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Curious what are everyone else’s experiences with Black Friday weekend this year, hopefully some of you will post over the weekend so we can have the discussion in real time!
Are you doing any scavenging out among the non-scavenger deal hunters this weekend? Or how about online? What are you buying or looking for deals on?
How are your sales going? Any sales projections or goals this year? Are you running any coupons or promotions?
What’s on your Thanksgiving table? Got a favorite family recipe? Grateful that this forum exists and for all of you. Happy holidays!
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Been getting Black Friday emails for the last couple of weeks from the white-goods chains. Presumably this “mid-winter consumer festival” as the BBC describes it is tomorrow. 🙂 Then it’s Scavenging Saturday and Sorting Sunday. I guess Cyber Monday is when Doctor Who battles the Cybermen. Going to sit that one out.
Wishing everybody a Happy Thanksgiving. Be thankful you’re not going to eat British turkey; it’s as dry as a Puritan’s imagination and as tasteless as Jeff Koons.
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We bought our turkey at Costco this year. It was the best turkey we’ve had in a long time! It was nice and juicy. I made a few homemade pies that were wonderful. The weather here was marvelous (I live the SW), we were able to have out feast outside on the patio. Great day all around!
The Black Friday emails are flooding my inbox. I’m stocking up on stuff we use all the time.
Our sales have been pretty good the last few weeks, it should keep up through the New Year. (I hope!)
Hope everyone has great sales and a wonderful Holiday season!
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Sales are just ok. In the past this weekend has not been good for me on EBay but my store is three times the size now.
Retail arbitrage wise I find the best online deals are usually the day after Christmas (and in store this day), late January / February, and mid-to-late summer.  I bought my Christmas RA before Halloween so I’m not sourcing this week.  I am seeing pretty good deals on electronics.
I’m grateful to say there is not a lot my family needs.  My husband and I are splurging on Eagles concert tickets for the family as our gift.  We passed on so many great concerts this year but are really into music.  I also am due to upgrade my phone, which has been overheating lately.  Verizon is running a deal and our contract is up.
Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. Â I hope to hit listing very hard this coming week when my daughter is back at school.
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Black Friday has never been a good sales day for us on eBay. I think Black Friday is really “buy new electronics” day. But supposedly sales were bad all around this year. Americans have learned most BF deals are just scams.
We always shop for turkeys AFTER thanksgiving. Usually buy several of them for our freezer since you can find good deals.
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7 dollars a pound here in Britain for free-range turkeys, which is a thing I’ve never heard of before. Our turkeys are normally raised in long metal sheds in deepest Norfolk, and turned into sausages.
A decent chicken costs 13 dollars. An indecent chicken costs 4 dollars, and has that slightly-high taste that leaves you with a feeling of regret.
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Stocking up on things you use all the time is my approach to Black Friday as well. But I try and have this approach all the time. There are great deals to be found year-round if you stack discounts and coupons and rewards.
I’m running about 200 auctions this week which will end on Monday evening. I miss the days of eBay bucks promotions on holiday weekends. But no sense in dwelling. It’s nice that eBay still occupies its own large space in the e-commerce world. So many competitors have come and gone in the last ten years.
My main goal this week was to focus on my trading cards consignment port since the company COMC was offering a Black Friday promotion special all week. The promo was free (usually costs a few bucks to set up) and 5% cash back on everything you spent, plus a discount on future submission fees if you sold $500 or more. Pretty great marketing on their part. I’ve put in a good solid work week just on their site, buying and selling and repricing. Really I’ve been putting in the work all month, as I’ve been running progressive sales throughout the month.
I had twin goals to reduce the size of my consignment port (which had swelled to over 15,000 items) and build up a cash reserve so I have more flexibility in 2024. I’ve sold over 1,000 cards (and counting) this week and 2,900 cards (and counting) sold this month. Many of them I sold a little lower than I would have liked, and some I sold too low, but I discounted everything across the board and figured I’d see what happened. I’m happy with the results and don’t have any regrets really. I will probably do it again next year.
I also found a large number of cards to buy, everything from cheap ($1 and under) to expensive (a few in the $100 range), and once I put in the shipment request and get all these sent to me, I’ll spend a solid week getting everything sorted for the various types of listings I make (Individual, small curated lot, large wholesale lot). This gives me a solid framework for how to spend my time the rest of this year, and a lot to look forward to heading into 2024.
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I’ve sold over 1,000 cards (and counting) this week
whoah! Are most sales multiple cards? Or lots of single cards as well?
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Jay, it was such an interesting mix because of the way COMC works where you can immediately reprice anything you buy, or buy individual cards from dozens of sellers and get all of them shipped to you in one package. So I had plenty of one card orders which got repriced or shipped home (I assume to someone’s collection), and just as many orders where the buyer kept adding more and more cards from my port to their order. I had lots of orders with two or three or five, and a few huge ones with 20 or 30 or more. Sometimes the buyer would purchase one every few seconds which was always fun to see in real-time, and other times they’d load all of them into their cart and buy in one click so I’d have a huge long page of solds to one buyer.
I wanted to build up some extra cash this month, so I ran sales from 35 percent in early November to as much as 65 percent Black Friday to Cyber Monday. I repriced old inventory all month too. There is no messaging on the platform, so it is all about price and which offers you accept. I went bigger with the sales than I would on eBay because I have so many cards on there and it’s hard to keep up with prices on all of them. That’s really the name of the game buying and selling on COMC. A lot of buyers (myself included) find a good deal on one card from a seller and then dig through the seller’s port to add more cards to their order.
I think the largest individual sale I had over the week was an authenticated autograph of composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold for $110 which was repriced by the buyer to $191. My cost was $35 and I bought it on eBay in March. Personally I wouldn’t buy something for $110 and relist it to $191, those are lower margins than I like to deal with. But that is a pretty normal buying pattern on COMC. There are a lot of volume sellers and a lot of scavengers who deal in cards that are $5 or less. That was basically my average sales price over the promo week — 1163 items for $5825.34 over Black Friday and 261 items for $972.16 on Cyber Monday.
I was buying all week too, and I’ll have a good number of $50+ card sales on eBay over the next month or two as I get these nice cards listed. Especially if we get some snowy weather in the Northeast for the first time in almost two years.
I had this silly fantasy of selling all the cards in my port over this month and maybe December, but I have 10,000 left even after all these sales. That’s the product of the last few years of scavenging and hard work. There’s a point where you can go too far with discounts and it was fun to find that tipping point. I think for next year, I will reprice my inventory twice as much and max out the discount at like 50 percent unless I really, really need to sell. I like to play the long game. Sometimes it’s better to wait a few months for the market to change or the right buyer to come along.
Overall, this week went as good as I could have hoped. I am going to really try and push myself with eBay in December. I haven’t been over 500 listings in a long, long time because I spend a lot of time on organizing inventory for this consignment site and I try and run the max 500 collectibles auctions every month. I’d love to get to 500 and stay at that level.
But I also have some plans for fun stuff now that I’ve got some extra cash at hand, so at some point early 2024 that will become more of my focus. Can’t wait to share more of those stories with you.
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How do you keep track of cogs on so many single transactions? I assume you’re operating on purely a cash system -money and money out?
Are you able to keep track of the break even point on every card?
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Yeah my whole accounting method is cash in and cash out. I buy pretty much all of my card inventory through eBay auctions using Paypal, and I don’t use Paypal for anything else, so it’s a pretty decent system now that most of my cards go directly to the consignment site.
COMC (which eBay just bought a stake in) is an interesting platform in terms of how it operates. Anything you sell, you receive store credit after COMC takes their few percent cut. You can cash out for another 10 percent in fees (I do this once or twice a week) or you can buy cards and have them shipped to you to sell on eBay or Facebook or at a show or to keep. Most COMC listings cross post to eBay but not all of them (only BIN — no best offer option), and any sales you run on COMC are visible on COMC but not on eBay. So there are plenty of opportunities for arbitrage.
Any cards bought on site and repriced to flip, the price I buy it for is visible to me. This is a decent chunk of my inventory, maybe 20 percent. But anything I send in, obviously COMC doesn’t know that price. I use Terapeak a lot when I’m pricing out COMC inventory and sometimes I can see the original listing I bought from, but other times if it was part of a lot or the original listing was bad, I price based off my own knowledge of the player and rarity of card and set.
I lost money on plenty of individual cards over my 65 percent off sale, but the overall volume of sales more than made up for that. And sometimes the market for certain cards changes in a year, no point in clinging to what I thought something was worth a year ago.
I am planning to reprice aggressively over the next month (ideally I’d like to reprice 500 cards every day) and then run another big sale in January. COMC offered 5 percent back on each $100 spent during the Black Friday sale and the bonus $$ will hit our accounts in January. I don’t think I’ll go to 65 percent off again, but maybe 50 percent and see if I can raise another chunk of cash at what would be a slow time of year.
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