Has anyone found shelving units that will fit 3, 30 Gallon containers/shelf?

[Mark S]

One of my 2019 goals was to get shelving for my containers so that I don’t have to keep pulling 4 30 gallon containers of the pile when something in the bottom container sells.

I have found a 60″ Width x 72″ Height x 18″ shelving unit for about $82, but I would like to know that it will work. I have found others that would definitely work, but are $40 more and that adds up to a lot when you have to buy a large quantity of them.

My plan is to put 3, 18 gallon containers on each shelf. It has 5 shelves, so that will hold 15 containers. Space is a real issue, so I don’t want to waste any space.

My two concerns are: 1. Each 30 gallon container is about 20 inches wide. I think they will fit on the shelf, but it may be difficult to get them out if it is that tight. 2. The unit is only 72″ high, will I be able to fit the containers on the lower 4 shelves without running out of space?

Yes, I could just try it and see, but it would be helpful if someone has done this before and knows what works. That would be a lot of work to buy it, get it into my basement, build the whole thing and then realize it doesn’t work.

Mark S

[Jay]

These are the shelves we bought at Lowes:
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Gladiator-72-in-H-x-77-in-W-x-24-in-D-4-Shelf-Steel-NSF-Certified-Freestanding-Shelving-Unit/1000003004

All steel and solid. Worth the cost. Our plastic tubs fit perfectly on the shelves and can be as heavy as we want to make them.

And Lowes always has discounts. We got these at a 20% discount. Im sure xmas time will bring a sale.

[Mark S]

Jay,

I don’t think these will work for me for 2 reasons:

1. There are only 4 shelves. I stack mine at least 5 high, some places 6 high. I would lose a lot of storage space with that.

2. They are only 77″ Wide. That would only hold 3, 30 gallon containers (20″ wide each) with 17″ left over. or 4, 18 gallon containers (18″ wide) with 5″ left over.

Mark

[Jay]

Got it. Maybe we use different plastic bins? We can fit four on each shelf. It’s tight but works.

You can go five shelves up? Any issues with getting to bins that high? We have a step stool to get to higher bins, but it’s gets tricky finding only bins that are “light” to put up there.

Commend you for being as efficient as you can. I guess I was going more for solid shelves.

[Mark S]

Jay,

It is out of necessity. I have everything in my basement and I am squeezing out every inch I can!

Right now the 30 gallon containers are stacked 5 high. The 18 Gallon containers are stacked 6 high.

I don’t want to lose any space in the process.

I do try to put heavier containers on the bottom and lighter ones on top. But, I have found that after several years, the containers on the bottom start to give out. I have had to shuffle things around a bit to avoid that.

Mark

[aperture]

This past summer, I went to Costco and was able to test the bins and shelving unit in the store to make sure they would work together before I purchased. I really wanted to have shelves that held thre bins per shelf x 4 shelves and not end up with wasted space either because the bins were too wide (e.g. 2.5 bins per shelf) or the shelves would not stack four bins. I think the big box stores have shelves and bins similarly displayed so you can check sizes with the actual bins on the actual shelves.

If you have a low ceiling, consider measuring the height and determine the clearance for a bin pulled from the top shelf. Also, leave enough clearance between shelves to easily pull bins out.

When you do re-organize, be smart and put all the heaviest stuff in the bottom bins. Best wishes, Daniel.

[Mark S]

I found a 60x24x78 for $133 with 5 shelves. Should work height wise, but still not sure about the width.

I would also like to find something to fit only 18 gallon containers (18″ – 18.25″ wide). A 40″ wide shelving unit with 6 shelves would be perfect. But guess what, they don’t sell 40″ wide shelving units.

My other alternative is to build custom pvc shelfs. I think I will have to do that for small areas that won’t fit a shelving unit, but I would like to keep that to a minimum.

Mark S

[Inglewood]

I like to use grocery store bins to store my items – they are either free, or have a small deposit and worst comes to worst, I just return them if I don’t need them. 2 fit well across on a 4′ shelf and I get 7 of them high in my basement. The size is good as they don’t get too heavy and you can see to the bottom easily.

I’m not sure if this is a thing in the U.S., but it’s been around in Canada for over 30 years at different stores that don’t supply bags.

[Mark S]

This is not a thing in the U.S as far as I know.

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Mark, I guess you are aware that the 18 gal. bins, which translate into 66 Qt. for the Sterilite Company, is a lot of internal space. We have had industrial shelving designed for stacking pallets for decades.

The specs are 6 ft. wide x 7 ft. high with 5 shelves. The top shelf is at the very top so items sit “Up Top” or “UT” in our sku code, and the bottom shelf is 1″ off the ground. They are spaced so our 66 qt. bins with latch handles and lids fit 4 across and just slide into the top and bottom. The middle shelves are spaced so we can get one large tub-bin in a space and 2 smaller shoe box size bins on top. That gives us 32 plastic bins of 2 different sizes per 5 shelf unit.

We have 8 of those units arranged back to back like library shelves for a total of 256 bins.

Now for the members newer to all of this, there is a cost to all of this and a consideration to packing a whole lot into a small space.

First for you Mark, watch the size of those big bins. We took our large shipping scale out a couple of summers ago just for fun and giggles. we took use a strudy 3 step folding ladder, one with a thigh high rail at the top to lean against. Here’s the warning. Some of our bins are close to 45 to 50 lbs due to the fact we sell mostly hard goods. Sets of dishes, cast iron skillets, book ends wieigh a bunch. My wife can’t get bins down. Up on a 3 foot ladder pulling a 50 lb. box off a shelf, securely grabbing both the front and back handles, then backing down the 3 steps is precarious to say the least. So we are now downsizing to bins half that size and we will just have 2 bins in the space we currently have one large one.

Secondly, watch the total weigh at an average [just ball parking here], of 30 to 35 lbs per bin x 32 bins per unit is a lot of lbs. per unit and times 8 units equals “tons” of inventory. If you do this inside of a house, in a room on top of 2″ x 10″ floor joist spread the weight out or your floor will start to bow downwards. Garages are perfect because they are mostly 4″ slab, reinforced concrete.

For the newer guys thinking of this.. Our larger pallet shelves which we got 30 or more years ago were over $150 per unit, today, they are even more because of their size. But let’s use your $130 per unit x 8 units for us is $1,040 in shelving. Now to the cost of 256 bins. We got ours at a damaged goods outlet, so some are missing a handle or have a broken corner of the bin or lid but we paid $3 aeach for these distressed ones or $768 total over the years. So that plus the shelves is approx. $1,808. Now also consider that at a local Walmart and even on Sale, 66 qt. and larger bins are way more than $3 ea, try maybe double that. So think about a budget of $2,000 to $2,500 to fill a 20′ x 20′ garage or storage shed with large, heavy duty shelving and all spaces filled with bins.

Item capacity of 256 bins for us, using a softball size average [so larger, some smaller], we figure we can do 2,500 to 3,000 items if we lean toward the smaller baseball [ashtray] sized item, give or take of course.

We are going to the half size bins just for the fact I am tired of carefully sliding aheavy bin off a shelf whereby I am reaching up for it or having to use a 6′ taller ladder. I would rather pull off the front “A” box and set it down to reach the 2nd “B” box just to be more careful. I hit my 70th birthday Monday and FYI, I don’t bounce anymore like when I was 20, I now break. So I don’t need a busted hip, knee, angle, arm or leg. 🙂

Just some thoughts to ponder on building / setting up large storage area.

mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta

[Mark S]

Mike,

I got lost in your description. I think a picture here would go a long way.

Also, on another note, How difficult \ time does it take to export items from Wonder Lister and then import them into Etsy? I saw you talking about this a while back in the Etsy thread. I was thinking if Siz bit still makes you do some manual work, is the export\import of spreadsheets about the same amount of work or a lot more?

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Hey Mark: All the data was to say, big bins get heavy [30 to 40 lbs.] and are hard to handle, hard to get off the shelf when high up and dangerous on me.
My solution, I am slowly swapping out to bins that are half the size of my current 66 qt. [using 30 qt. or less] and then putting two of these smaller bins on the shelf in the same spot where I had 1 large heavy bins previously.
And just stating that a large inventory is very heavy on the shelves and can add up to tons of weight, so get heavy duty shelves. Jay had plastic shelves collapse on him a few years back.

Now, WL over to Etsy using export to .csv and then importing. We don’t do that. Way too time consuming and will spare you the details as to why. The way we are doing it manually right now is one of our helpers opens our ebay store on one monitor and the Etsy listing form on the other. Then all she does is copy and paste directly from the Ebay live listing from our Ebay store and paste the data into the Etsy listing form and then saves it as an Etsy draft. I then open those up each morning, attach the photos since they are here at my office, add the box size and postal weight then publish.

We have about 400 out of our 1,100 Ebay listing already on Etsy. And are seeing some sales activity on Etsy as a result.

Heck, by the time I get SixBit downloaded, customized and set up on two computers with a shared in office network we my have almost everything in Etsy done manually. Our helper seems to be getting about 2 dozen Etsy listing done in an evening from her home. She says it takes her a couple of hours, so I am guessing about 10 to 12 per hour just copying nad pasting from Ebay live listing into each new Etsy draft.

But once I have made the transition over to SixBit and then cut the cord with WL and from there atleast SixBit will take over and finish up the job for us real quick. Once we have everything we want from Ebay uploaded to Etsy, then SixBit will handle everything going forward automatically. Upload to both platforms if we so choose, then also track all the sales done on each platform and manage the deletion from the platform that it did not sell on. Auto synchrinization which is what WonderLister is hung up on. Also WonderLister did not even get it’s Shopify interface working correctly as of yet, so we just had to give up on thinking WL was going to get anything together fast enough for our plans. We missed this whole fourth quarter because WL did not get anything done on an Etsy interface that we know of and they cut us out of the information loop on where they stand on getting themselves working smoothly.

The export and import process is very clumsy because once you export to an Excel spread sheet then you have to go and format that spread sheet. Time consuming. Then you have to get each data field “mapped” to the correct “Etsy” field. Well, that may require [unsure] knowing which fields would need the spread sheet data, how Etsy has those fields named, and unsure if it could be done without making a mess of the process. Troy, may be able to add to this, but we just figured rather than trying to deal with the export-import into Etsy, just get SixBit set up here at the office as quickly as we can, then let SB handle it for us automatically.

Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art

[Mark S]

Thanks Mike!

I followed that this time on both fronts. Although I am still trying to find that elusive shelving unit. I may have to compromise or just go all in with custom pvc which may be time consuming. The 18 gallon containers are the smallest I want to go with. I have a combination of items, so I try not to get them too heavy. If I see it getting heavy when I am planning a lot in the container, I switch things around. However, some of the shoe lots in a 30 gallon can get quite heavy, so I am trying to put the shoe in the 18 gallon containers now. I put the heavy containers at the bottom of the stack.

For the move to Etsy, I wish this were much easier. The manual entry into Etsy sounds like as much time as a new ebay listing. I wish Six Bit did it everything automatically for the $100/ month, but I guess they don’t. I think I will just have to go with Six Bit and do the 1-2 min of listing per item of manual work. The wild card here is how well I will do on Etsy. If I knew it would be a great success, I wouldn’t mind so much doing the work. But if it doesn’t do so well, then the work may feel like a waste of time. Or worse yet, opportunity lost on what I could have done on ebay. I don’t think there is any way to know because some sellers have great success on Etsy, and others not so much.

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Careful with the PVC. If too wide of a span left-right and there is much weight on that shelf it will deflect downwards. You might try making a test situation. Buy enough PVC to make the frame of one shelf. then set it on two concrete bricks or blocks, then start placing wieght on the rectangular frame and watch to what degree it starts to deflect [bend]. Even steel will deflect. Example, ever seem an empty-unloaded flat bed tractor trailor and it is bowed “upwards” in the center? That is called pre-deflection that the engineers pre-bow the bed so that when the calculated weight is placed on the trailor then it will begin it’s deflection downwards until it is either level, when loaded or downards, when over loaded. Steel will bend and or give way at a certain point.

The same will hold true of any shelf made out of steel, wood or plastic. Steel taking the most weight without deflection, wood being next and plastic bending the most. So all I am saying is build a test shelf to make sure.

Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta

[Mark S]

Mike,

For the pvc, I would not span it across, I would have cuts for each individual container. That is why it would take some time and cost. But I think it would be worth it because it is light weight and I could move it and mold it to any different place that it needs to go.

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

I got you. That will require elbows, “T” connectors or multi corner connectors. Yep that will run the cost up and if 2″ dia. PVS then all those verticals will start to add up. 12 – 2″ dia. spacers will take up 24″ in lost space.

10-4 copy that the custom configuration can be utilized.

mdc at mdcgfa

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Mark, We haven’t made the move into SixBit yet. We are still setting it up. But Troy said SixBit is now including more details in it’s automatic handling of the listing and their is only a couple of lines to have to fill in manually and Boom she is done.

Maybe Troy will chime in and tell us exactly what lines [data fields] Veronica has to fill in manually after SixBit has transferred the Ebay listing over to Sixbit.

mike at MDCGFA

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Don’t know if this makes you feel better or worse but up and through the 18th of this month we did $568 dollars in Sales on Etsy. That is with 394 listings so far for Dec.. BUT the number of listing a month ago was far less but due to deciding to quit waiting on WL to get it’s act together, we have accllerated the manual cross listing on Etsy in the last 4 weeks.

So when we get over a thousand of our Ebay store cross listed, we are thinking maybe over a thousand to $1,200 per month as of current thinking, but no hard numbers to back that up yet.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by MDC Galleries & Fine Art.

[Jay]

I’ve heard that Etsy sales are often good during the holidays. Would be interested to hear if your Etsy sales are consistent over the rest of the year.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

That will probably be hard to get a grip on early in the year because of the movement of so many new items due to the use of SixBit. Going from 346 Etsy Items to over 1,000 in a matter of months will most likely skew those numbers. Sure our Sales will grow, hopefully, but will it be to just the sheer increase in the volume of items listed. Then we are still looking to add another 1,000 of newly purchased inventory. It may take a year or more for the inventory to sort of plateau out, get on more of a maintenance level and then see what happens. But we will try to watch it. With building 4 houses all at the same time the first 4 to 6 months of Ebay or Etsy will be at the mercy of my time availability. we are just now at the permitting stage of the first two. Which one is under contract already and we have another strong interest but no offer yet on the second one. That is a good sign to get two spec homes sold before a shovel has touched the ground.

[Mark S]

Mike,

Yes, that would definitely be worth it. $1 \ item per month in sales and I would consider it a success. Any more would be icing on the cake. Sounds like you are doing well.

Troy and others: Are you seeing at least $1 \ item per month in sales on Etsy?

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Tell you who was doing well on Etsy and sort of was the inspriration to opening our eyes there is a member whom we haven’t heard from for a good while here on SL and that is “Omfug”. If she still haunts the SL forum, maybe she would chime in.

I am unsure if she would want her store named so I will leave that to her if she chimes in, but currently she shows 620 current items lsited,, 419 5 star feedbacks, 639 Favorites for her store, she used to say she does better on Etsy than on Ebay, both total sales and the costs are lower on Etsy so she was making more than on Ebay.
She has been on Etsy since May of 2014 = approx. 54 months. She lists about the same items as we do, vintage, older home decor, jewelery, photographs and ephemera,vintage collectables and some vintage clothing. Total sales since 2014 is 1,390 items = approx. 25 per month and that would also include the slower start up period and lower number of items to start in the beginning.
She has about the same bread and butter mid price ranges as J&R and us with the $20 to $40 and with some on up the scale.
So making a very broad assumption-guesstimate take $30 as an average x 1,390 in solds = $41,700 divided by 54 months gives an average of approx. $772 per month.. BUT THIS IS A SWAG! [scientific wild ass guess]. But after ghosting for a while and hearing her SL posts we decided to give Etsy the plunge.

We have identified 8 other SL members who have Etsy stores and they all seem to vary but they are still present, listing and selling on Etsy.

Hopes this helps.

Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta

[Jay]

Yep, Omfug got tired of eBay from what I remember, and I believe sells almost exclusively on Etsy. $800/month isn’t bad since I think she was just supplementing her retirement.

Mike, you’ll have some solid numbers for us in the next year on Etsy. The question I have is can you get consistent sales on Etsy while AT THE SAME TIME keep your consistent sales on eBay.

Usually people start spending more time selling on other platforms and their eBay sales go down. Same money just coming from different places. But maybe these crossposting shortcuts you guys are exploring will change that.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Hay Jay:
In response to: “Usually people start spending more time selling on other platforms and their eBay sales go down. Same money just coming from different places. But maybe these crossposting shortcuts you guys are exploring will change that.”

These shortcuts we have been using is just because WonderLister didn’t build the Etsy interface as of yet, but SixBit has. That is why we are dropping WL and migrating over to SixBit.

Now here is what WonderLister was working on but has yet to have completed it and Sixbit has done a lot of this, but still a work in progress. Since we have not migrated to SixBit yet, then this is the way I am understanding most parts of it as well as the experience we have had using WL to cross post on Ebay and Shopify. And for the most part Troy mentions the SixBit team is listening, learning to some degree themselves and making changes as they update. Troy says they may be interested in what tid bits I may be able to share with them to help SixBit improve. We have 3 times as many items as Troy and Veronica have already in our Etsy store, so SixBit will have a broader base to gather information for improvement on. Troy mentioned that if I am willing to share information with SixBit just like I did with WL that they may have an open ear, if it will help with making improvements.

Within the SB software we will build listing templates just like we have within WL and Troy has done in SB. The all you do is fill in the SB listing form. One form, in one place. Then you will click a tab that says submit to Ebay and click a second tab that says submit to Etsy [we do this now for Ebay and Shopify].

From there, all synching of prices, discounts, sales, sold items, the deletion[removal] from both platforms will be done by the software.

With regards to tags, we use tags now, even in WL on our generic template. That is just good SEO for any store, any where. tags are food for Mother Google. Tags are nothing more than one or two words that describe your item, objcet. Our one template we use for both stores is in the WL template we fill out. If they have no use on one platform but do on the other, then the software will place it where it goes and just ignore the platform that does not have a “mapped” line for it.

Let me say it another way. You use InkFrog now. You fill out one form I suppose and then click to submit to Ebay. Well the only difference would be what if InkFrog had two morw click buttons, one that said submit to Shopify and one that said submit to Etsy. Click those 2 buttons in less than 2 seconds and InkFrog sends that “One” template-form you use to list your item to all 3 platforms simultaniously. From then on InkFrog handles all synching, adds and deletes items as sold, if you edit a description it makes the changes on all 3 platforms.

So, we will use SixBit going forward as a one place to add, edit, create promotons, discounts, anything you may want to do and send it to all platforms, or just to one. Want to add a 15% discount to our whole Ebay store, we can do that now, but not have it on the Shopify store, Yep. Attach photos in one place and those will be sent to all 3 stores with the one uploading.

The manual part is if there a few lines here and there that are not on the generic listing orm then a quick review and fill does the trick.

So bottom line, we hope to start creating every listing in SixBit and almost everything required by the 3 platforms gets sent simultaneously to all 3 and they go live.

Now just hoping this all pans out after we get finished customizing the main form in SixBit.

mike at MDCGFA

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Funny you ention the $1 per item. That was a rough metric I used 3 or 4 years ago, when I spread sheeted every SL member who posted weekly numbers. I roughed guessed that if I could have a store with a given number of items and averaged $1 per unit in total sales per month regardless of total units sold I would be fine with a 2,000 item store.

Funny thing is that metric also worked out on most of the regular SL posters who listed their numbers.

[Mark S]

Mike,

If you could make a video of you manually cross posting 1 item from ebay to etsy that would be real helpful (especially for the tags).

Also, if Troy could do one for what he has to do for 1 item using Six Bit, that would be great.

Mark

[So Cal Joe]

In my old house, I used wood to construct custom shelving. Some kid put a youtube video up explaining how to do it. I used 2 X 4’s with framed shelving and these shelves hold a lot of weight. Because of their size, the wood does take up “dead space”. I’m willing to bet 2 X 3’s or even maybe 2 X 2’s would be strong enough for your application.

For the shelf area, a 4′ by 8′ piece of wood is cut down the middle leaving you with (2) 2′ by 8′ pieces. The shelves end up 2 feet deep and as wide as you want them. Of course, you can alter those measurements, any way you see fit.

In the video, he uses nails, but I use screws to put everything together. In case I need to adjust or move them, the screws make it easier.

Good luck with it.

[Retro Treasures WV]

I use 2×3’s and they are perfectly strong enough for this purpose. That extra space adds up.

[Mark S]

So Cal Joe,

I wanted to avoid using wood because as you mentioned, the size will take away from my space.

Also, when I am done using the shelves, I don’t want a lot of heavy wood to deal with.

Mark

[So Cal Joe]

All that makes sense Mark. It was such an obvious option, I had to chime in.

It’s also a fair amount of work and really doesn’t save much money, just gives a lot of options.

Happy Holidays..

[Mark S]

I had a 48″ shelving unit that I got for Christmas. So, I set it up to see how it worked out. What I now realize is that you lose quite a bit of space with the shelving units. The bars on the sides eat up about 1.5″ for a total of 3″. So, a 60″ shelving unit is really only 57″ wide. Also, the horizontal bars on a shelving unit take up an extra 1.5″ – 2″. For 5 shelves, that is nearly 10″ in space lost going up verical.

I think I have come to the conclusion that if I want to conserve as much space as possible and also be able to fit into custom sized spaces, I am going to have to use pvc.

Mark

[T-Satt]

Mike & Mark: Just saw the discussion on doing Etsy listings from SixBit. I’m going to start crossposting to Etsy myself on my vintage clothing to get more familiar with this.

Doing my first one, I can see that the “Populate From” button on the Etsy tab will bring over the Item Description for you. You can also customize what to do with the Item Specifics. I told it to make my Item Specifics my Tags (as Etsy calls it) and it did that for me as well.

There is still some tweaking to be done, because item by item and category by category, there are unique items that Etsy is asking for that you have to tell it what you want. But very quick.

Side note: just found out that Etsy limits your Tags at 13. You know me and Item Specifics… 🙂

[Mark S]

T-Satt & Mike,

I was looking at the SynCommerce tool that Mike was talking about. They say they can do the conversion from ebay to etsy automatically. I am not sure how that is possible since it has been pointed out that etsy has fields that ebay doesn’t. Unless you have to specify that before you start like “Use Item specifics for my tags”

I am going to call SynCommerce when I can get them during normal business hours because I have other questions for them too. SynCommerce would be worth it if they also did Mercari and Poshmark, but on the fense with just etsy. It would work cheaper than Six Bit till I got to 1000 items on etsy because they give 2 months for free when you do an annual subscription.

Mark

[T-Satt]

Mark: Good luck on the SynCommerce. Let us know what you find.

But they won’t have Mercari or Poshmark since those platforms don’t have an API.

[Author]

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