Random and rambling

[lokar]

Okay, random it is. I listen to the podcast all the time, it’s great. Jay I like your business sense, I feel our ideas would be almost identical if we were put in the same situation. I don’t know if I’ve posted here in the past, if I have it’s been awhile. I was of the mind that Jay mentions now and again, the one that says why tell everyone about the good procedures and cool tricks and (not easy but) sure profits selling on ebay? I was a-feared that everyone would dive in and make it tougher for ol’ #1…..me….. but then I think about what I’ve learned in the past year and a half, and that is that even with this overwhelmingly positive opportunity, there is still enough uncertainty and detail work and effort required that most folks will get scared away or they won’t stick with it. So I’m not worried about getting squeezed out.

I don’t know where to go from here… I’ll just start talkin’ and see what happens… I don’t sell a lot but it’s fun so I keep messing around with it… I’m a retired air traffic controller, decent retirement, but can’t sit around and do nothing and extra cash helps the extended family… I usually have between 200 and 300 things listed…. never more than 300…. sold well over a thousand items, but in my experience most people do not leave feedback.. mine’s all pos so far…. my first sales on ebay many years ago, I sold a couple things just as a dude that had a couple things to sell… no thoughts of business…. then a couple years ago, my brother gave me a couple pair of raybans and said I could keep them or sell them, and I had some laying around so I decided to sell too… he had leathers, and tortoise of some sort, and I had a couple general’s from way back, in great shape…

Please forgive, I’m gonna wing buy/sell prices here ’cause I don’t have time to research everything… please don’t take the dollars and cents literal, but my numbers here or the idea they mean to convey will be very close… it’s weird how you can buy so much valuable merchandise over the years and still remember very closely what it cost and where it came from… on a lot of stuff, I can remember and picture in my mind the color and placement of the price tag on the item from the different places we go to regularly… the little ol’ lady place (we call it) has little pink tags with shitty price printing on it, etc….. and I can picture the $4.00 pink price tag on the vintage BMW k1100t tank bag I sold a couple weeks ago for $260…. dammit, I’m skipping ahead… http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dark-Green-BMW-K1100LT-Motorcycle-Multivario-Tank-Bag-With-Base-Touring-Riding-/192048400544?rd=1

lemme go back to the couple things that got me fired up… I have always been able to make stuff out of nothing… see what isn’t there… so, when I sold the old old old raybans for something like : generals most valuable, around $350, the leathers were in great shape, got a lot, hundreds, and the tortoise I had accidentally nicked a lens, got sixty or seventy bucks… raybans are good for parts…. these big-ass aviators were all laying around in our drawers (?) waiting for the ’70s to swing back around… instead we made large cash…. then by chance me and my wife stopped by a fairly crappy thrift store, 70% sale on most stuff… D saw a guy swinging some binoculars around and pointed them out to me, then the guy decided no and put them back, I figured I’d swing over and check them out… I look at them, and they’re obviously old, and the white inscribed brand name is pretty obscured with crap and I can only make it out a little, and it looks like Japanese writing, and I’m not a dipshit, so I bought them and cleaned them up at home and saw that I was wrong but I was cool with it this time because these binocs turned out to be dubdub II Voigtlander binocs, marked twelve dollars, seventy percent off that, and then sold fast for about $350….

I was hooked…. but, now that I know there is plenty of $40 and up profit stuff out there, what I wish I would have started doing from the get-go (Listening beginners?) is only buy stuff that will make that $40 profit, minimum…. I have way too much stuff laying around that I know now is not really worth my time because there’s enough of the more profitable stuff out there to itself fill all the time I can give to listing. Maybe this is a weird way to figure, but it kinda works for me: lately and from here forward, I’m thinking I spend on average 20 minutes total on an item….that’s buy it, photo and list it, store it, pull it and ship it… twenty minutes total…. if I can come close to that estimate, I am comfortable with saying I’m making at least $40 for every 20 minute period taken up by an item, so it would mean that three sales per hour, whenever they happen, are producing a profit of at least $120 per hour, most likely way more than that.

I hate stuff packaged badly… I know Ryanne ships shoes in a bag, I can’t do that… maybe tennis shoes… anything leather or nice has to be boxed. I’m extra picky I know, but if I got a bag of leather shoes, even if they arrived in good shape, I know the possibility of them getting scraped or wet or dicked up somehow was increased by the packaging choice, and I’d think the seller shoulda known better. Anyway, that’s just me…. I know people send hats in envelopes and bags… not for me either… I spend a few more cents and it looks better and is better, I think… I put the hat (standard baseball) in a 10 x 13 mylar bag, two cents… I use 9 x 6 x 4 boxes from amazon at .42 each… I sell with free shipping (only for hats ’cause I know what it costs)… a standard hat packaged my way comes in at about 8 ounces, and costs me $2.77 first class postage… so to pack and ship a hat securely costs me $3.21… I recently went to a new method of listing and pricing hats… used to spend way to much time figuring prices, etc…. it’s great profit any way you do it, so I figured don’t worry about being too particular with or falling in love with any item… so I said I’m doing hats at 25, 35, and 45 dollars… so I made three ebay templates titled hat 25, hat 35, etc., and all the info is the same except item specifics and a couple other fields… it’s quick now, I pick up a hat, decide what price of the three I want to use, select that template, enter details for about 30 seconds, attach pics already taken, and publish.

I thought of something to do with the stuff I won’t take the time to sell now because I don’t think it’s worth it, and some of the stuff like I got the other day… I don’t want or like clothes, but specific things can make money, and at a thrift store I saw a Kenworth trucker pullover, cool logo embroidery, it’s money but I’d list it on my site just for the cool factor… anyway, clothes that day were five for five dollars…I only wanted this pullover, but I sifted through and got a faiap-new under armor compression shirt, a lands end lightweight pullover, and a couple other good-but-wouldn’t-have-bought-them items… so I’m gonna list the kenworth pullover, and I’ll throw the other four items that cost me one dollar each into a box that I have started keeping things in off to the side that I won’t ever sell and cost me maybe a buck or two but the item’s still kinda cool… then if I make good money on a sale, I’ll pick something out of that box and add it to my sold item when I package it if it fits and doesn’t change the shipping, like a flat rate package… example, I packaged a pair of paddock boots today in a medium flat rate box, and rolled up the lands end pullover and stuck it in a mylar bag and in one of the boots… they were size seven, it was a size medium… maybe they like it, maybe they don’t, I’ve gotten some nice notes, and nobody’s bitched yet about getting extra stuff…. but for no extra shipping fee to anyone and a buck outta my pocket, I sent a cool and probably in some way usable item to someone who I think will dig it because I dug it.

I try to strike a pricing medium with two things mainly in mind…. I want to get as much as I can for it, but when they open the box, I want them to feel like they got a better deal than they expected. It’s tricky, and I think feedback plays into it too, people know there’s not gonna be a hassle… take a pair of shoes, on the lower end of “great” shape, so I describe and price them as “good”, not great, but I show pictures that show these “great” shoes…I price them at the upper end of the “good” range,…. with most things I think there’s a low pricing “range” a mid pricing range and a high…. say my research shows these shoes are $40-50 low range, 50-60 mid range, and 60-70 high range, I’ll price around sixty bucks probably. i want them to not just open and feel they got what they paid for, I want them to smile and feel like they got more. That’s a good experience as a buyer.

Couple other cool buys…. walking through a habitat for humanity, found a xlerator granite cover auto hand drier (the brand that blows at super high speed) marked $whatever with a percentage off I remember it ended up $12 and change…no box or papers, looked new and perfect, sold for over $300, retail is about 500…. five dollar cowboy hat sold for over a hundred…. cutco cheese knife set at salv army in case for ten bucks… retail is pretty high, sold for over a hundred… two dollars for nwt billabong backpack, sold for $90. I have example after example. Two dollar fireman boots in great shape for $130…. this stuff is just laying there in the store.

I think I can find this stuff every day….. I stop all the time…

not sure why I ran on and on, hope it’s okay…

zman cool stuff network

[Jay]

Welcome lokar. Sounds like you’re enjoying the life of a scavenger. There are certainly many ways to do this. It’s fun just to experiment and see what works for you. There’s so much out there to find and sell.

As a retired air traffic controller, what do you think of the new plans to privatize your industry? Is that safe?

[lokar]

Since I’m retired, it’s not “my” industry anymore, which is nice from an employee perspective, because once they go private, about thirty thousand people would immediately be working for the new, non-government business, and thereby lose the government pension, security, vacation and seniority they’ve been promised and working toward. I know that’d frost me. Be a bunch of p.o.’d controllers for a few years.

Just like everything else, privatization has its good and bad…. prob way more efficient, because there is a lot of waste now, but a private company is always being squeezed to save money and trim workers’ hours, etc…. operating minimum staffed with old, crappy equipment doesn’t sound like the radar room I want working my airplane at 30 thousand feet. You’ll get one guy in the tower when you need two. Stuff like that.

Was a great job for many years, seemingly different every day, but it gets to be the same-ish, too… turn left, turn right, climb, descend….. what time do I get off?

[Author]

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