facts of how to do it, about Ebay and Etsy polocies and had no idea on how any type of business runs.
The overall point then, is still, know what you are doing, do your research on how to run a business, how the platforms work before quitting your day job thinking you will replace a full time job in a short amount of time. I know you know how much work is involved in doing what we all do.
But again, didn’t mean to be ugly about it. Out of my almost 800 posts here on SL, almost always, I have shared tons of positive information on how to do things. Enough that I could probably write a small book on how to accomplish buying, sourcing, art recognition, seeing color, packing, handling bad customers, etc., etc.
So, think I may have a little leway on expressing my opinion, and that is just what it is, on what I saw and heard from a group that had no idea or factual information about the subject of online selling. Wish you could have been there. I just went outside to get away from it.Oh, and I said I too do follow a couple of YouTubers that do provide good information. AND, do you know what I think is one of the best BOLO Lists anybody could ever have… Just listen to over 10 years of JamdR and enter into a spread sheet every what sold item and the top dollar they got for it. I did that for 1 complete year about 5 or 6 years ago. Then sorted the list by category. Used that list for years. Had thousands of BOLO . What better list than items that sold for top dollar from all the SL members.
But, tis what it is.
BOLO lists only exist due to the laziness of resellers.
What some people call lazy, other people call efficient, or just a difference in preference. Personally, I prefer to watch several carefully chosen youtubers to learn about what styles and brands are “in” now, rather than doing lots of ebay solds searches and following fashion blogs. It’s much faster and a lot less boring for me.
I’ve enjoyed Scavenger Life for a number of years b/c the vibe here has always been positive, and all about “do whatever you find works for you”. Can we try to keep it that way? Calling people lazy, incompetent, clueless, blind – not helpful.
Online arbitrage only exists on Ebay due to the laziness and incompetence of many sellers on the platform. From bad pictures to incomplete descriptions. Bad keywords. Bad pricing.
BOLO lists only exist due to the laziness of resellers. If they just did their own research on Ebay solds/Terapeak/Worthpoint, there would be no need for BOLO lists. If resellers just went into stores and looked at what was for sale and determined on their own what a “good” item is without having to watch Youtube videos telling them, they wouldn’t need to watch the Youtube videos in the first place.
Sharing of information is fine if you’re a generalist seller, because you’re not dependent on one specific form of income. The clothing sellers are posting nonstop on where they source from, what brands they buy, how much they pay for items, how much they list them for, what venues they’re selling on. They are practically holding the hands of newbie sellers and begging them to do exactly what they do in the exact way they are doing so, and eager new sellers are like “okay, thanks, I’ll do exactly what you do because you’re a full-time seller making a lot of money!”
Yep.. and the same goes double for Fine Art. Can’t tell thew difference between something that is not worth the paper it is printed on and an original hand done piece. And in the case of art most times there is no brand [or artist known name] to even use to do research on.
We have covered a lot here on SL about trying to bridge that gap to some very basic degree, but that is a far cry from having 6 to 8 years of college specialty courses on art making, techniques, processes and art history background.
And one of the big points I was trying to emphasis that I gathered from the article is that on mass market clothing items, it is stating that since 2000 the desire and demand for used items made of cloth is diminishing. China has made “new” so cheap, that “used” has no demand. Why try to sell a man’s dress shirt for $9.95 or even $6.95 and have to pay for the Free Shipping when a buyer can get a new mans dress shirt for $2.65. Not talking about designer items, just plain cloth shirts. And as Almasty said, most sellers don’t know much about what they are selling, they just bought off of BOLO lists.
This also touches on a few discussions Jay has had where you can order something from China for a dollar and get free shipping to the states. And I have done it a few times myself and it gets here in a few days.
So take what you are saying, most don’t know **** from Shineola about what they are buying or selling and trying to sell it to a market that is going away to lower cost new. Then with Flash sales, and in the moment instant Trends, the Chinese produce billions of tons of clothes for pennies, create a quick trend, sell all they can in 6 to 12 weeks then dump everything else that is left over into the used recycle market and start the process over again.
I have personally seen barges of used, recyclable materials sitting in the Hudson River when we lived in Ct. and they couldn’t get rid of it. Everybody wants to say they recycle but that is just another way of saying put it in the trash. Yes some things get recycled, but most doesn’t.
Question to every SL Member, when you shop do you actually look for a re-cycled product on every item you buy, knowing in a lot of cases, it even costs more?
Sure many SL members do buy used items so it stays out of the landfills, but who checks to see if the used items are recycled items.
Jay has said it before, as a country we consume like crazy. We create trillions of tons of waste and now it seems it is getting harder to sell used stuff. And just recently someone here was saying the younger and younger people don’t even come to ebay.
Why would anybody other than a camera collector come to Ebay to buy an old used 35mm Film Camera other than a “camera collector”.But again these late posts were just in response to my reaction to that article, and is just a bunch of brain flash thoughts. But in the article it points out that this decline and the degree of the declines have spanned 10 years. None of us have that kind of time.
But we used to have some used clothes and bought them just like you said. Even still have a few pieces, but we have two mannequins we will be trying to sell locally and haven’t bought a piece of clothing in years. Why when that SL member I mentioned earlier will sell you any of their clothing, with a wide selection and variety, for $6-$9 with free shipping.
Even with Ryanne’s mother who taught/mentored Ryanne and was a heavy clothing reseller, is now at about 40% clothes and 60% other collectibles and hard goods and JandR out of their 8,400++ items are about 32% clothes. So what about the other 60% to 70% of both Ryanne and her mom’s store focus. Seems to be in other categories than clothing to me.
Jus been pondering all this type of stuff today and ceratainly have killed off time I should have been listing.
Oh, well..just babbling and wasting bandwidth.
mike at MDCGFA
Alright, as a very very very occasional clothing seller, here are my feelings in regards to most clothing dealers:
A lot of them have come into reselling by way of watching youtube videos. They don’t know the first thing about clothes. They wouldn’t know what’s popular, either vintage or modern, if they didn’t have BOLO lists shoved in their faces. They don’t know what 20 year-olds are wearing. They don’t know what 30 year-olds are wearing. As long as someone tells them what to look out for, they will create a mental checklist in their heads of these brands and lookout for them while looking through racks at the Goodwill.
Once they do find these brands, they don’t know the market well enough to know where to list these items. So, they cross-post. It doesn’t matter to them as long as they make a sale. Ebay, Poshmark, sure, whatever.
Once they have listed an item, they don’t know how to describe it. They can’t keyword it right, describe the condition well. Heck, they don’t even know how to properly clean the garment prior to selling. They don’t know how to display it well for photos. They just mimic what everyone else is doing, describe it incorrectly, price it incorrectly, and then complain when they don’t get sales because their gurus told them that those brands would be profitable, gosh darn it.
These people may be selling clothes, but they really have no clue what they’re doing. I think this could be extended to most resellers of most items, not just clothing. If an Ebay search, or an Amazon search, tells them to buy it, they buy it. They are not specialists, they don’t care to be. They are barely even generalists, they are just decent enough at data entry to enter a brand into the search on Ebay, photograph the item, ship it, and then move onto the next item. That’s all.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- …
- 119
- Next Page »