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Hey Scavengers,
I’m Ken from Little Elm, Texas and I was turned onto your podcast a couple weeks ago by my SO, Eric. I’ve been listening to the podcast to and from work, and it’s been quite entertaining. I started listening at episode 400, as that was the earliest episode on Spotify. I’m only on around episode 425, but a couple episodes ago Jay mentioned that he was from Denton, so I wanted to jump in and say Hi, as we live 10 minutes from Denton currently and do a lot of our scavenging in the North Dallas area.
The other reason I wanted to get on the forums was because I found it interesting to get the insight from experienced Ebay sellers, because not only are we new sellers in comparison(we have been selling for 11 months, we had our first sale March 13, 2019), but we are primarily a Poshmark seller.
We primarily sell on Poshmark & Mercari, and a little bit on Ebay & Amazon OA. We almost exclusively sell used shoes, and mostly women’s athletic shoes, as that’s primarily the base buying on Posh. In 11 months, we have sold 1025 shoes on Posh, 225 on Mercari, and another 50 on Ebay. Amazon is our newest platform, and not one we are trying to grow very hard, as we don’t have much in terms of capital yet that we want to put towards it. Until last month, we were both working full time jobs, but Eric has gone full time on reselling as of February to help us expand aggressively in this year.
Unlike the majority of shoe sellers, we don’t do new shoes that often. We will pick up some every 6 months or so, because there are buyers who are interested in that, but having a mostly used shoe inventory lets us buy them at a relatively low price compared to new shoes, and each sale essentially gives us a profit of 100% or more in most cases. We started in March of last year with initially putting $1,250 to start the business, and have sold around $50k worth of shoes and have 900 active listings.
To answer the question of why we chose Poshmark over Ebay, we understand that Poshmark takes 20% instead of Ebay’s 10%, but with our numbers, it was essentially the same after factoring in all the costs. Yes Posh is 20% fees, but the buyer pays for shipping, and our ASP is $34, which meant that the 20% Posh is taking only amounted to $6.80 per pair sold, and Posh has much better seller protections than Ebay when it comes to returns. In our thousand plus sales, we have had less than 10 shoes returned to us, because Posh does not allow returns for fit. We had heard horror stories about shoe returns on Ebay and just decided as young sellers it wasn’t worth the hassle trying to grow with that stress hanging over our heads.
Love the podcast and hearing about how you both built out from Ebay and we are hoping to do the same. I’m 32 and Eric is 27, and I’m hoping to be free in the not too distant future.
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Welcome. I was born in Denton but really grew up in Houston.
You guys sounds pretty experienced to me selling approximately 100 pairs of shoes a month. That’s over three pairs a day.
–Where do you find so many pairs of used shoes?
–You say you sell shoes for $34, what is your net profit after inventory costs, fees, shipping?-
We find most of our used shoes from local thrift stores. We don’t go to Goodwill because they are too mainstream and have been very dry for us, but we are lucky enough to be living in an area where we can pick up 50-75 pairs a week without too much trouble. It does mean our weekends are nothing but sourcing 10+ hours a day to find the inventory we want, but it’s been working out for us so far.
For Poshmark, selling a pair for $34 would net us $17.20 in profits ($6.80 fees, $10 Inventory costs, 0-$2 shipping). The $2 for shipping is if we have any stale inventory where we do an offer to likers, where it sends a 10% discount as well as $2 off shipping.
For Mercari, our ASP is $42, because we offer free shipping and just list everything slightly higher to account for the shipping costs, as that’s the only way to sell on there. Selling a pair for $42 would net us $17.80 in profits ($4.20 fees, $10 inventory costs, $10 shipping).
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Cool. So if you sell 3-4 pairs of shoes a day, then you’re making up to $75 in profit out the door. That’s 7 days a week. Nice.
Whats your limiting factor? Finding enough shoes? Storage? Just not enough time to physically photo, list, and ship shoes?
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Our two biggest limiting factors is finding good inventory, and time to process and get it listed.
Our routine currently is sourcing the whole weekend, and then having Eric process and list the shoes during the week, before the next weekend and do it all over again.
The reason it takes so long is that we clean all the pairs in an effort to upcycle the pairs and get more profit out of each pair.
It’s a lot of work, but it’s also resulted in really happy buyers and decent profits overall.
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