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This week we came up with a new slogan that we hope will ring throughout the online selling world: “The best way to sell is whatever way you enjoy bec
[See the full post at: Scavenger Life Episode 312: Is eBay Removing Old listings?] -
Total Items in Store: ebay, 209—etsy,438
Items Sold: 11
Total Sales: $691 (ebay, $321 — etsy, $369)
Highest Price Sold: $300 (antique beaded gloves found at my local auction house, I stepped up and paid $85 after researching similar “sold”pieces, I had my priced at the upper range for this example and took an offer, I am very pleased with the sale)
Average Price Sold: $62
Returns: 0a good week for me, I can’t even imagine having to pack 60 items in a week, I have decided that that will not be the direction I am going in, I am pleased with the size of my store and the sales flow (in general of course, slow sales are a bummer, but I try and roll with the punches.)
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5/21 – 5/27
Total Items in store: 356
Items sold: 11
Cost of items sold: approx. $20
Total Sales: $130
Highest price sold: $$28 pyrex corning cranberry sauce pan
Average price sold: $12.78
Int’l sales: 0
Returns:0
Number of items listed this week: 0
Amazon disbursement – $4142Full time ebay goal – was March 2018; now – ????
Ebay to Amazon – 12 sales – $1,680 , COGS – $688, fees – $219, profit – $770
I am running a 35% off sale on ebay and have been selling a bunch of cheap stuff. At this point, selling the stuff off of ebay is a plus. There is never enough time in a day-
I feel like your experiment on Amazon is a huge, continuing success. Why not just focus on that business. It’s been consistent enough for the at least the past six months, right?
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Essentially, I am only doing amazon at this point. I have listed less than 50 items on ebay during the past year. I have been averaging $500 per month in ebay sales in 2017, even though I have not listed anything since october of last year. Since the first of the year, I have been concentrating on being consistent on sending stuff into AZ.
I feel like a day trader!
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RR Store Week May 21-27, 2017
Total Items in Store: 1,264
Items Sold: 44
Cost of Items Sold: $56.22
Total Sales: $883.98 (798.98 eBay/$85 sales to friends)
Highest Price Sold: $59.99 (50s dress)
Average Price Sold: $18.16
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 13So thankful for my auction experiment. Wednesday, I threw my back out. Like bad. I was (and still kinda am) down for the count. So very little listing happened. But since I’m starting auctions every day, listing is still technically happening, just not brand new listings. I have a bunch of stuff ready to list, so once I’m ambulatory again, I’m going to hit the ground running…well, maybe walking. I’m still really sore.
Lots of low dollar sales brought my average price way down. But it was mostly stuff I’ve had listed for years, so I’m just glad to see it go away and make room for new stuff. It also tells me that my experiment is working, so I’m gonna keep on keepin’ on. I also had two sales to friends. One called asking if I had any Hawaiian shirts for sale. I had JUST pulled a whole bunch out to sell, and she bought a beautiful 50s polished cotton one for $45. Another friend needed a peacock chair for her baby shower. I have one in my tiki room, so I offered to let her borrow it. She insisted on renting it from me; $40 bucks cash in my pocket.
*Paul*
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What is the starting price for your auctions, or is each one different.
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Sorry for the late reply, Steven. I was having computer issues.
I started each auction at a different price; basically, the lowest price I would be willing to take for an item. Because I’m just doing it for older items, I don’t mind taking a lower price. My cost of goods is so cheap that I’m still making a profit.
*Paul*
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Total Items in Store: 431
Items Sold: 26 (24 ebay, 2 facebook)
Cost of Items Sold: $64.00
Total Sales: $519.61
Highest Price: $100 (Beretta shotgun case)
Returns: 0 -I had one person open a case for “Item Not Received”. Tracking showed it was delivered to a parcel locker at his address. He never responded to the case after I uploaded tracking, so I had ebay close the case.Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $15
Number of items listed this week: about 50I’ve been selling a lot of vintage mixer and vacuum cleaner parts lately.
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Week May 21-27, 2017
Total Items in Store: 920
Items Sold: 12 (waiting payment on 1)
Cost of Items Sold: $ 26.75
Total Sales: $ 152.14
Highest Price Sold: $ 38.85 (set of 3 slides)
Average Price Sold: $ 12.67
International Sales: 0 (GSP 0)
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 48
Number of items listed this week: 54I am glad I can post my numbers again. I am working my way through the dead pile so I have many low dollar items sales. I also put a bunch of old inventory on auction as I want it gone.
Last month I began waking up at 4:30 am and work till 8-8:30 am when my little girl wakes up. It is amazing how motivated I am to get up so early every morning knowing I work for myself. My previous job started at 6 am so I woke up at 4:30 am but it was so hard then.-
I am with you. I like to get up early (4:30-5:00), spend 30 minutes in my morning routine, and then go straight to listing. Nothing better than living the old Army slogan…”We do more before 9am than most people do all day.”
I’m a morning person, so mornings are my magic time to tackle the biggest item of the day…
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Week May 21-27, 2017
Total Items in Store: 920
Items Sold: 18
Cost of Items Sold: $65 (14.4% of sales)
Total Sales: $451.94
Highest Price Sold: $65 (Temple of the Dog Concert T-Shirt)
Average Price Sold: $25.11
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $340
Number of items listed this week: 31
Promoted listings test: 7 sales, $139.98 (30.1% of total sales), $7.57 fees (5.4% of sales)Decent week, but the second half was dead. When I posted in What Sold on Wednesday, I already had 17 sales – but that means only 1 sale Thurs-Sat. Still a good week, I can’t complain.
Only went to one sale this weekend, but cleaned up. Bought an entire tobacco pipe collection for $300 and listed separately & in groups for approximately $1000. At the same sale too, bought a box of playing cards for $10 total and listed the decks separately for $450.
Taking advantage of the day off today, digging into my death pile while my wife is still asleep and before we head out to bbq this afternoon. About to put on the show while I list.
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I had kind of a funny scammer customer this week. She bought a Victoria’s Secret teddy/gown that I sold for only $10 because I found a small hole in back after washing it. (I wash some things like gowns and swim suits–just seems icky not to.) She asked me to ship it fast because she was leaving on vacay Friday. So I got it there by Wed. Then she emailed me thru ebay saying “I washed it and the straps broke and now it’s worthless!” It always tips me off to a scam when someone 1. Is rude and 2. Bought something really cheap. So I immediately wrote back, “That’s horrible! SO sorry! Please send a photo for immediate refund “. She wrote back, “sorry, it’s on the way to the landfill. No can do photos.”
I resisted the urge to reply, “sorry, no can do refund.” Instead I toyed with her and said,”Wow, I checked tracking and it says your post office just got it this morning, and you’ve already laundered it and the trash collector already picked it up.” She replied that her husband took their trash to a dumpster. Then I said,”i’ve never heard of both straps breaking at the same time. They didn’t do that when I washed it.”
She never did open a case and of course I never sent her any money. If she gives me bad FB I presume I can get it removed because she never sent a photo. I did however block her and reported her as a scammer to ebay.
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Yes, this does sound like someone who wants to keep the item and get her money back. But I have noticed lately if the buyer leaves a negative comment like: ‘terrible product’, ‘it broke’ or whatever, Ebay will not remove it. They state this is the buyer’s opinion and they have the right to express it.
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My numbers for the week of 5/21/17:
Total Items in Store: 107
Items Sold: 7
Cost of Items Sold: $13
Total Sales: $240 + shipping
Highest Price Sold: $75 (vintage Disney sheet)
Average Price Sold: $34.28
Returns: 0I didn’t work on eBay this past week and my numbers reflect that.
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but read the blog post. There are no less than 5 people on different FB groups I belong to who got the email from eBay and had many of their listings removed. They are saying that the listing are in their Unsolds, so they don’t completely disappear out of the system. That’s good news. But to relist them without making any of the changes they are recommending does not seem to be a good plan. They are not refunding those listing fees on the removed items. And merely relisting them, they stand to get removed again. One of the “victims” said the Rep she worked with said this policy is being rolled out. Here’s the relevant info from the eBay help pages:
“If your listing was removed because it hasn’t had any sales in more than a year, we recommend that you don’t relist it unless you take steps to improve the likelihood of it selling. You may need to review your pricing strategies and best practices for listings, or consider whether some inventory needs to be removed from eBay if it won’t sell.”
Link this was copy/pasted from (bottom of page): http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/questions/listing-ended.html-
Just curious what you think they danger may be to just relist? I assume the worst that happens is the items get taken down after another 12 months of not being sold, right?
That being said, I guess some newer sellers may need to take new photos, update titles, research new prices. But if you’re a more experienced seller, much of this will be good. Again, some items just take time to sell.
The other thing to do is just list 30-day and then relist as new each month. I guess that just tricks eBay.
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Ebay is trying to clear out, make the site less cumbersome and the search more effective for its buyers. I understand why they are doing it but also see the negative implications to long-tail sellers.
Historically, when they are trying to accomplish something and the sellers don’t cooperate (ie: low item price/high shipping to avoid fees, forced return policies), eBay has moved to less subtle means to the end. What do you think will happen when they are telling sellers to cull and/or update their old listings and they are instead just relisted without any changes? My guess is that eBay will move to the next step of forcing compliance. Not sure what that would be, but I have a few ideas. It would be easy enough for them to actually delete the listings (not have them available in unsolds) or to take away the “Sell Similar” function and only allow a relist after changes have been logged.
To answer your question: what am I afraid of? This change doesn’t affect me much. And most of the changes in the recent year or two have been for the better, in my opinion. I do feel a little unnerved with putting all my eggs in the basket of a company that feels the need to change rules every 3-6 months. It is not the sign of a strong company but of a scrambling one. I guess I am just wishing the “platform” I have chosen to stand on was a more stable one.-
eBay has always made refinements to their platform for as long as I can remember in every Spring and Fall update. I’d feel worried if they didn’t evolve. Would you want to depend on a business that didn’t change with the market? I know Amazon changes comes a little too fast for me.
I guess we’ll see how far eBay wants to take “clearing out” inventory. Doesn’t seem like a smart or necessary move. As others have said, it’s easy to expand a database and buy more servers. Every listing is more listing fees. I dont have enough evidence to know what their big picture is.
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I understand the reason. If you talk to buyers they will tell you. The site is too cluttered with junk. And not one man’s treasure type junk. It’s like when you go to a garage sale and maybe 70% of it is something that no one is ever going to buy. Ebay is like that now, and it was never supposed to be. it was supposed to be the culled 30%. It kills the sales for browsers because there are too many weeds to wade through. You can only find what you want with a very specific search, or with a whole bunch of time invested.
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That’s an intersting point. Does it say somwhere that eBay is supposed to be just the culled 30%? Is there somewhere on eBay’s site that says how many items they want to have in their database?
I have different experience with eBay as a buyer. I love all the variety. I can find literally anything and often at extremely good prices because there are so many sellers. Without this wide and deep inventory on their site, it’d be much less useful.
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Jay, I am quite sure ebay has no upper limit in mind for the number of listings on the site. Years ago, they were worried about it but they can buy more servers to maintain more inventory. The biggest impediment they faced years ago was that the default search was “ending soonest” which made sense for a relatively small auction site, but not for a site that has tons of fixed price items. People complain about “Best Match” ad Cassini, but without them, ebay would be a much, much smaller site in terms of inventory.
I don’t think ebay is looking to cull inventory so much as trying to modify seller behavior—to get more sellers to think about sales velocity as an important part of their business. To us long tail sellers, velocity is not as important, but it wouldn’t hurt us to give more thought to it.
One problem is, I don’t think ebay gets a lot of real input from many of the small long tail sellers, so they tend to lump us in with the multi-item listing sellers, and the business models aren’t really the same.
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I want to star this answer. *********
Yes, I agree that our kind of store is really a tiny portion of their sales, so they are creating new policies for the commodity sellers. But this is why I usually take these policy changes with a grain of salt. As long as we’re willing to be patient, the wheels of commerce keep turning.
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Week May 21-27:
Total Items in Store: 255
Items Sold: 5
Total Sales: $205
Highest Price Sold: $72 (Yakimo Mako Kayak Saddles)
Average Price Sold: $33
Returns: 0 but 1 Unpaid Item Case
Spent on Inventory: $0 but did receive another car load of donations from my community
Listed: 8I totally give up on beating myself up when I don’t make listing targets. My internet went down this week and it was one of the most frustrating periods I’ve had since I’ve moved out to this rural area. Honestly, if I had an alternate internet option, I’d shift in a heartbeat and pay the contract penalty! I love rural living but…. gaaaaaaaaaaaah! Still, I could process sales on my phone by driving into town to get data signal! Woot woot! LOL
Unpaid item case closed for a buyer in China who emails me several times a day with odd requests. Is there an easy way to block a buyer? I can’t find the option and it’s probably front and center and simple! Ha!
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To block a buyer, use this link:
http://pages.ebay.com/services/buyandsell/biddermanagement.html
If you have the seller hub page, you might have a short cut set up to this page already, if not, it is pretty easy to add it there.
And as a final note, You can do this through site preferences, which also lets you control whether or not blocked buyers may contact you or not.
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If this policy holds true and we are limited to one year of listing time, that creates a huge opportunity for a new site.
Successful businesses are all about filling a niche.
I can’t imagine Ebay would be so foolish, as to turn out this segment of their business.
Time will tell.. maybe it’s time to open an Etsy account?
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Just to be clear. eBay isnt removing the items permanently. Seems like they’re just making sellers jump through a hoop to actively relist. Seems like a temporary dumb thing they’re doing.
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Jay, A dumb thing? Yes and no. While everyone seems to be getting caught in the net, I’d say the net makes sense for multi-item GTC listers. A seller selling a new model iphone, who has 100 in stock, and one listing to represent the 100….if that guy hasn’t sold even one iphone in a year’s time, then, yes, it’s time…past time…for that seller to figure out what he can change to start selling them.
But I just wonder, how much of a problem this really is? If a seller has money tied up in 100 iphones, he is likely to make changes long before a year is up. I suppose if one is using a drop shipper that could be different…maybe less self-imposed pressure to make changes because the seller doesn’t have a lot of up front money tied up in the inventory.
The question is: why not exclude sellers like us, who are mostly selling long tail one-offs? As you say (and I agree), lowering the price or making other changes is often not at all necessary….patience is necessary. Still, if I think back to my days setting up in antique malls, the most successful malls were the ones that strictly enforced rules about fresh inventory. Most malls depend heavily on a core group of regular buyers, and if those buyers are seeing the same old stuff over and over again, they stop coming. Harry Rinker taught a course years ago (pre-ebay) for mall dealers, and one of the things he talked about was maintain fresh inventory. And if you have nothing new to put in your booth, move the stuff around to create at least the illusion of change.
I’d like to figure out an easy way to cycle things in and out of my store (I could probably do this with SixBit if I took the time to figure it out.)
One thing I might try: I don’t use GTC, but I do relist over and over again, usually without changing anything. I think I might start switching out the gallery photo, replacing it with a different photo from my assortment (where feasible). ebay is a very visual environment, and doing that might be the online equivalent of re-arranging an antique mall booth. Will it increase sales? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try, especially during this “slow season”
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I can see the need to switch around an antique mall since there is limited physical space. But eBay can be as big as it wants to be, almost infinite. The Search Bar filters out stuff and lets you keep seeing new stuff listed. I have a handful of saved searches for items I like that is in order of “newly listed”.
I’d love to hear if switching around photos works. Maybe it will! But honestly I’m not sure how moving around photos would sell an item that didn’t sell last week if the original photos were already good.
I just think a lot of people are trying to come up with solutions when we really don’t know what the problem is yet. Is there really too much stuff on eBay all the sudden?
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I don’t think there’s too much stuff on ebay all of a sudden. ebay has been warning us about slower moving inventory for a few years now, so this should not really come as much of a surprise. And as you say, I think re-listing the stuff is the simple work around. I don’t think this is as drastic as it may seem.
But I agree with those who say if ebay sees this as a teachable moment, and sellers don’t get the lesson, ebay will find a stricter way of getting their point across.
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Swapping out the gallery photo is one of the things we do to tend the garden (I take 3-4 potential gallery photos for each item). I know that eBay sees the gallery as part of what is “unique”. Once when we were experimenting with Sell Similar instead of relist, I had two listings that were identical except for the gallery shot. I know that eBay flags duplicate listings immediately, so that told me that when they look for uniqueness, the gallery photo is part of that.
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Total Items in Store: 380
Items Sold: 6
Cost of Items Sold: $152 new + 12 used
Total Sales: $354
Highest Price Sold: $240 (Bedding I purchased online last month for about $140)
Average Price Sold: $59
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 13Thankfully one good sale to save the week and it was a Facebook Pinterest party item sold the same day, so that’s awesome. I’m trying out a few promoted listings and had one sale in a couple of weeks. I’m going slightly over the 5% mark for most items. I pulled an action I was running for a sealed Lego set starting at .99 since there were practically no views after 6 days (seems odd). Very busy with family life and the latter part of week was definitely not Ebay friendly. No shopping this week, so back on the wagon.
For the caller in Santa Barbara, I recommend also trying the Facebook Group Santa Barbara Home Décor Swap. It’s smaller and still a bit more upscale than the other local swap sites, but things do get buried fairly quickly.
Re the removed listings issue, just reporting that an unlucky few reported sell similar items were also pulled, even some that had been tweaked a bit. Those seemed unhappy with paying a bunch of listing fees but were glad they hadn’t lost all of the text and photos.
Have a great week.
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Week of 5/21-5/27
Total Items in Store: 1,494
Items Sold: 63
Number of Items Listed This Week: 88
Total Sales: $1,953.16
Cost of Items Sold: $423.42
Highest Item Sold: $65 – Fly Racing MAVERIK Motorcycle Boots
Competition: Highest Priced Items: Veronica wins (again!) expanding her lead for the year 13-7.
Competition: Highest Total Sales: Troy leads the year $16.9k to $13.1kSales bounced back up this week, being closer to the recent average. We increased our listing activity closer to normal for the week, and the “Feed the Beast” proves true…the more we list…the more we sell.
Yard sales were great this past week, and I was able to do well in the thrift stores. We are going to hit a large community sale this Friday, and I will hit the thrift stores on Saturday, and we should be set up in a backlog of unlisted items to take next weekend off. We are also getting a backlog on Fall/Winter clothes that we are going to sit on until August while we list everyday items. If we get low on anything, we will have these items ready in draft or scheduled listings, and then list in August.
Regarding eBay removing listings that are over 1 year old…It will be interesting if we get any notices on our items. We are in the 30 day camp, and we touch up any unsold listings (change out the gallery photo, touch up the item specifics and item description, checking pricing, etc.), but we have listings that are over year old since we originally listed them.
I can tell you from experience that when we have listings that have low number of views in the past 30 days, when we spend time on changing the listing, we get more views the next week. That is part of the reason that we do 30 day listings, so that we can see how our listings are doing and what is working (and what is not). It is like fishing…if we see we aren’t getting nibbles (views), it is time to change the bait!
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Awesome sales. You guys are really hitting on all cylinders.
How long have you had your store on eBay?
I know you like to revisit listings and try to sell them fast, but you also like to list a lot of items consistently. Do you think that it’s just a natural progression of growing a large inventory because you can never sell as much as you list when you’re really going at it? Or do you think you’ll always be able to sell as much as you list?
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Veronica started the business in 2004, and I started listing in 2013, and that is when we moved to the Premium store. We made this a full time business in 2015, and have not looked back.
We set a goal of 100 listings per week, and with some tweaking in the process, we keep getting closer. With that level of new listings, I think we will outpace sales until September through December (that is what my forecasting model is showing).
To be where I want to be, we really need to get to 150 listings per week. Or, 100 higher Profit listings per week. We have a review of our numbers each week, and had this very conversation today. Grow the volume…or the ASP? Love to do both, as long as the higher ASP has a reasonable sell through. Cash flow is always king…
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Ryanne and I started in 2008 and list about as aggressively as you guys do. (That’s almost 10 years!) We have amassed a 5000 items inventory because it’s difficult to sell sell as much as we list.
If you and Veronica keep selling into 2025, do you think you’ll have the same size inventory? Or will your listing ability surpass your ability to sell? Just curious if you think that tweaking prices and photos will keep sales exponentially rising. Or will it be like Coca-Cola where they simply cant sell as much product as they make.
Also, do you ever lack money to buy inventory? We find buying inventory to be almost a negligible cost.
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I have a spreadsheet forecasting model that I use to forecast the current and one future year (so right now, 2017 & 2018). I use the inventory we have, forecasted listings, and sell thru rate to predict # of sales. As of now, assuming 100 listings per week, sales will outpace listings in Q4 2017 and Q1 2018. Listings will out pace sales in Q2 & Q3 of 2018, and sales outpace again in Q4. For 2017, I’m predicting 4,523 new listings, and 3,720 sales. For 2018 that gap closes, with 4,800 listings, and 4,566 sales.
I use the past 2 years sell thru rate (by month) to help predict the number of sales. If those rates continue, I think the model is accurate. If we see changes, we adapt. We are always looking at items that don’t sell, or sell well, to make sure we are putting out there items that people want to buy. When we started, we could sell Boeri ski helmets and kids Kamik & Sorel boots for good profit. Now we don’t touch them as either the purchase price is too high, or the sales prices and profit are too low. So we always adapt.
Does the updating the listing work? I really think so. When we relist our unsolds, I look at how many views the item had in the 30 days to gauge if the listing is working. If something had a lot of views, I don’t change much, and get it back out there. If it had less than 20 (just my own line), I spend more time changing the listing title, description, looking at price, etc. I can tell you from experience that there are a lot of times something will have less than 10 views, I work over the listing, and either it sells the next month, or at least the views are 20+ to 30+. That Cassini engine knows when you have tended the garden. Will that work for you guys? Maybe on your clothing and bread and butter items more than your collectibles. Only way to see is to try, and I think that experiment is for a year, to remove seasonality and get a good universe of the before & after affect.
I think that we can get our listings up to 125 per week with some new tweaks in how we list and finding more efficiency in our process. Once we are as efficient as possible everywhere…then we think about either an employee, or looking for the same number of items, but that bring more profit per item. For example, I track our ASP (Average Selling Price) and AP (Average Profit) in all the categories that we sell in. I have a much higher AP in Suits, Sport Coats, and Jackets than I do for Shirts. But, it takes a few minutes longer for each listing, requires more storage space, they are longer tail items so the sell thru is lower, they are much more seasonal (Fall & Winter sales) and harder to find regularly. So we can change the business to make it grow, but we have to fund that somehow as well.
Cash for new inventory is always my first item in the budget each month. Before I pull money from PayPal, I make sure that we have the current eBay fees and the next week’s forecasted purchases at thrift stores in PayPal first, and just take out the top. So if our eBay fees are at $1000, and we want to spend $500 at the thrift store (normal), I only take out the money above $1500. I also make sure that we have enough cash on hand for yard sale purchases as well each week. Cash is the life blood of the business, so we take care of that first…and we tighten our personal belt if we have to. Business cash is king.
I know that your model has a higher ROI than ours. I think you guys are around an average 10x on your purchase price. We are closer to 4x, so cash for inventory is more important. Also why I forecast that in our model as well. I track our average purchase price, and when I change the number of listings for each month, it changes then amount of cash needed to fund those listings as well.
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I love your attention to detail! You also have a background that seems perfect for running an eBay store since you are able to plot out your numbers into the future. I really look forward to seeing how your store grows and evolves. Sounds like you guys are also having a lot of fun.
Cyndi and her husband (https://www.scavengerlife.com/2015/05/episode-197-seller-conversation-wi.html) are our heroes on eBay , but they also run a store more like how you describe. They never have more than 1500 items. She says she likes to sell one item every hour. They never let items sit in their store for more than a couple months. They make crazy money. Their secret is selling clothing in volume averaging $10-$20 profit. They list 50+ items a day. She says she wakes up at 3am to start packing and works until bedtime. They make much more money than we do. We also couldn’t do what they do.
We’re coming at it from a different angle. We want a business that is more hands off. We like to work, but we also need to do other things to stay interested. I think we’d burn out very quickly if we had to check and update every listing that didn’t sell each month. “List it and forget it” is just up our alley since storage and COGS isn’t an issue. As you said, cashflow is king. eBay has always been a super positive cash flow for us. A pipeline of cash in fact!
So I hope our “list it and forget” strategy can keep working for us. If not, I’m glad we’re sinking our profits into rental property. When this second rental is finished soon, we could live off just that income if we had to.
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Thanks. As a team, Veronica and I are very complementary: She loves the unique items and the creative side, I love the volume and the business side. I love “keeping score” of our business, and by doing so, we make the business better.
Yep, different ways of running the business, and they can work in different ways. We tried GTC once, and our sales tanked, and when we went back to 30 days and tended the garden, our sales picked back up.
I hear you on some of the others that are REALLY working hard, like Amazing Taste. I like to follow other sellers that I know, both competitors here in our market as well as others that I find online (like Amazing, Rockstar Flipper, Prof Sales, etc.). I learn a lot from what they do, what they sell, and how they do it. Amazing has (based on my calcs), an 80+% sell thru rate. Insane! I have someone here in Denver that is over 100% sell thru every week.
We are trying to work that balance of total grind, and new things. We have thought about a blog on our way of doing things (so variation on you guys, Prof Sales, etc.) so that we have a new area to learn from. In about a year, our youngest son will be in college, and that will free up some time to take on new tasks. We are of the mind to NEVER stop learning, always do new things. We learned to make our own wine, expanded our garden knowledge, new recipes, etc. I even have been learning to identify edible plants that grow wild around here, and have a “scrounger garden” on one side of the house that I keep wild for free food. Some may think they are weeds, but we are getting free food (I don’t even water it) from Mallow, Purslane, Lambs Quarters, etc.
And funny enough…one of our next areas is rental property ourselves. We plan to be in that game sometime next year. We see that we will stay in this game for quite a while, but we know that when we get to 60 (a long time off!!!), we will want a business that is much more hands off, or at least easier to manage without a TON of grind work like eBay is. I laughed a ton when you started talking about your rental property (I found you in 2014 and went back and listened to every podcast…my boys can recognize your voices). I was like “Yep! We are planning the same path!”
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Sell what you want. And some of the boring stuff. Boring stuff makes some $, but the fun stuff lets you frustrate all your kids with your bragging. Best sale in weeks for pure fun? A whopping $18 sale that I am so excited about because it was it was everyone else’s junk. I bought a box of not real exciting ephemera for $1. I haven’t listed most of it yet but I thought I would give a try with a single piece of paper. Kind of pretend I’m Ryanne. So I listed a 50s/60s family’s Polio vaccination record. Complete with the written in dates. Somebody in England is buying it and paying double shipping. So excited. If that can sell, anything can sell.
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Its been a slow but sure couple weeks. Sells are down some, but I just keep listing. Sadly, I had some bad news this week. The irs sent me a letter saying I did not pay up on 12k plus of net income for SE taxes for 2016. Moreover, I never paid it this year either. I knew I was doing something wrong with taxes, but I guess I am clueless. I barely have 400 in my Pay pal, much less the 4,000 I will likely owe, so it is a bummer indeed. Not sure if I will sell my store or just get a job and send all eBay profit into the irs for the foreseeable future. I am trying to stay positive but it gets rough sometimes lol.
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The amount was for the net income I reported. I made over 30k gross but after all the fees, expenses and write offs that was my net income I reported. I actually thought I was going to get a refund of 30 dollars. Somehow I got confused and thought that if you owe less than 1,000 dollars you are not liable for SE tax, which is why I never have paid. Lesson learned = never do your own taxes! I have an appointment to meet with my uncle’s accountant tomorrow so hopefully she can help me sort it out. I will survive, but I am going to have a rough quarter or two trying to catch up.
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Week of May 14-20
* Total Items in Store: 750
* Items Sold: 11
* Cost of Items Sold: $11.22 + $8 ish Commission
* Total Sales: $236.00
* Highest Price Sold: $59 four pieces of enamel on copper art
* Average Price Sold: $21.45
* Returns: 1 (haven’t received yet)
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: approx. $108
* Number of items listed this week: 30 (includes 14 resisted as auctions)The week was pretty slow, but not bad. I like that enamel on copper sale. It was listed as best offer, but the buyer paid full price.
I had removed a large number of slow selling low value listings about 2 weeks ago to sell off at a flea market, but the day ended up very rainy day, and I had to leave after only an hour or so. I received a promotion email from eBay for some free 10-day auctions listings if they started on May 25. They will be running a commercial during the basketball finals on June 4, and they wanted auction listings that would end around that time. I have a store, so I didn’t need the promotion, but I ended up re-listing 14 items as auctions. Let’s see how that goes.
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Store Week 5/21/17 – 5/27/17
Total items in store: 1353
Items sold: 18
Cost of items sold: $19.21
Total sales: $528.42
Highest price sold: $100.00 (Vintage Bruce Lee Poster – 2nd sold of 3 purchased together)
Average price sold: $29.36
International Sales: 2
Returns: 2 (didn’t fit)
Money spent on new inventory this week: 0 -
Jay and Ryanne – I have something large I need to sell, and I have some followup questions on your answer to local pickup.
1. I’m used to listing weight for shipping. If someone is going to hire a company to move the item, won’t they need a weight? I have no method of measuring it. It is probably between 200 – 300 pounds.
2. I’m not sure of your exact wording, but you mentioned something about Uship being an eBay shipping company. Could you expand on that?
3. Other than Uship and Plycon, should I mention FedEx and UPS freight? Or are they much more expensive?
What I have is a nonworking refrigerator from 1939 or 1940. My grandmother had bought it when my father was an infant. It worked up to 2009 – about 70 years. My husband and I thought about getting it renovated and using it as a second refrigerator, but it ended up being too expensive. At this point it just isn’t going to happen, and we’ve decided to sell.
Thanks!
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With a Local Pickup, you are not required to put in a weight and dimensions. I would just tell them you don’t know the weight for sure. A refrigerator is a pretty standard item and the shipping company and buyer should be able to figure it out.
Uship is not associated with Ebay, but is similar to Ebay in the way that they handle their website. The individual shippers are all independent and bid on your shipment. You choose the shipper based on feedback, price etc. You are not obligated to go with anyone. It’s like a “best offer” situation. I recommend you go to their site and see what it’s all about.
The shipping options you may mention, are just suggestions for the buyer. They can choose whatever method they wish and should be the ones contacting the companies themselves. Put in as many as you want.
The key is to leave all the details up to the buyer, so you don’t get pulled into it and end with a lot of headaches.
Good luck..
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I want to chime in with a local pick up question too. I put something on and it sold. But the next day it was on the waiting shipping line and when I called Ebay, they said if I do not ship it, I will get a ding for late shipment. How do you go around this?
I ended up canceling my transaction because the buyer did not read it was a local pick-up.
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If the listing is for local pickup, the handling rules do not apply. I have about 12 local pickups in my listings and they are ineligible for the TRS discount due to this.
I’ve never had any of them dinged for late shipment. I have a local pickup sale about once a month.
When the item is picked up, you just mark it as shipped.
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I got dinged for a local pick up item. I marked it as shipped, but it still dinged me for not having tracking uploaded in time, cuz I did not have any tracking, cuz it was local pick up. I called ebay and they said that since the listing had shipping and local pick up as an option, that’s why. So if it had been local pick up only, it would not have dinged me. LLame lame lame.
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They just recently changed it so now you can offer shipping options as well as local pickup. I was listening to eBay radio when they changed it, and they said that as long as the buyer selects the local pickup option when they buy, it won’t negatively affect you. I haven’t had anyone use it yet, but it sounds like it SHOULD work.
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SoCal Joe has it all correct. Buyer is responsible for all shipping. All we do is make suggestions.
Here’s our exact wording:
“This is a local pickup item. We cannot ship these chairs.
You can have Plycon or a Uship shipper pick this up.
Happy to meet the shipper for pickup, we are located in xxxxxxxx”We’ve sold plenty of items this way.
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Hi Guys
Here are my numbers for the week:Total Items in Store: 1753
Items Sold: 23
Total Sales: $509
Cost of Items Sold: $62.63
Average Price Sold: $22.12
Average Cost of Item: $2.72
Highest Price Item Sold: $85.95 Heathkit Mohican GC-1A Ham Shortwave Receiver
Number of items listed this week: 27
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 234
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 78
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 52
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.31%
# of Hats Sold: 16 (69% of sales)I saw a bit of a slow down this week which I’ll blame on the holiday weekend.
My biggest sale was a purchase that I made blindly because I thought this old radio looked cool:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Heathkit-Mohican-GC-1A-HF-Ham-General-Cvrge-Shortwave-Receiver-Read-Description-/322524635431?hash=item4b17f76127:g:g8kAAOSwblZZIi-Z
When it sold, I may have overpacked it slightly and got hit with dimensional weight which ate up some of my profit.Hope everyone has a great (and profitable) week.
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May 21-27 2017
• Total Items in Store: 775
• Items Sold: 8
• International 0
• Total Sales $455
• Highest Price $200 model airplane kit
• Average Price Sold: $57
• Returns: 0
• Cost of Items Sold: $20
• Cost of items purchased this week $50Had a $1200 amplifier sale to Brazil, he wrote me and said he has been trying to pay and his credit card has been charged twice but ebay/Paypal has not received it. Nice honest guy with good feedback. Hopefully it will get resolved. Would have made this dismal week a decent one.
No sales on Saturday but 5 on Sunday and 2 on Monday.-
Hey Steven:
Two items:
One is had a similiar thing happen this weekend with a buyer only sort of reversed. He first notified me he had paid but Ebay won’t show it as paid, but his PayPal account showed it was paid to us. I checked our PayPal account and no deposit been made and also no notice from PP either. So I messaged back and said we could only ship once we got official notice of the receipt of funds and a confirmed address. Also our Ebay dashboard showed unpaid.
I was a whole day later before we got the PayPal notice and everything was fine there. But Ebay didn’t show it as paid. So knowing we had the deposit in our account I went ahead and an official PayPal receipt of funds I packaged and labeled it for today’s shipment. This morning, still no evidence of payment on our Ebay dashboard. I had to go to the Sale and check off that the item had been paid in order to get it to clear off our Ebay page and the item to be moved into the “sold” area.
First time that has ever happened.#2) Brazil!!! Worst place to ship to IMHO :-). All sorts of internal, political stuff happens there and a lot of stuff gets messed up. I think the GSP program doesn’t even ship there. I know some people [not to mention names Ryanne] will ship to TimbuckTu, but we stick to all GSP countries only. Ship to Erlanger, KY [not far up the interstate from Atlanta] and that’s it. So question is did you ship that unit out on your own [non-GSP]? If so how. And for such a large amount what admin. procedure did you follow insurance wise to CYA?
Just curious. That unit may wind up being in a grass hut in the jungle of some type of drug lord or gun runner communicating landing spots for a rogue plan flying under radar for a night time shipment!! LOL…
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
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It hasn’t shown up on my Paypal so I’m not sure what the problem is.
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Hey Steven:
Two items:
One is we had a similar thing happen this weekend with a buyer only sort of reversed. He first notified me he had paid but Ebay won’t show it as paid, but his PayPal account showed it was paid to us. I checked our PayPal account and no deposit been made and also no notice from PP either. So I messaged back and said we could only ship once we got official notice of the receipt of funds and a confirmed address. Also our Ebay dashboard showed unpaid.
I was a whole day later before we got the PayPal notice and everything was fine there. But Ebay didn’t show it as paid. So knowing we had the deposit in our account I went ahead and an official PayPal receipt of funds I packaged and labeled it for today’s shipment. This morning, still no evidence of payment on our Ebay dashboard. I had to go to the Sale and check off that the item had been paid in order to get it to clear off our Ebay page and the item to be moved into the “sold” area.
First time that has ever happened.#2) Brazil!!! Worst place to ship to IMHO :-). All sorts of internal, political stuff happens there and a lot of stuff gets messed up. I think the GSP program doesn’t even ship there. I know some people [not to mention names Ryanne] will ship to TimbuckTu, but we stick to all GSP countries only. Ship to Erlanger, KY [not far up the interstate from Atlanta] and that’s it. So question is did you ship that unit out on your own [non-GSP]? If so how. And for such a large amount what admin. procedure did you follow insurance wise to CYA?
Just curious. That unit may wind up being in a grass hut in the jungle of some type of drug lord or gun runner communicating landing spots for a rogue plan flying under radar for a night time shipment or they are going to pipe out loud hard rock music to the field hands harvesting “Poppies” in the jungle as they work!!! LOL…
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
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May 21-27
Total Items in Store: 754
Items Sold: 17
Total Sales (Gross Profit): $465
Net Profit: $388
Highest Price: $105 (32 Pairs of Large Memphis Neomax Industrial Neoprene Work Gloves)
Average Price: $23
Returns: 0
Cost of Items Sold: $40
Costs of Items Purchased this Week: $23Looking a lot better last week than the week before. Not quite as depressing. I had a bunch of bread and butter sales so my average was kind of low, but I can’t complain. I think I really started to make some sales after I went through and updated some of my old listings. I set a hell of alot of stuff for “best offer” and that must of triggered something because I was selling things that I’ve had in my store from the very beginning. For full price too!
We held a garage sale on Saturday. We have a spare portion of our garage where I stack up boxes and boxes of stuff and junk that I obtain from auction box lots. Once or twice a year we take all of that and garage sale it off. It’s all stuff I would otherwise have thrown away or donated. Ended up making over $100. Pretty good for just a few hours. Donated or threw away the rest to make room for the next garage sale’s items.
I’m on vacation all this week so my goal is to list all those city garage service manuals I recently acquired. There’s about 140 of these things. I spent all day Monday taking pictures, so at least that portion is done. I really hope these things sell well. If it’s anything like the last group of service manuals, there’ll be a huge spurt of sales and then it’ll trickle off until I’m selling one every few weeks. But no biggie there. I got them for what I consider a bargain.
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I am starting to fall behind on the podcasts. Gotta catch up! Here are my numbers for the week. Sold several REALLY old items (one had been on Etsy for five years I think) that I put on ‘clearance’ to clear them out. Not very exciting numbers, but still gladly met my meager goals for the month.
May 21-27 2017
Total items in store: Etsy 400 // Ebay 271 (Items not crossposted I list different types of things on Etsy and Ebay)
Items Sold: Etsy 6 // Ebay 6
Cost of items Sold: Etsy $6.48 // Ebay $51.78
Total Sales: Etsy $40.10 // Ebay $134.94
Highest Price Sold: Lularoe dress for $37
Average Price Sold: $14.59
Returns: 0
Number of items listed this week: 43 (Listed at $677) -
I feel for the call-in guy that thought it was great that his items were being shown to him in eBay ads, only to find out his actions were being tracked through cookies. When it first started happening to me, I was perplexed, then paranoid, now a little amused by the whole thing. But WHY did I have to look up that Hello Kitty nightlight? Make them go AWAY!
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I heard you all talking about taking pics in the ebay mobile app. Just this past weekend I figured out that if you tap the screen before you snap a photo it will reorient the camera so you can take horizontal pictures easily and not have to go back and rotate them all later.
Hope this helps make life a little easier!!!
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ben
welcome to the forums! i tried that trick and it didn’t work. maybe i need to update my app? or are you on an android and the app is different? -
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Total Items in Store: 694
Items Sold: 9
Cost of Items Sold: $44
Total Sales: $295
Profit: $251
Highest Price Sold: $60 Ski Jacket
Average Price Sold: $32.78
Average Profit: $27.89Sold 9 items – 7 pair of shoes and 2 jackets. The benefits of diversification!
Twas a sad, sad day this weekend thrifting. We go to Columbus ohio often for weekend getaways. There is a huge Veterans of America thrift store on the way near Circleville that I absolutely love. Went to stop by on Sunday and they had shut down. Noooo!I hit up some decent yard sales – one of which had a big pile of late 90’s toys. There was a Power Rangers big Zord that is worth about $100, as well as a bunch of the 12″ GI Joes and vehicles. Got it all for $10. As I was hauling it out a lady tried to buy the GI joe stuff off of me. No thanks lady!
I didn’t list much this week. Going out of town combined with all our kids activities took up all our time.
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Do you hit up any other thrift stores in and around Columbus? I’ve always wondered if it was worth the drive there. We usually thrift shop in Pittsburgh, but Columbus is about equal distance from where I live.
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There are a couple good Goodwills there. There are some real overpriced duds as well. I’ve never had much luck with the Ohio Thrift chain. The Veterans of America ones were good, but I’m not sure of the status of the rest after the Circleville one close up suddenly. I was just there over Easter and they were doing well.
Generally I just hit one or two shops around the hotel I’m staying at and do quick 30 minute low hanging fruit shopping sprees. I don’t like to take too much time away from doing fun family things. I can still spend a few hundred and get a ton of high quality stuff even with a total of maybe 2-3 hours thrifting over a weekend.
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You all mentioned in the podcast this week that you prefer auctions to yard sales because of the amount of stuff that you can get vs the other. I have to ask what kind of auctions you are frequenting? Are they the weekly consignment auction houses we have around here in KY or are they the estate auctions that happen on Saturday at 10am? I have been to many of both, and outside of a few instances I just don’t find that much for the time spent (box lots are at the end and a lot of the good stuff soars to crazy prices). On the other hand, I have very good success with yard and estate sales. I target the neighborhood sales to hit many in a small amount of time and can really clean up. I run 4-5 hours on a Saturday and come home with a car load (and theoretically, can make it to an auction for the box lots) that takes me the week to list (usually 30-60 items).
Joshua
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Huh, well I guess it all depends on what auctions you attend and what yard sales we go to! Sounds like you really know how to yard sale.
There are plenty of dud auctions in our area. Lots of junk. But we know the auctions where the contents of the whole house is being sold off. And the owners had really good taste. And at every auction we have here, they sell off the box lots first. The expensive stuff is at the end.
In our rural area, yard sales are tough. Lots of baby clothes and VHS tapes. We have to hit a lot of yard sales to find treasures.
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I have great luck with yard sales as well, and my system sounds a lot like Joshua’s. I usually try to hit it hard on Friday and Saturday mornings, and can usually fill up the car. Some days are a dud, but there is usually plenty of good stuff. I love estate auctions, but it’s hard for me to spend most of a day waiting for things I might or might not get. My favorite auction company use to always do the boxes first, but they seem to have abandoned that plan. But I still find a great one occasionally!
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That makes a lot more sense now. Here, box lots are generally at the end, which can be great, because the crowd is gone. That is probably why the good stuff goes higher too, many people are there for the cream and leave afterwards. I live just south of Louisville, so I have plenty of opportunities for yard sales. In fact, when I look at my yard sale map in the summer I am overwhelmed. I make a list and a route, and follow it as well as I can, but I rarely get through it. There are just so many. The craziest part is I go to almost the same area every week. Too rich – too expensive or lackluster items. Too poor – low quality. Middle class – Gold. Week after week. If I was to do this full time, I would be at auctions every week too. Since I work a 9-5, I settle for where I can do the most damage in a 4 hour window on Saturday 🙂
Joshua
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I recently went o my local Sunday auction. I haven’t been there in a while. Every time I go, I say “I should have brought my trailer.”
Among other items, they have the remains of many estate sales selling in box lots and pallets. Basically you buy a lot of stuff, drag it home and filter for the gems.
For $50 out the door including fees, I bought 8 boxes of old books, with about 40 first editions. 7 Boxes of new old stock car oil filters and 4 boxes of stuff from an estate sale. I had to make two trips with the car.
In about a week, I’ve sold a couple of books for $235, some glassware for $130 and $50 in oil filters.
Unfortunately, except for about 6 books, the rest aren’t worth much and I’m debating just donating them… what a shame. Even first editions don’t necessarily have value.
Also, the oil filters are a tough sell, unless you have multiples of the same one. I’m debating putting about half of them on “Offer up” locally and just moving them cheap.
There is a certain thrill after you get home and find out what’s in the bottom of those boxes. I’ll be going back for sure.
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Hello all,
My small store keeps trucking along. I reached and surpassed my goal of selling at least an average of 1 item per day.
I also invested in some file cabinets and this has helped my organization and storage a lot.May:
Items sold: 44
Cost of Items Sold: About $280
Total Sales: $2,064
Highest Price Sold: $225 – artisan-made wood box (paid $3)
Average Sale Price: $46.91
Returns: 1 – shoes – $120 🙁
International Sales: 1 through reshipper.
Number of items for sale: 106. This is nearing my comfort level right now with space and time constraints. But it requires me to be very particular about what I purchase.I tried a few estate sales this month. One had a line of intimidating and fancy looking ladies around the corner. Pass. And another was all junk. I mean, there was NOTHING that I could find that would net me more than $5 and most of it was really junky and moldy smelling. I found one item at a yard sale that would be fairly easy to flip and ship and one rough Stihl chainsaw for MrKensington for $5 (!) I’m going to try again this weekend.
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March:
Items Sold: 35
Cost of Items Sold: About $240
Total Sales: $2,967.42
Highest Price Sold: $1200 – furniture (paid $60)
Average Price Sold: $84.78April:
Items Sold: 28
Cost of Items Sold: About $185
Total Sales: $1398.84
Highest Price Sold: $250 – rare leather notebook (paid $3)
Average Price Sold: $49.96 -
What should I price this at? I put an obnoxiously high price on it or maybe I underpriced it? No idea I can’t really find a lot on it.
Here is the eBay listing
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A little late in the wee but it has been kind of busy as I bought a bunch of Littlest Pet Shop toy and have been listing a lot of them which is super time consuming. I probably won’t buy them again. But I did want to stop in and show off a big find I got this morning. I already to it to my watch guy and had it cleaned and a new band put on. I paid $24.99 for a vase and this is only one of the cool find in it. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-1968-Omega-Constellation-564-35mm-New-Leather-Alligator-Style-Band-/263015348759?ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT
I know it might be over priced but someone will talk me down anyway. Another cool find was a set of WWII dog tags. Keep up the hunt. The dream is real. -
Scamming the scammers
Friends,
I was initiating this post earlier the week to touchbase on the scammers topic, however I had a fantastic issue that I decided to wait a bit to post.
Initially I was going to mention that when I started selling more seriously on eBay (my account is from 2007 but I only started selling last year with R&J motivation), for me everything was part of a big scam. I would usually lose my sleep and get really angry at any case.
I learned and incorporated that in the business. Today I have a very good customer services area in my company 🙂 🙂 😉
First I accept 30 days hassle free return no questions asked. If there is a claim of any nature, I just try to understand and most usually I settle for the buyer.This week was really scary though. First I had 3 sales on Bonanza … scary by itself. Second. I had one of the Austin sculptures I usually find returned and immediately acquired. Now I see some messages (for example, the buyer did not have previous life on Bonanza before this week’s purchase).
He sent me a message stating that the arms of the statue were broken apparently because of shipping. Easy piece so far.
After that he accused me capital letters as SCAMMER and committing FRAUD. Detailing that the foreleg was broken and glued together in a very amateur way, then all the threats came, including expelling me from all the eCommerce platforms in the Solar System.
He closed with a demand: 24hrs reply directly to his email, he would not accept other type of contact.
Well, I just replying that his satisfaction was my priority and asked him to continue using the official Bonanza channel since Bonanza offers great assistance for cases like this and for his own comfort and protection that channel is better. Also I reinforce that independently of my response, please to contact Bonanza anytime because they are great.
Lastly because of the insurance I asked for photos etc.He never replied back, it’s been 36hrs after his deadline …
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I just noticed in My eBay under Selling Announcements this article titled “eBay Listing Spring Cleaning” regarding the removal of old listings.
http://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/eBay-Listing-Spring-Cleaning/ba-p/27039412
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Good catch! I’m glad eBay is explaining what’s happening.
We have identified a relatively small number of unproductive listings and have begun removing those with one or more years of no sales and minimal page views, and are refunding any associated listing fees. We value long-tail inventory – it is what makes eBay unique – and remain committed to helping sellers of all types be successful on our platform.
They say they’re refunding listing fees which is different from what some sellers said. It’s great that eBay recognizes that long tail items are slow selling, but they don’t really make clear if ALL items over a year old are being removed? It says a “relatively small number” so it cant be all items over a year, right?
Removed listings in violation of eBay’s duplicate listing policy. Even when you have listings such as connector cables or auto parts that are identical except for the fact that they fit certain models, the policy specifies limitations on how many separate listings you can have. It is also important to use eBay parts compatibility format if available in the category you are listing.
This is aimed at the commodity sellers. The people who list multiple of the same items. To me, this is where eBay gets junky. Glad to see them cleaning up.
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Update on the printer: I bought it and it works. Yeah! Took over an hour to set up but now it’s easy peasy. I figure this thing will pay for itself in 2 months, based on me not having to buy shipping labels at staples, and the reduced postage rate for ebay.
Sales for ebay have picked up and amazon is chugging away. I only listed a few things this week cos of the holiday. I feel like all week I have been playing catchup. Even listening to the podcast late.
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Well, I’m taking the plunge…I’m going to report my numbers, such as they are! First, a few questions if you please:
1. when reporting gross sales, are you including the shipping amount? Or, are you just including the amount of the price of the goods? I ask because, although I price shipping separately, I typically plan on making a certain amount from the shipping costs.
2. what time period are you using as the week? Monday morning to Sunday night? Sunday through Saturday, or….?
3. do you feel I’m missing anything from this formula: (sales price + shipping) – (shipping cost + COGS + eBay/paypal fees @12%) = net
4. for average sales price, do you go with or w/o shipping in that value?Here are my numbers for the week of 5/21 – 5/27
ebay: $263.42
net: $98.32 (after shipping, COGs & ebay/paypal fees @ 12%)
number of items sold: 7
average sales price (including shipping): $37.63
average sales price (w/o shipping): 20.19
highest selling item: 49.99 (not counting shipping) http://www.ebay.com/itm/Samsung-Blu-Ray-DVD-player-Model-BD-P1400-USED-WORKING-w-remote-control-/201770714225?rd=1The highest selling item is my own personal DVD player which I no longer used.
At the time of these numbers we had about 620 items in the store; a mix of some vintage, some clothing, some household items…nothing extraordinary. My eBay partner, Lynn, and I put in about 1.5 hours to 3 hours a week together working on listings. I probably put in 2 – 8 extra hours a week additionally, but we don’t work every week. Recently, we probably took about 5 weeks off from eBay, and now here comes summer! So, I’m actually pretty okay with netting $98. The only thing is, putting pen to paper (so to speak) and really looking a these numbers makes me a little less happy about them. My father, a realtor, always used to say, “production cures all woes”. Guess it’s time to make more cha-chings!
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Glad you are reporting in for the first time! I have enjoyed doing it now (we just started reporting recently as well), as it is a nice motivation to make sure you are looking at your numbers, analyzing them, and making improvements on your business. If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
I will give you answers based on what we do. Others may do things differently based on their business and process.
1) For Gross Sales, I include everything in revenue, so the Sales Price of the item and the Shipping Price Paid by the customer. Some items are free shipping, so we only have the one number anyway. And like you, we separate out Shipping Revenue from the Sales Revenue, but in the end, we also want to at least cover our costs of shipping and some packaging costs as well. We look at it this way: If the customer was willing to pay it to us…it is revenue to the business. The IRS looks at it that way, so we do as well.
2) Our week is Sunday through Monday. There is a slight caveat to that, as we only report PAID and SHIPPED. I don’t consider it a sale unless they pay. Also, our accounting process (the Easy Auction Tracker spreadsheet) only pulls in sales when the item is shipped. So we either do some shipping on Sunday (to get the sales through Saturday) or I wait until we ship on Monday to get our final count of sales through Sunday. Just easier to do on our end that way. I track sales by day as well for my own purposes, to get good data on daily average sales vs inventory value, sell through rate, sales average by weekday, month, etc., and the EAT file is used for that, so I just piggyback the weekly reporting on top of that.
3) For your Net, you have the big stuff. I track two numbers. First, Gross Margin. That is Sales Revenue (no Shipping Revenue) minus COGS. I like to see what return we are getting on just the products we sell. We look to have at least a 4x return (or said another way, we sell for $20 what we paid $5 for). We have a lot of clothing, so the returns are tighter. I would guess Jay and Ryanne are closer to 10x on their items, but Jay would have to talk to that piece. For Gross Margin, you could also calculate it as Total Revenue (Sales Revenue + Shipping Revenue) minus COGS & Shipping Cost. Should get you to roughly the same number if you charge for shipping (your profit on shipping should be small as compared to profit on the product itself). If you were mostly Free Shipping, I would only do Sales Revenue minus COGS.
I also track Net Profit, and that is the total bottom line. So all Revenue less all Expenses. Those expenses include the big ones you discussed, COGS, Shipping, and Fees, but I also pull out packaging we buy (bubble wrap, poly mailers, etc.), Internet Access, Labor (when we pay our boys to help), Business Meals (when we eat when shopping, or have a business lunch were we specifically talk about strategy for the future of the business), Mobile Phone, Product cleaning (if I take a suit to the cleaners to get clean), Supplies (cleaning products, paper, labels, tape, printer cartridges, etc.). Make sure you are looking at every legitimate business expense you have. Consult IRS.gov or a tax accountant.
4) For Average Sales Price, I use just the product cost, because I forecast the Shipping Revenue separate from the item.
Your Father is right about that…good sales cures all. However, remember that it masks problems in your process as well. I always look to get better (list faster, source quicker and cheaper, increase revenue per item or per hour, reduce OH costs, etc.) so that if things are tough, I have as lean of a process as possible to weather that storm.
Hope that helps. If you have any questions, let me know.
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