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On Ebay, I have not done well overall with the following:
- Used baby items (except Pottery Barn), including very clean handmade quilts
- Drink coasters
- Dansk china
- Generic can’t make out the signature art pottery, generally speaking, except ethnic (not moving!)
- Fake fruit bundles
- Blank cassettes
- Candlewick stitchery kids (all white)
- Hallmark Christmas ornaments
Slowed Down/Decreased Sales/Depressed Prices:
- Brown Bag Cookie presses
- Lenox Butterfly Meadow
- Stitchery kits that are not Christmas decor
- Starbucks mugs
- Chalkware wall art
I heard a Youtuber say that glass seems to be starting to cool off. So many people know to look for it and list it now. There is also chatter about low dollar items in general (sellers quitting listing under $10-15). It’s a lot more to ship low dollar items than when I started on Ebay for sure.
MCM is still very strong locally and online for me. ’60-70s flower power is definitely in. Vintage patches, cowboy boots, vintage Levis – edgy vintage clothes. I do well with textiles and they are easy to ship.
Curious what others are experiencing.
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This is a good topic. It’s why we are always selling everything and finding new things to sell. I cant imagine selling just one kind of thing because 1) taste change 2) saturation.
Over the years we’ve sold lots of things that did well and then sales fell off a cliff. Typewriters, vintage fedoras, black pirate boots, old mac software, patches, trucker hats….
We used to find vintage trucker for cheap and sell the for big money, They sold all the time. Then other sellers started doing the same thing. One seller was even here in our forum and exclusively sold old trucker hats that he’d purchase by the hundreds. Saturation.
Another guy started a store that just sold vintage patches. I think he had like 10k at one point. The market dropped out for us and we no longer seek out old patches to sell. I always wonder what happens to the people who build a store around a single category over the longterm. You really have to know that market
Our goal is to keep seeking out overlooked items. Tastes are always changing.
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Bought an 18th-century ivory double slide rule from a thrift shop for three pounds. Fortunately the manager was absent that day, otherwise she would have thrown it away, like she does fur coats. Rare and unsaleable, unless I pay £250 for a CITES licence valid for one transaction.
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For years I was selling cordless phones. I could reliably source at least a dozen or more a week and list them within minutes. It was so easy. Prices would hover anywhere from $15 to $20 all day. Not crazy numbers, but they would sell eventually. Then other people jumped on the market and drove the price down and down and down until it was straight up unprofitable, like $5-$8 net.
To the other point: I won’t touch anything under $20 now. I crunched the numbers and found the money I made from sub-$20 sales was so low it wasn’t worth the time investment. I effectively cut out all of those items and my bottom line barely moved.
Not trying to rag on anyone who lists below that BTW, but I strongly encourage people who are considering cutting it out to click the order ID on the desktop version of eBay and look at the fee breakdown for those items. Nowadays it even includes the cost of shipping labels after you purchase them. You can just take that number and sub out your cost to get net profit. Might be shocking to see how low that number gets!
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Yes, when I first started I could ship a mug from California across country for $6. I bought a lot of coffee mugs at first to build my confidence packing, shipping and selling. Rates have gone up so much since then. A lot of these lower dollar breakables aren’t compelling enough to pay current rates unless close to seller.
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There are so many brands of clothing that were hot for a minute that now I either won’t touch at all or I’m very selective: Tommy Hilfiger, Lilly Pulitzer, White House Black Market, most Anthropologie brands, Madewell, Robert Graham, Tommy Bahama, Vineyard Vines, Cabi, Lululemon. Oh and let’s not forget the flash-in-a-pan Lularoe. I remember a reseller I used to follow getting so excited at finding Lularoe. Now thrift stores can’t seem to give Lularoe away.
I’m dating myself with these two: fancy china dishes & Boyds Bears. There are some china patterns that still do well but its few and far between.
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Anthropologie ran a lot of sales last year. I think they are struggling a bit more than before. Certainly is a lot available on the second hand market. Still have some great items to cherry pick once and a while but like an employee told me a while back when I missed out on something – they are always putting out similar lines.
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