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I had some final thoughts about my Chicago haul and hopefully can make a post about them without breaking the forums again.
Links to the full story of the haul: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Trip by the numbers
To recap: I spent $1000 on expensive classical music box sets at a Chicago library, mostly on a hunch. I know and love music, but I’m not a classical aficionado and have never sold expensive CDs or vinyl or box sets. I actually started selling online with selling CDs from my favorite used record store. I was used to spending $2 to make $20, not $50 to make $300. But I know quality when I see it, and I know how to use Terapeak, so I had a good feeling about this haul.
No matter how I break down the numbers about 90 days later, my hunch paid off. So far, I’ve doubled my money in terms of the initial money spent at the book sales, and I had broke even on the whole excursion within about two weeks. Practically speaking, I paid for my entire trip between my library sale finds and the few hours I spent at the National card show in Rosemont. In the end, it will probably be a $500 to $1000 profit and all of these amazing memories. Amazing!
As always, there’s so much that I learned and things I would do differently with hindsight. My biggest lessons learned:
1. I bungled the post-sale bookshop purchase. It’s on the bookshop too, their incompetence was staggering, but I probably missed about $500 profit by missing out on a few really nice items. My biggest sale (the Karl Bohm set) was a bookshop purchase and it boosted my numbers quite a bit. They had a few other items in that price range which “sold to someone else” (no I’m not still salty) and who knows what else they had which didn’t make it out to the shelves. In the week or two after the library sale, I was seriously considering going back to Chicago just to try and cut a big deal with the bookshop. I had fantasies of working out a massive deal like @retro-treasures-wv did with his hoarder haul. But that wasn’t meant to be. I’m not 100% sure how I would handle a situation like this differently in the future, but at least I have a good idea what might go wrong.
2. If you looked at my sold listings, you’ll see a few of these expensive box sets have the words “outer box damage” in the title. That was my bad. Most of that happened because I shipped everything home from Chicago in two huge 90 pound boxes, specifically the first box which didn’t have enough bubble wrap at the bottom and in between layers. Hilariously, the 200+ CD Bach box set got damaged when I dropped it while carrying it inside. I had already taken pictures and made the listing. I wanted to cry. Instead I took pictures of the damaged box, changed the title, and dropped the price by $100…and it sold anyway. Never cry over spilled inventory. But I probably lost a few hundred bucks profit from mangling some items. One or two damaged items were from the bookshop, which pretty much tossed everything in a box and slapped a label with my address on the outside. Again: something to remember for next time!
3. With the trip itself, I didn’t go too hard into setting a budget as far as the hotel, tickets, food and fun etc. I haven’t traveled much at all and this was my first solo trip…really in my whole life. My 37th birthday was the week before, and I treated this like a birthday gift to myself. I was more concerned with not chickening out (just being honest) than spending as little as possible. But now the next trip will be easier and I can plan a lot better.
There were some obvious spots where I could have saved a few bucks: buying two single day passes to the card show (instead of the 4 day pass) would have saved me $100. I only went to the show for two days anyway, it wasn’t my scene and I enjoyed seeing the city so much more. I liked my hotel (especially the location), but probably could have saved a few bucks or gotten a room with a kitchen if I had booked earlier and cast a wider net. But being right next to the Vetra (the el) made it simple to get to the card show, which was my reason for the trip. Airbnb was too expensive in Chicago to be an option. That would have been my preference but honestly, I was happy with the hotel and I got a good story out of being there.
4. Shipping a bunch of stuff home was an experience on its own. But wow was the whole process fun — a little nerve-wracking, but what a way to feel alive! How you know you’re a shipping nerd, for sure. Now I have a scale and soft measuring tape for next time…and a lot of knowledge what to do and what not to do if I want to ship a few boxes home.
The whole trip made me think about those early days when I first started selling online, when I was just trying to figure out what I could sell. It’s exciting finding really profitable items, but then it can be nerve wracking wondering if you will find more good stuff to sell or what happens next. I stumbled across a very rare find on this trip, someone’s expensive personal collection which they built over years and years and it all ended up donated to a library which (to my benefit) underpriced some of the items by a little or a lot. I would love to replicate this trip again, and that’s kind of the plan going forward once I tie up some loose ends over the rest of 2023.
This trip made me realize that my scavenging life could go in a lot of different directions in 2024. It doesn’t just have to be buying cards online and selling them online. I enjoy that and it’s worked well for me, so I expect that to continue. But it’s fun to take a risk and see how it goes. Isn’t that one of the reasons why we all chose a scavenger’s life? I think a lot of people would get frustrated very easily by the idea of selling things online, let alone the reality where some things take months to sell and you have to stay organized and disciplined to sell things with consistency, and then some stuff doesn’t sell for some reason or you get weird buyers. But that is our life. I hope everything I wrote was a reminder of what a good life it truly is.
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@craig-rex – Thanks for sharing your adventure. Always good to get out of your comfort zone. Buying in person can be exhilarating. I love estate sales, even though they aren’t the ideal place to find deals. I get a kick out of finding something in the jumble that they estate company overlooked. My biggest profit ever, and one that is still selling years later, was a box of ephemera that I picked up at one (latest sale this week was 3 worm-eaten 200 year old almanacks for $80). There’s almost always something. I don’t go as often as I used to, but still like getting out there.
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I love this adventure. It’s makes me happy that we’ve found out people in our scavenger life.
I don’t see it as much anymore (maybe because I don’t follow the community as closely) , but there was a time when online sellers were split in two groups. There was people like us who sold weird, often old, stuff we found for cheap. Our costs were low but it took work to scavenge and list one them at a time.
And then there were the exciting sellers who would do deep research and buy thousands of the same widget from China and resell on Amazon. Their upfront cost was huge, but they would list once and watch the money roll in. Or at least this was the pitch you’d see online.
As enticing as making lots of easy money sounds, we’ve always been attracted to the treasure hunt. We love when scavenging is part of our lifestyle. We are always scavenging in our day to day life. We can (and do) sell anything we may find on the street or being given away or in some pile in the back of a thrift shop. Life Craig here, we’ve done trips where scavenging is the main activity, but the background is being together and learning about a new city. The money we make is the way to keep score, but the adventure just as valuable.
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Jay, I can’t wait for my next adventure like this. It will be a few months down the line, I want to spend the rest of this year really doing the work and maximizing my sales in Q4 as much as I can. But then it will be time for a nice break.
I think the Amazon resellers who did private label and resell on Amazon have a lot in common with the guy I met at the Chicago book sale who does all books, all Amazon FBA with his hand scanner. I texted him about a month ago to see how he did with his haul. Maybe I was hoping to compare numbers. But he hadn’t sold any of the stuff he had bought. He hadn’t even sent it into FBA yet. It was textbook season. I asked him a few questions about it, but he wasn’t too talkative. He suggested I watch some videos by a Youtube reseller named Joji Davenport to learn more. That’s what he did when he started out reselling. So I looked up Joji. Here are the names of some of his videos:
I Made $800 Profit in One Day Selling Used Textbooks
My Secret to Finding Expensive Books to Sell on Amazon
How I Make $300 Profit Per Day on Amazon
I really tried to watch a few of these videos, but it was a lot of math and graphs and it’s a completely different mindset than how I approach things. I didn’t enjoy them. I also don’t like the oversell of content creation. Joji Davenport’s methods might work now…but is their method going to work in a year? Three years? Five? And what kind of life does he have — or is it always about going to the next sale, and the next, and the next?
It’s funny because this mindset should appeal to me more than it does. I buy and sell a lot of cards. I have been trying to think about the “seasons” of selling lately. Recently I have been selling a lot of cards from players who were in the baseball World Series, and starting to step up on football cards because it’s the middle of football season and soon it will be playoff season. I’m figuring out that timing can be a big factor with certain types of items. Maybe that’s obvious to most people, but never really how I approached things. It was often about, how can I make enough money to pay my bills and make up for the low pay for my shitty job? Fortunately I have gotten past that point.
I still love selling the cards after 21K items sold and counting because I know them so well. I understand why some cards are valuable and others aren’t. I know the market well enough that I can have a little fun along the way. I don’t have to maximize profit on every sale. I can give a repeat buyer a deal or run some auctions and make a little less profit. There are always going to be more cards to buy and sell .I can throw in a little bonus here and there, and sometimes I get a really happy message from a buyer. It makes selling fun for me. My main challenge this year has been keeping my inventory manageable and starting to enjoy my life a little bit. I’m still getting used to that. The challenges will change next year and in the years following as my business continues to grow and change, and I’m excited. I like change. I think you have to, in order to sell online.
Are the Amazon people having fun? I’d love to know the answer to that question, but I don’t think my buddy from Chicago has time for that conversation. He’d probably send me a link to some video. If I go back to the Chicago library sale next summer, and I’d really like to, I hope he’s there at the sale, too. It would be great to hang out with him and talk shop some more. Joji videos weren’t for me, but I liked seeing a different perspective on selling.
If he is there, I’ll make sure that I ask him directly: Is this fun to you? Do you enjoy this? How is your business going to change in the next year? Or is it just go to sale, scan until you hear the cha-ching, ship to Amazon, set prices according to some graphs, and do it all over again the next day?
Is that fun? Is that really fun to some people? I can’t imagine it is, but I’d love to know his answer.
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You hit the nail on the head. I feel that that’s all we ever talked about on the podcast. No tips or tricks on how to get rich. It’s all about “are you having fun doing this?”
Because ultimately if I hate doing something, I’ll stop doing it…even if it may makes me money. Or I’ll be miserable. Ryanne and I decides years ago that we’d take chances on doing things we that were challenging but fun.
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I found some success on Amazon FBA around 2017/18 I think? It was a pain to learn, but once I developed a good methodology I was able to make some money at it. The sales prices in some cases were WAY over ebay values, especially in books. I even took my little printer on vacation or business trips and did retail arbitrage at Walmarts while traveling. I’d buy the boxes at the same time, create the labels & shipments right in my van or at the hotel. Then drop off the packages. Then just watch the money roll in. The idea of ship it all and forget it was NICE!! Being able to buy (for example) 20 Bratz dolls, print out 20 barcode labels, slap them on and box them all up and be DONE was nice. In that scenario, all 20 dolls sold within a couple days and I made a couple hundred bucks!
I couldn’t have done that on vacation with ebay as I couldn’t have brought all those home with me. They also wouldn’t have sold quickly or for near the same amount.
A couple things happened though – Amazon went crazy with gating. Amazon drastically changed their storage fee structure with NO warning right in 4Q – basically elminating long tail inventory. Also, stores like Target & Walmart got wise to the retail Arbitrage game and stopped putting out good deals. The local Goodwills started their own book scanning program to weed out the valuable books before they hit the shelves, so the book game dried up too.
I watch a video game seller who is wildly successful on amazon selling video games. The prices he gets are way higher than ebay prices. So much higher that he can actually pay people the going ‘ebay after fees’ prices for games and then list them on amazon FBA!!!
Anyways, I’m sure Amazon FBA can still be profitable but the golden age of small time sellers on FBA is long past.
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How to Build Your Own Solid State Oscilloscope
The price history of this 1979 book on Amazon. Four or five years ago World Of Books had six copies listed at £6 a copy. A friend bought one- he realised he’d bought the one copy out of the six that was a bit worn, so he contacts WoB to see if he can exchange it for another. They replied that he’d have to return it for a refund and purchase another.
In the meantime their price had risen to £126. Now, years later, they only have one copy for sale, at £99.47. I guess they pulped the other four copies.
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