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I look to be on track to net about $19000+ after fees this year. I wish I did a better job tracking my time so I could figure out if this has really been worth the effort. I also freelance as my main income in IT and at least at the moment that pays me much more than that. I do prefer selling and shipping to doing IT work though since it is way less stressful (even with customer issues). I sell a lot of media items so it is pretty minimal effort and fairly minimum storage. I doubt I spend more than 10 hours per week on average, but I honestly have no idea. And on average being the key word because I had a week or two where I just listed a ton and that could have easily been 20-30 hours those weeks.
I really like what someone said about doubling the value of the thing you are selling as an “hourly rate”. Since I sold a bunch of cheap media items for $5-$10 in the beginning it definitely FELT like I was making less than $10/hour shipping those out. But more recently I have moved a little upstream when I can, had a $150 sale for some software last week and some other winners.
Still I’m curious what people’s threshold is for it being worth their time or not. Avg sale probably $22 right now. Thanks!
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I also do Ebay strictly as a side gig, and had a lot of similar concerns. I started tracking my time this fall so I could actually answer those questions. You could consider doing the same just for a few months to get a reality check. My net is something like $22-$24/hr, which is a living wage. But like you, I could make more by doing freelance work. I think “is it worth it?” is ultimately more of a subjective, personal question. For me, it’s right on the edge of “not worth it” so I’m trying to make some adjustments.
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I think you should start in 2019 keeping track of all the time you spend on eBay. It will also help direct you to “avoid” some harder to list/pack items that aren’t that high of a profit.
$47.67 CAD (converts to $35.60 US) is what we are averaging per hour of work this year.
I did not track how much I made an hour for 15 years – only the last 5 and it really helps to show what items are a time waster and what items are more profitable.
I would not avoid all the small $5-$10 profit items – some of them are simple to list/re-list and ship quickly.
Building a good understanding of my “hourly rate” has been the basis of my movement to full-time in the future. It gives you a good understanding of what you can do alone vs. working for someone else, as long as you can scale it over more items.
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It includes unsold inventory, but not net of taxes – that’s a little more complicated to give a straight number as I will have to combine my eBay income with my job income, my wife’s income, etc.
It gets pretty complicated, but I use the number to compare my pre-tax income of my job against it, and that I will be in a much different tax bracket when I go full-time, and where I will be moving has different income tax rates provincially.
It would be a good exercise for me to fill out a tax form this year without my job’s income to see what I would be paying out in income taxes, and what credits I could get back.
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Some context on my numbers:
-491.6 hours combined this year between my wife and I – that is about equal to one person working full-time for 3 months. Will see how scaleable this number is…
-We shop together often, saving time at stores by splitting up where we look – a single scavenger would need more time to look for items at the same location.
-we feel we left around $500 on the table by not having a subscription/store this year until this week.This year is my best year by far – however, we are becoming better year over year. 5 years ago, I was at just over $25 CAD an hour of work – therefore, through 5 years we’ve doubled our income per hour. Now the challenge is to scale that to 2000+ hours, and keep getting the hourly rate up if possible.
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Thanks Inglewood, that’s super interesting. Our numbers seem pretty comparable. I worked 450 hours this year and my hourly rate is in the same range.
I simply do the post tax numbers by taking my item profit and slicing off my marginal rate. So I consider my day job to “use up” the lower tax brackets as it were. I can see how it’ll get a bit more complicated when you go full time!
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@sidehustlershane Nice job on the $19k! Now – is that net of unsold inventory cost?
I would definitely track hours. It’s really key info when you’re strategizing what kind of stuff to buy. I’m not super formal about it but every day or two I log the approximate # of hours for the past couple days in my sheet.
Personally I would NOT try to code hours to individual items – I tried doing that and it was way too much of a pain!
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The other thing I noticed was my selling costs as a % of my total sales were much higher when I was selling low cost items, I guess that should be pretty obvious lol but seeing it in the numbers really adds to the reasons to avoid it. To be fair I had a few items with quantity 20+ that all sold fairly quickly for between 5 and 10 and that wasn’t too bad from an “efficiency” stand point. But the opportunity cost of not moving up stream is real too.
Although I will say those small items have helped me get into my workflow and work out the kinks in my systems a little bit, which maybe is a good thing before moving to high dollar items
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