Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack?

[Ryanne]

 We make a living selling weird, unique items we find in the wild on eBay. But are we supposed to? How many of us are there living in this weird gra
[See the full post at: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack?]

[T-Satt]

Week of 7/1-7/7
Total Items in Store: 2,405 (Up 57% YOY)
Number of Items Listed: 136
Number of Items Sold: 80 (Up 105% YOY)
(Includes 3 Etsy, 1 Bonanza, 0 TrueGether)
Weekly STR: 14% (Up 4% YOY)

Total Product Sales: $1,982 (Up 92% YOY)
Cost of Items Sold: $436
Highest Item Sold: $102 – Under Armour Bozeman Speed Freek Hunting Boots
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Veronica wins the week and Veronica leads for the year 16-11.

eBay Clothing
# Listed: 1,536
# Sold: 49
STR: 14%
ASP: $22.05

eBay Shoes
# Listed: 284
# Sold: 14
STR: 21%
ASP: $35.78

eBay Hard Goods
# Listed: 585
# Sold: 14
STR: 10%
ASP: $23.53

Etsy Hard Goods
# Listed: 160
# Sold: 3
STR: 8%
ASP: $33.19

Another solid week from a revenue perspective. We were up 105% compared to last year, all on increased sales volume. We missed our listing goal of 150, but we still were strong considering we took Wednesday and Thursday off from listing to work on other tasks. We are making a push to get more hard goods packaged up and moved to the warehouse, assembling more shoe racks here at the house, and looking to move some new clothing items to the warehouse as well. Expansion continues…

ShipRush is working out very well. A little steeper learning curve, but much more robust. It was nice to see our Bonanza Sale come in direct to ShipRush without a hitch. Also got a 2% cash back card to start using for more business transactions (like ShipRush).

This week will be hectic. I have the contract gig Monday and Tuesday, then a lot of listing on Wednesday, drive to Albuquerque for my niece’s wedding Thursday and Friday, source ABQ Saturday Morning then drive to Denver and source there Saturday Night (if needed).

[Jay]

You guys have a warehouse? Did I miss this story?

[T-Satt]

I call it the warehouse (old habit). It is a rental storage unit. 10′ x 30′

[Jay]

Understood. Our storage is affectionately called “the purple building”. (because its a bad shade of burgundy)

[totommyto]

The funny thing is, I always thought I was just a mainstream eBay seller with my toys, junks and weirds! Well it’s always best to be elite with good company watching each other’s backs!

Numbers first, then right over to another great podcast and thanks again!

7/1 – 7/7/18

EBay store totommyto

Total store items: 579
Number of items sold: 8
Ebay sales (not counting s/h): $460.00
Cost of items sold: $25.00
Consignment payouts: $10.00
Highest price sold: $160.00 – vintage new Mattel Holiday baby Doll
Average price sold: $57.50
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: $155
Number of items listed this week: 19

Etsy store Oldfleatoymarket

Total store items: 530
Number of items sold: 3
Etsy sales: $65
Cost of items sold: $9
Consignment payouts: 0
Highest price sold: $25 – vintage new mini Mattel doll
Average price sold: $21.60
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: $105
Number of items listed this week: 6

[findsandfurnishings]

The Seller’s Announcement Section is an option on your Dashboard. They currently have an apology up for the ‘recent technical issues’.

[Jay]

Ah, I didnt even know that existed n my dashboard. Not a place I check. Thanks.

[knmenterprises]

Hi! In regards to eBay’s “recent technical issues”, I called them this morning in regards to closing a return and thought it was a great opportunity to voice my concerns and frustrations with these said technical issues. I was transferred to another rep who specializes in listings etc. I explained to this rep how difficult it was to determine which of my listings were missing photos, and the time involved with fixing these errors that eBay caused. She was very apologetic, said eBay was working on it, and then said it would be no problem to waive our monthly store subscription. I was pleasantly surprised, said that would be great, and that I appreciate their working with us. She also mentioned that eBay is continuing to resolve these issues, and may offer additional refunds/credits in the future. So, I believe it is worth your time to place a call to eBay – if not to just have your voice be heard. It made a difference to me – and made my day too!
Thanks ScavengerLife for all you do! Love your podcasts!! Cheers from hot as he** Phoenix!

[auntbea]

Heck, I have no idea how to post a new topic on here. If this isn’t right, too d bad. On the topic of glitches…about half the new listings I have made today are charging me a $4.00 fee to list. I just save those to draft and move on. It doesn’t seem to matter what object I am listing or in what category. GRRRR, Aunt Bea

[Jay]

To start a new topic, you just go to the forum categories: https://www.scavengerlife.com/forum/
Find the relevant category and create a new post.

As far as fees, do you have a store subscription. Are you sure you didnt have any of the “extras” checked on the page that charges you more?

[Sharyn]

Usually, when a fee is listed, there is a round button with an “i” or question mark next to it. If you click on that button, it will give you a breakdown of the fee and where it comes from.

[Retro Treasures WV]

Items in Store 988
Items Sold 13
Total Sales $495.00
COGS $42.70
Total Profit $452.30
Average profit $34.79
Average sales price $38.08

This was a much better week for sure. I had a few big sales which helped out a lot.

I had two scavenges of the week. The first was from a yard sale on Monday. Noone has yard sales on Mondays here so that was really weird. Luck was on my side, because I only found this yard sale due to an unplanned trip to the post office and cutting through town to avoid a train on the overpass. I bought a pile of baseball equipment for $20. I sold a catchers equipment within a couple days for $130. Score!

The second scavenge was a yard Overseeder I bought at a yard sale for $250. This is a piece of equipment that cuts slits in your yard and then dumps seeds down in the slits as it passes by. New it was over $2k. I should be able to sell it for close to $1k in about a month. I’d love to use it on my own yard before I sell it though.

Listing wise, I’ve went from 860 items to almost 1000 in two weeks. We’re on a roll! Having my wife take photos during the day has been a HUGE help! She takes the photos in the app and I’ll crop/rotate them and list the item as she finishes them while I’m at work. That flexibility with listing directly on ebay is why I’m having a hard time to committing to a software like sixbit.

[T-Satt]

Retro: Great job on the increased listings and your new process! Process matters…

PS – From a SixBit user, you can still use that same process with SixBit if you want. You can list the item directly through eBay and SixBit will automatically import that listing into SixBit. You may have to add some SixBit items to the listings if you want (Item Cost, Relisting Schedule, etc.) Veronica listed through eBay for many months before we got the home network set up (which SixBit did for us for free).

Just wanted to let you know that you can still have that Flexibility with SixBit.

[Retro Treasures WV]

When I imported from ebay the total listings didn’t match and I could not figure out why. I had two listings with identical titles and it copied the same photos for both. Sixbit had 8 less lisitngs than ebay. I tried multiple times to redownload my ebay store but it never fixed that with the “merge duplicate titles” turned off AND changing the actual title of one of the listings.

I also had no way to access the ebay custom label in Sixbit, which is where I put my inventory location. The solution from sixbit was basically to just start using the inventory location in sixbit. Yeah…but I list on ebay and use the Custom SKU there so I can take my phone out to my storage unit and see the SKU right in the ebay app. I wanted linkability between the custom SKU and sixbit and that isn’t an option. I literally can’t even see the Custom SKU field in sixbit.

I put in a ticket and it was 2-3 days before I got a response that wasn’t really helpful. By that time the ship had sailed on my interest. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll give it another go but my time is far too limited right now to try and figure it out and completely change my listing/inventory practices to use it.

[T-Satt]

Yeah, I really feel that the best thing SixBit can do is to have an Implementation List of things to think about.

I could probably figure out your issue, as it messed with us too. There is a setting when you import from eBay to SixBit on what you want to do with the Custom Label field in eBay. You can have SixBit put that as the SKU or as the Inventory Location. You use that field like we do, it has the location.

The key is that the SKU in SixBit MUST be a unique number. No duplicates. For us, we had some issues because Veronica had some items that was one SKU on multiple listings (she paid one price, then just made multiple listings). That is a no-no in a database.

Yes, there is a bit of a database learning curve on SixBit (or WonderLister, or any similar software). When you go down that road again, let me know and I can help.

PS – you can ask for a remote session with a SixBit person. They will link into your computer and can see your issue, correct, and explain the solution and the cause. I have done this a ton, and it helps a LOT.

[Retro Treasures WV]

I use duplicate SKU’s. I just need to know the tub or shelf location. The tube name is coded to tell me exactly where it is. Adding any more detail than that is a waste of my time as the tubs are just filled up in no specific order and I frequently change the location of items when I condense tubs.

[T-Satt]

Retro: Here is how we get by that.

We use a Google Doc Spreadsheet that has the next item number (just a list of numbers, we are at 11,000 now).

Each time we create a listing, we add it to the sheet, and the next number is the SKU. We add the inventory location at the back.

So, SKU 11000-C5 is a casual shirt in location C5. SKU 9549-SUIT1 is a suit in SUIT1.

This makes sure we have no duplicates. Plus, I can quickly use SixBit to find out how many items are in each location. I just search for inventory in -C5 and I can see how many shirts are in that drawer.

[Jay]

So is your wife now on board the eBay train? I seem to remember that you were flying solo up till now.

[Retro Treasures WV]

She has always been very supportive, but it has been difficult to get her on board with helping with the business. Currently she is photographing 10 items a day. That’s all she’ll commit to. I’ve asked her to just take photos and let me edit/crop them in hopes she would have time to do more, but 10 done in less time it remains for now. Lol!

It’s a hard job to tend 24/7 to 4 children, so I’ll take what I can get. It lets me concentrate on creating listings, which is where my efficiency is put to best use.

I can also say it is pretty awesome to check my drafts and a bunch of them are photographed without me doing anything. It feels like magic! I bet you guys felt that way when you first started with helpers.

[ChristineR]

Total store items: 424
Number of items sold: 5
Ebay sales: 137
Cost of items sold: $34 + $3 free shipping
Highest price sold: $71 (New 25 purchased on clearance for about $25)
Average price sold: $27
Returns: 1 ($40 new pillow returned without new packaging)
Money spent on new inventory: $0
Number of items listed on Ebay this week: 22

Mercari: 31 items listed, 0 sales, 14 listed this week (some Disney cross posted – super fast to cross post)

Soft week definitely despite listing, pinning, and running a 20% sale as soon as they lifted the 14 day restriction. In the past sales have worked well for a bump and I usually got 1-2 immediate sales right after a listing session. I think summer plus all of the back end stuff is probably affecting things at least for some. I got used to the reward for my efforts – like a slot machine, so it’s a little bit discouraging.

Getting likes on Mercari but no sales yet. I’m checking out the solds now and then to see what is moving. Prices are definitely lower, solds are more pop culture and younger brands it seems. Picking inventory for Mercari is key I believe. I’m going to throw some Pyrex on there when I get back from vacation as shipping will be less expensive and that is a popular vintage category on Mercari. If you are in an area where it’s difficult to source (seasonally at least), you might check it out. Some cool things move there for cheap, and Mercari has a simple system encouraging sellers to promote by dropping the price 10% and notifying shoppers who have liked the item. They also encourage offers. Plus it’s so quick to list, people could do a higher volume business and let things go for less.

Going to be a very busy week outside Ebay, followed by our summer vacation, so hoping for some sales before we go. I got a response after about 5 days on the Ebay Facebook page to my request for a fee break. They asked me to submit all of my info and some listings with missing photos. By the way, you were mentioned on Ecommercebytes as first bringing up the pay per click beta discussion. Have a great week!

[Jay]

Yikes. I fear we attract the audience that hangs out on the site that shall not be named.

[T-Satt]

🙂

[ChristineR]

or it might get more Ebay eyes over here.

[simplicio]

Sales: CAD$1729, 5 items, COGS: $146 –> Item profit: $1318
Expenditures: $316 –> After-tax cashflow: $806
Hours: 8.5, $95/hr
Listed: $460, 5 items, total 412 ebay listings
STR (week basis): 0.4%
Notable sales: Controller for radiant heating, $85 –> $1200.
Also notable was a sale to a person in Russia. They paid full price on my listing, including shipping by Canada Post which cost $370 (for a 7 lb package). I went to DYK post (they ship via USPS and other carriers + a small markup to save canadians money on overseas shipping). Their charge for the same standard was $75. So, slight difference.
Notable scavenges: via government surplus, I am now the proud owner of 78 hernia braces for $170. Must’ve been dozing when I bid on these.
We have been trying to sell one of our rental properties for 4 or 5 months now. It finally sold on Friday, thank God. Took a pretty good bath on it but I’m glad to be quit of the thing.

Nice work on the bandanas! That’s a find I never would have even looked twice at.

[simplicio]

Quick correction: eBay used to allow us to print Canada Post labels directly. A few months ago, they switched to shippo, so now eBay sales sync to shippo automatically with destination pre-filled. There were some growing pains but it works pretty well for me now.

[T-Satt]

simplico: Is eBay continuing with Shippo in Canada? We were contacted by eBay that eBay was no longer supporting Shippo (for free) in the US, but ShipRush was going to still be free through eBay’s partnership. This is why we switched to ShipRush (and it is better than Shippo).

[simplicio]

Weird. Yeah, far as anybody knows shippo is now the name of the game here. Though there’s one guy on the forum here told me he saves by going through paypal. Got to try that.

I don’t know anything about Shiprush, intersting… might check it out, although I’m not finding Shippo to be broken at the moment.

Unfortunately we did lose discounted postage a month or two back. Not sure what, if anything, that has to do with Shippo but it was around the same time.

[Inglewood]

Paypal is still somewhat integrated with ebay.ca – when I print using Paypal, all the shipping/tracking information still gets populated into ebay automatically when the label is generated.

Since Paypal is officially partnered with Canada Post, they provide some good shipping history information on Canada Post’s website once you have an account. You can also use the savings you earn to print non-ebay labels as well. Find this great for sales off ebay or personal shipments.

The only issue I see with switching would be you need to earn a savings level with Canada Post – therefore, you will be getting only slightly discounted shipping the first few months until you earn a higher savings level.

[Ryanne]

ah, that’s cool. glad you guys can do that. i thought you could only print labels in the US, but i’m glad you can do it too!

[Rhianna]

Total Items in Store: 2180
Items Sold: 33
Total Sales: $1019.55
Highest Price Sold: $118 (New Voice Recorder) Paid $3 at an estate sale
Returns: 3
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0

Don’t they know who I am???!!! Love that line! Also love Jay’s “ I don’t give a shi…heck”. I think we should put that on a t shirt.

Had a good week in sales this week. A couple returns for fit, UG. I threw out my back last Saturday and haven’t been able to do much in the way of listing or sourcing. Hoping to get back into the grove of things. We have been getting our house ready to sell so I have actually been listing some of my own items. I think sometimes we forget what treasures we have in our house that we no longer need or want. I am thinking of going through some old inventory and taking some better pictures, some of them are pretty shady.

[Simon]

Hi R&J – Thanks for the podcast!

My numbers for this week:
Total Items in Store: 2391
Items Sold: 36
Total Sales: $1206
Cost of Items Sold: $138
Average Price Sold: $33.49
Average Cost of Item: $3.85
Highest Price Item Sold: $249.95 APOGEE MQ-100 Light Meter (paid $30 at a garage sale)
Number of items listed this week: 39
YTD Sales: $23074
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +21%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 322
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 141
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 55
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.51%
# of Hats Sold: 26 (72% of sales)

I had a very good week. I sold several high-value items. My highest was the light meter mentioned above. I also sold a $125 slide rule. My favorite sale was an $85 LED watch from the 1970s that I got for free at an estate sale.

Regarding the “Create a Copy” feature on the drafts page, I’ve been using that for at least a couple of months. It’s just like a Sell Similar for active listings. I find it useful when I’m create new listings for similar items but I don’t want to make them active yet. eg: I was creating listings for several similar games yesterday. I created one draft and then used the Create a Copy to create 2 duplicate rafts so that I could take photos of all the games at once.

I think I heard you guys say that you wish eBay would have templates. They do. There’s a link on the left side of the listings page under Settings (above Automation preferences). I have a template for hats for example. (It’s not really a fill-in-the-blanks template though. It’s more like a draft that doesn’t go away).

One more thing that I discovered recently. It’s always annoyed me that my sales in disappears off the ebay website after 60 days . I sometimes find similar items after months or years and would like to be able to do a sell-similar from an old listing. Anyway, I noticed that if I go back to my email and click the item link to the email from the “your item sold” (or whatever the title of that email is), I can see the old listing. Often the photos are missing but I can see the rest of the details and I can do a sell-similar from there.

Hope everyone has a good bug-free ebay week.

[Jay]

Thanks for the heads up on the template. Weird that we never knew about this. So can you share an example of the different way you use “Create Copy” vs usng the Template?

Nice to see you venturing outside of just hats. Though they seem to still do very well for you.

[T-Satt]

From Seller Hub, click “Create Listing”

Bottom of that page will show any templates you have, and you can also manage the templates (create new, edit existing, etc) from there.

Just use the right template and it creates a draft listing automagically…

[Retro Treasures WV]

I don’t really like the templates because they require too many fields to be pre-populated. Why do they require certain fields to be populated?? Just let me fill only the ones I want!

I have used them when listing a bunch of hats or button down shirts in a row.

[Designated Buyer]

Hey there. Just letting you guys know you can set up listing templates. You can have 50 templates at a time. I haven’t used sell similar ever since I set all my templates up over a year ago. When you copy
or type your title in while listing, ebay automatically selects Item specifics for you. Tends to work pretty well overall.

[T-Satt]

Agree on the Templates. I used the heck out of them before using SixBit.

Prefill Item Specifics, Store Categories, Business Policies, Item Descriptions…

Very useful.

[Ryanne]

i just checked out templates, and unless i’m not seeing it, it does not allow me to use the template to make multiple listings. so i have a Mens Hats template, but i want to make 20 of those, but i don’t see an option to do that, only to make a listing one by one with the template. any advice on this?

[T-Satt]

Ouch. Been a long time since I played in that sandbox. I always did them one at a time as I was listing.

Once you have one template sitting as a draft listing, you should be able to copy that draft and make multiple copies from there. I think I did that before…

[Ryanne]

ah yes, you can. seems dumb to have an extra step there.
create 1 listing using template, then choose that, click Copy and make 10 copies. that’s cool. i wish it was just 1 step: Create multiple listings using template.

[T-Satt]

Glad it worked!

[T-Satt]

PS – I like the new ending segment, think I will start to join in each week:

What did I cook this week? Sunday I canned 4 Quarts of Green Chile Stew and grilled Brown Sugar Balsamic Filet Mignon with Roasted Broccoli.

More canning to come. Gotta make room in the freezer!

[Brian Treasures from Grandmas]

Week July 1-7, 2018

Total Items in Store: 897
Items Sold: 24
Cost of Items Sold: $130 (13.9% of sales)
Total Sales: $935.18
Highest Price Sold: $105 (Lot of 102 Corbin cabinet keys https://www.ebay.com/itm/201723527694)
Average Price Sold: $38.97
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0
Promoted listings test: 15 sales, $585.94 (62.7% of total sales), $31.38 fees (5.4% of sales)

eBay must have heard us an turned the spigot back on!!! 🙂 Kidding of course, but this week was better than the past month or so. Of course we always try to figure out the why or how to prepare to for these types of weeks… anyone have thoughts? I thought it might have to do with eBay Bucks coming out at the beginning of a quarter, so I looked back at my first month of each quarter for the past year and there’s actually no correlation (in my sales).

Outside of the lot of cabinet keys above, other good sales included Transformers lot (paid $5 https://www.ebay.com/itm/201981136963), locksmith pin kit (paid $5 https://www.ebay.com/itm/192518640501), Fox Business hoodie (free from work https://www.ebay.com/itm/192557281383).

[Sharyn]

Week of July 1 – 7
* Total Items in Store: 1179
* Items Sold: 8
* Cost of Items Sold: $10.10 + $0 Commission
* Total Sales: $141.65
* Highest Price Sold: $40 for 6 Vintage Royal Straffordshire bowls
* Average Price Sold: $17.70
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $16
* Number of items listed this week: 5

Slow week with only 8 sales total, but I sold seven items yesterday (Sunday) to start off the current week. How does that happen?

I did get my store subscription cost refunded through eBay for Business on Facebook. I haven’t done anything yet with the affected listings. Something I’ll have to do this week. I guess I’ll start by adding a photo of a white screen (per the suggestion mentioned in the podcast) and see if that helps. Some items are newer and I can easily reload the photos, if necessary. Others will require searching.

[Steve List]

I’m kind of late with my numbers for the month of June. My numbers are about the same as last month except that my number of items listed is way down due to my back going out for a couple of weeks and having to take it easy. It is way better now and I hope to list quite a few items in July as my death/profit piles are overtaking my spare bedroom.

Numbers for month of June
Total Listings: 921
Had 47 Sales for a total of $855
Cost of Items Sold: $95
Highest Price Sold: $88 Vietnam Era US Air Force OG 107 Uniform
Average Price Sold: $18 – Average Cost: $2
Spent on new inventory: $145.69
Number of items listed: 31
2 GSP, Canada and Australia
No returns for month of June

I just recently set up free returns with automatic approval. The person that purchased the Uniform opened a return case stating it didn’t fit, I had the measurements in the listing so I think he was just fishing for a discount. After the return window closed I called eBay right a way and had it closed. I searched for a while trying a to find a way to do it on line but to no avail. Luckily I only had to wait about 3 minuets for a teck to answer.

On many of my low price items, I increased the prices and then changed them to free shipping. I did notice a small bump in sales for older things but it didn’t seem to last very long.

Now to go and listen to the podcast, and a few past ones I haven’t got to yet.

[Doublythumbs]

July 1-7
Total Items in Store: 1577
Items Sold: 14
Total Sales : $340
* below yearly average of $725
* below 2017 total week sales of $829
Highest Price: $69 (Green Kodak No. 2A Brownie Model C Box Camera)
Average Price: $24
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $11
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 0

Well, after my first week of opening my store back up, sales sucked. But I kind of expected that. I haven’t listed any new items for over a month. But the good news is, I’ve nearly got my eBay workspace complete. I’ve just go to hang some more lights and acquire a good chair and I’ll be back at it in no time. I’ll post a video once it’s complete along with the video I took of my old workspace before I packed it all up. It’ll be a Pimp my eBay Office post.

So as I mentioned before, I spent 8 hours replacing all of the missing photos that got deleted from my listings. It was such a pain in the butt, and a waste of time too! I’m glad eBay apologized, but a little compensation would have been greatly appreciated!

[Marshal_G]

Re: Caller needing to find an address for a shipment. I download all sales every month using the file exchange function. I use it to track sales for tax purposes, but it does have the buyer’s complete address. I think it goes back 90 days so it would work for the caller. Unfortunately like you said even if he has the address he still can’t prove he sent anything.

[Marshal_G]

On your main topic, yeah I find it interesting that eBay has added a baby store below Basic, and an Enterprise above Anchor, and still there’s this gaping hole between Premium and Anchor. Not a conspiracy theory, but it’s more like they don’t expect individuals/couples to be making a living on eBay by themselves. In their mind it’s either large Amazon type sellers and people cleaning out their closet.

[Jay]

We could be wrong. Just evidence points to their strategies are aimed at little sellers and big sellers.

[ebaymom]

My Store Week July 1-7, 2018

Total Items in Store: 1057
Items Sold: 16
Cost of Items Sold: $35.80
Total Sales: $304.63
Highest Price Sold: 35 (Vintage Board Game)
Average Price Sold: $19.04
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $26
Number of items listed this week: 32

No notable sales and it has been an uneventful week. 50% of my sales – 8 out of 16 were from running promoted listings. I haven’t had a chance to do any exciting sourcing this week – just a quick run to the goodwill down the street (which always makes me feel ambivalent coming home with a giant bag of .99 cent clothes that I’ll be lucky to sell for $20 – but I want to keep up the momentum and this was all I had time for this week.

Happy Selling and off to listen to the remainder of the podcast!

[jimi]

Total Items in Store: 1551
Items Sold: 21
Cost of Items Sold: $38.21
Total Sales: $382.91
Highest Price Sold: $80 (Thule bike rack brackets)
Average Price Sold: $18.23
Returns: none
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 1
Notable sale would be a LL Bean polo shirt which sold for $20 and was one of my listings w/o photos. I think I have all of them restored now but was surprised to see this one sell with no photos. Also glad to see ebay has reversed the decision on the 14 day restriction on sales promotions.

Overall another down week for sales but still made a few. Enjoyed the podcast and I hope everyone has a good week of scavenging and sales.

[Paul]

Jay, here is ebay’s system status page: https://www.ebay.com/sts

Also, Premium and higher level stores DO provide listing templates: https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/ebay-tools/selling-templates?id=4097

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by Paul. Reason: added info about templates
• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by Paul. Reason: added url for templates

[Jay]

Someone else on Youtube pointed out that eBay status site. But as you know it’s just an on/off status. I assume it’s all been green the last couple weeks even when people’s photos were disappearing…because the site was working. Just not perfectly.

What we need is a page that shows the status of ongoing issues. A bug tracker.

[BethGreen]

My numbers for the week of 7/1/18:
Total Items in Store: 150
Items Sold: 18
Cost of Items Sold: $97
Total Sales: $740 + shipping
Highest Price Sold: $255 (Bar Light)
Average Price Sold: $41.11
Returns: 0

Hi! I have been MIA on the forum because the kids are home on summer vacation and time wise, something had to get cut. But still devotedly listening to the podcast! I just wanted to pop in today to share my numbers…because it was one of my best weeks of sales ever. Even taking out the top sale, still a great week…And I had another $200 worth on Sunday! It’s such a relief to know that choosing to Opt Out of Free Returns has not had the slightest negative impact on my business. Hope everyone is enjoying their Summer!

[Mark S]

07/01/18 – 07/07/18

Total Items In Store: 2,406
Items Sold: 9
Cost of Items Sold: $40 (around)
Total Sales: $ 471
Highest Price Sold: $ 150 (Vintage Briefcase)
Average Price Sold: $ 52.33
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 0
Number of Items listed this week: 0

I was off on vacation so nothing but sending out the 21 items that sold while I was gone. Not much volume, but good ASP.

I drove through from Michigan to Florida and back. I enjoyed going to Chick-fil-A in the South where they are everywhere. I don’t have one close to where I live. I saw a “Hands Free” zone near Atlanta. So I guess the law is that you can’t even have your smartphone in your hand when you are driving.

The photo issue was hitting just as I was leaving for vacation. I didn’t have time to do anything about it. I ran that utility url that Doubly suggested and it worked great. However, I have 198 listings with only 1 photo. I spot checked 1 item with my Wonder Lister ImportedPicturesDirectory. The good news is that I have a backup with WL. The bad news is that is going to be 800-1000 photos to upload. I called ebay to see what they could do. The rep said there was nothing they could do. I asked for a manager. The manager let me send the file of 198 items with their item id. She is going to send the list to the tech team to see if they can retrieve the photos. She said that ebay is planning on addressing this global photo issue by July 13th. I will let you know what happens.

Mark

[VintageTreasures]

My numbers for the week of July 1 – 7, 2018
Total items in store: 253 ebay & 129 etsy
Items sold: 21 ebay & 3 etsy
Cost of items sold: $23.25 approximately
Total sales: $289.70 ebay & $34.95 etsy
Highest price sold: $29.95 + shipping: Vintge My Buddy Doll
Average price sold: $13.53
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: $3.00
Number of items listed: 76

It was a soft sales week for me, I guess the 4th of July holiday as well as it being summer affected my sales. I had one day last week on July 5th, with zero sales! I’m expecting this week to be better, I’m within $70.00 of last week’s total as of Monday night this week.

Wishing everyone a great week!

[Rob]

Retro, your posts sound as if I had written them. I am just now getting my wife on board with helping with the business. I think having that partnership is the only way to do it, when one of you works full time. Working 50 hours/week at my job, I need her to spend her days at home taking pics and listing. It’s been somewhat of a struggle. She’s been listing more lately, but we’ve got a long way to go if we want to hit our goal of 500 items by the Christmas season. Maybe I’ll try your process of sharing the responsibilities of each listing.

[Anonymous]

ARRGHHH! That was my primal scream–could you hear me in VA?

Dudes! You’re not getting it. I think I’ve clarified my meaning in the thread that followed my original post, https://www.scavengerlife.com/forums/topic/str-it-up/

But, “lemme ‘splain one more time”:

The analytical tools I devised, especially PA/T contain no specific price or time horizon assumptions–they’re just tools for you to use according to your own requirements.

What they do do, through the T threshold, is prioritize high-profit items over low profit items and isolate them from the rest of your items for review and markdown after your age threshold has been reached–as you see fit! The price definition is yours. The age definition is yours.

I clearly made an error in choosing $30 @ 100 weeks as an example–it was a more or less random choice and, in fact, doesn’t represent a T value I would personally use. Until now, I’ve avoided stating specifically what T value I’d use, precisely because I didn’t want to argue my specific choice rather than arguing the merits of the analysis, but here goes:

In the podcast you guys cite the $30, bread and butter sales of old, long-tail items you rang up last week as a counter-argument to my supposed advocacy of marking down such items. That is precisely the inverse of what I was advocating! I’m advocating exactly what you say: $30 items will sell eventually, so let ‘em ride! (exactly what I mean when I say “You’d like to sell high-profit items quickly, and low profit items eventually”)

What T would I choose? T=16,000

Solving PA/T for a $30 item,
A=T/P, so A=16,000/30, A=533 weeks or A=10 years

Solving PA/T for a $100 item,
A=16,000/100, A=160 weeks or A=3 years

You guys also discuss the above-market prices Ryanne puts on weird stuff. That’s the reason for PA/T! You put a “crazy” price on something hoping to beat the odds–great, good strategy, I agree, but then the item and listing are gone down the memory hole. Years later it hasn’t sold because the odds beat you instead. If you use PA/T analysis, at some point (your choice) PA/T will pull the item back out and prompt you to reevaluate. You may say “shit, that was a crazy price” and mark it down. Or you may realize you flubbed the title. Or you may say “It’s all good”, and toss it back into the memory hole.

Also, I hear people advocating contradictory strategies:

1. “I want my $30 items to sell quickly” High turnover/low ASP–that’s Iphone cases (but with price scaled up a little and STR scaled down), a model most folks seem to reject–too much work for the returns.

Simultaneously, it is said:
2. “I don’t want to mark down $30 items because they’ll sell eventually and I don’t want to lose the meagre profit.”

1 and 2 are contradictory positions.

QED. Over and out. If the tools work for you, fine, if not, fine. I’ll never say another word on the subject. Maybe 😉

Peace!

[Anonymous]

Luftmentsh said:

1. “I want my $30 items to sell quickly” High turnover/low ASP–that’s Iphone cases (but with price scaled up a little and STR scaled down), a model most folks seem to reject–too much work for the returns.

Simultaneously, it is said:
2. “I don’t want to mark down $30 items because they’ll sell eventually and I don’t want to lose the meagre profit.”

1 and 2 are contradictory positions.

By the way, I agree with both 1. and 2., but 1. is aspiration and two is strategy, and neither negates the applicability of PA/T or VA/QP analysis.

[Jay]

Just to get into the weeds here:

#1: If we were selling a commodity item (like iPhone cases), I’d want to sell these quick because the profit will most likely be low and competition fierce. I can keep buying these from the same factory everyone else does, so there’s no reason to hold and wait for a higher price. PEople who sell iPhone cases probably make $1 or less an item. The money is in volume and velocity.

#2: For long tail items, there’s is little competition and little demand. So I want to wait for the right buyer who will pay a premium. Instead of undercutting ourselves, we hold out for the full price so we can make $25 on a $30 sale.

[Anonymous]

Again, $30 items = not what I’m talking about discounting.

$30 item?: T=16,000, A=10 years.

Not long enough?

T=160,000, A=100 years and it’s someone else’s problem!

[Anonymous]

I’m glad I didn’t become a math professor like Dr. Luftmentsh Sr., Ret. (an actual Ph.D, “recovering” math prof), ’cause I’m clearly a terrible teacher. 🙁

[T-Satt]

Jay and Luftmentsh: My thoughts on the continuing conversation.

Luftmentsh, I agree that your formulas are a good tool to use for identifying items that are getting stale and need to have some review. And there is some validity in having the higher priced items indexed to the top: Since they have the most profit, they can absorb the extra time spent in crafting a listing that will sell. Spending an extra 1 hour on a $100 profit item is more sensible than in a $10 profit item.

It is a subjective tool, so everyone can use to fit their needs. There is no hard and fast rule on $30 items. You pick the profit, you pick the threshold. Agree.

Jay, I agree on the commodity level items. Move them. The profit margins are lower, so churn and burn. On your second point, that is the potential rub. By listing a lot of items with little demand, there aren’t as many selling opportunities. This is why you need a large store to generate consistent income. If you are only fishing for a rare species of fish, you don’t have many opportunities to land them. So the risk is…what if you never find that fish? Or…you had an issue with the listing that lost the fish to begin with?

No, changing the price will not always result in a sale, but you can start too high and scare the fish away at the beginning. Or have a bad title, bad description, bad photos and never get the nibble.

For me, the important concept is to make sure that everyone has SOME type of review of older listings to make sure they are still good listings. Luftmentsh has a tool to assist that. We can all use it or not.

But are we all reviewing old inventory at all? If not, I think that is a risk. I can’t say that we are 100% perfect in our listings every time we hit submit. I know that for a fact, as I’ve seen and corrected mistakes (title, price, description).

[Jay]

For me, the important concept is to make sure that everyone has SOME type of review of older listings to make sure they are still good listings. Luftmentsh has a tool to assist that. We can all use it or not.

But are we all reviewing old inventory at all? If not, I think that is a risk. I can’t say that we are 100% perfect in our listings every time we hit submit. I know that for a fact, as I’ve seen and corrected mistakes (title, price, description).

We’d need to get into the weeds further to really judge your statement. How often are you revisiting your listings? What if the photos and titles look good, but its still not selling? How much do you lower the price? How often are you lowering the price?

No doubt that mistakes can happen with listing. Or more knowledge gained over time can help an old listing. But the danger of revisiting long-tail listings anytime it’s “slow” are several:

–You’re lowering prices just to feel you have some control over sales. Revisit & lower price several times and you have a suddenly store of $5 items. It’s much easier to just put on a storewide sale if that makes you feel better. We’ve never seen sales rise with discounts, but I guess it makes us feel like we did something. It’s a bad habit IMHO.

–Lets say you revisit long tail items you listed 3 months ago. The photos, titles, and descriptions looks pretty good. Maybe you adjust some. Then what happens if they dont sell in six months. Do you think you need to keep further refining titles/photos/description?

–Depending on how often you revisit listings, you waste a lot of time when you could be listing new items. As I and Almasty have broken down the math, there’s no extra carrying costs for an inventory under 10k once you pay for the Anchor subscription. So any worry is more just
a self-created sense of “something must be wrong”. When long tail items dont sell for a while, I dont feel there’s anything wrong.

–If your goal is to increase profits and move items quickly, then it totally makes sense to “list and revisit”. But if you’re goal is to create a steady state income stream, “List and forget” works.

Tsatt, since you seem to be more in charge of scavenging and selling contemporary clothes in your store (and your wife doing the long tail items), I have a sense that your personality isn’t suited to long tail scavenging. You are great at finding items with high demand, and then equally great pricing super competitively to great velocity. Would you say this is true?

[Jay]

And I like Tsatt’s metaphor to fishing since there’s different kind of fishing temperaments.

There are guys that like to go deep sea fishing. They spend a lot of money to go out so expect a big catch. There’s a crew and sonars and fuel costs to find the fish. Fishing equipment is expensive. But usually they come home with a big catch.

Then there’s the guy who has his quiet spots on a lake or river near his home. He loads up his trusty fishing rod on quiet mornings. He spends a relaxing time in a place he knows. He’ll usually catch something but nothing to brag about. Just something to cook that night, though the experience of the day was the best.

[T-Satt]

Jay: Thanks for the compliment on the metaphor. As a fisherman and hunter, I have that perspective.

Question: Which fisherman are you?

[T-Satt]

Reposting since my edit killed the post (I should know better!)

Jay: OK, lots of ‘splaining…

“How often are you revisiting your listings? What if the photos and titles look good, but its still not selling? How much do you lower the price? How often are you lowering the price?”

All on a case by case basis. We usually have a review each quarter to look at old listings. Now, if we just reviewed and item last quarter and were fine with it, we will probably let it go. Takes 5 seconds. “Nah, already looked. Listing was good, still ok with pricing, just need to wait.” So we don’t always make a change.

Many times we realize the item is just flat out long tail, everything was good, just have to wait. If it is still there say a year later, we may do another market price check to make sure pricing is good. We may change, we may not. Just having the review doesn’t mean you HAVE to make a change. You are just checking in. But if we see that others are selling for much lower prices, yeah, maybe we are too high.

“–You’re lowering prices just to feel you have some control over sales. Revisit & lower price several times and you have a suddenly store of $5 items. It’s much easier to just put on a storewide sale if that makes you feel better. We’ve never seen sales rise with discounts, but I guess it makes us feel like we did something. It’s a bad habit IMHO.”

Totally agree. But I never said we ALWAYS change prices. Always changing prices would be, well, stupid. We can do a check and see what other Solds have been recently, and maybe we change and maybe we don’t. But I never have a blanket rule that we ALWAYS change prices.

“–Lets say you revisit long tail items you listed 3 months ago. The photos, titles, and descriptions looks pretty good. Maybe you adjust some. Then what happens if they dont sell in six months. Do you think you need to keep further refining titles/photos/description?”

Nope. See above. Plus, I don’t revisit items I listed 3 months ago. Our average range is 120 days from listing to sold. I said we look at OLD items. Since we use a next number SKU, I can sort our listings in SixBit and review the oldest items (lowest SKU) only. Last time I think the list was like 50-75 items.

–Depending on how often you revisit listings, you waste a lot of time when you could be listing new items. As I and Almasty have broken down the math, there’s no extra carrying costs for an inventory under 10k once you pay for the Anchor subscription. So any worry is more just a self-created sense of “something must be wrong”. When long tail items dont sell for a while, I dont feel there’s anything wrong.

Our review is probably about 2 hours long total, spread out over 30 days. We set the item to no longer automatically relist, and when we see that the item isn’t listed, we do a check. We have caught errors in listings. We have realized we were on crack when we priced it. Or…the sucker just is a bad buy. Been there forever, no views, no bites, no solds. At some point, it is just a bad buy. We can either slash to move or just get rid of it.

“–If your goal is to increase profits and move items quickly, then it totally makes sense to “list and revisit”. But if you’re goal is to create a steady state income stream, “List and forget” works. ”

Yes, list it and forget it works. However, I think we have a pretty steady state income stream right now as well. Our weekly numbers are solid and we are happy with them. There are lots of ways to make steady income in this business.

“Tsatt, since you seem to be more in charge of scavenging and selling contemporary clothes in your store (and your wife doing the long tail items), I have a sense that your personality isn’t suited to long tail scavenging. You are great at finding items with high demand, and then equally great pricing super competitively to great velocity. Would you say this is true? ”

Nope. I purposely went into clothing so that we had a different style of income. When we would visit the stores when it was all hard goods, I noticed that we only hit the outside of the store. We never checked the clothing. After doing research, I could see that the profit was there, was a faster velocity, but lower margins. Hard goods only can work, but requires a much larger inventory to have consistent sales. So we added a new stream with faster velocity at lower margin. This can feed cash into the business and provide an offset to slow hard good sales.

After that, we started to include shoes and Veronica is loving them. It gives her a stream that we can source year round, but at great ASP and STR. We are expanding that area now, and gives us three different styles of income.

I have no issue with long tail items as long as the money is there. We have a $2k print that we are still sitting on. We consigned on the Dicken’s Village for 18 months (a saga that is still ongoing for final payment). We have had lots of items that sold years after it was listed. If the money is there, we sit and wait. I have no issue with that at all.

I’m just saying that from a business perspective, a review of non-selling items is a worthwhile task. You catch errors, you change your thinking, you review the market for the item to see if pricing still makes sense…you see if your thought on that item from 5 years ago is still valid today. Obsolescence is a risk…ask anyone that still has their Hummels…

There are two big risks in this business that I see: Selling for too little margin (and burning out) and obsolescence. Both are a risk, and I work to minimize both.

I think it is always worth challenging your thoughts (in many areas of life). You either reaffirm that your thinking was right…or you learn something new.

[Jay]

Yep, totally agree with learning how to do things better. But to be blunt, I’m not getting any new info.

So you revisit old items to check photos, titles, price. We dont have a schedule, but we do this every so often. Cool. Not a game changer.

No one here has shown any evidence that they are selling long tail items quicker because of something they do. Relisting as new (no evidence it sells quicker). Lower price (no evidence it sells quicker). ???

Tsatt, your inventory is steadily growing. From my observations, this isnt just because you are listing more, but because you’re holding onto items longer. Your tail is growing longer my friend!

We and Almasty are just ahead of you in terms of growing out store. Your store will become a large inventory of long tail items as well unless you decide to focus more on high demand + high competition commodity items like Amazing Taste. Or you purposely de-list long tail items because you dont like a large inventory because it feels wrong.

[T-Satt]

Jay: “So you revisit old items to check photos, titles, price. We dont have a schedule, but we do this every so often.”

That was my only point. You agree with me that at some point, some old listings need to be reviewed to see if they need updating, need repricing, and if the market is still there for them. So if large inventory sellers like you guys (6,000+ items) can do this type of review, then we should all make that kind of review.

As to any kind of evidence you would need that doing certain work yields better results…you will never see it. Unless someone has two complete stores, with EXACTLY the same items (I mean double listing), and they A/B test every item that has been discussed (GTC vs 30 Day, Free Shipping vs Charged Shipping, Free Returns vs Charged Returns, Updating Old Listings vs Never See It Again)…you will NEVER have the evidence you need to convince you that one method is better than another.

So just like when you are sourcing…you have to go with your gut.

And I don’t think that there will ever be a “gamechanger” that you will ever adopt. Because a tectonic shift in this business doesn’t occur. But small changes add up. If you sell a little faster here, for a little more money there, saving some money on this item…you can move the needle. If you see the market drying up on this item, but opening up on this other item, you can make a big change over time. Like us with shoes. It has become a very nice “pipeline” (I always liked your term!) for us. We didn’t have it last year. We have it this year. It took time to learn and grow the inventory (and we are still growing).

I find that many people underestimate the small advantages (and disadvantages) in life. Habits matter. Process matters. Many people search for that “One Big Thing” that will change their life. Want to change your life? Make your bed. Eat a good meal. Take a walk. Are you amazingly better today than yesterday? No. Are you on the path to being a completely different person? Yes.

So I never look for or wait for a gamechanger to change what I’m doing or how I see the world. I look at small moves, test them out, see if they work, and implement if they work. If you move your aim just a fraction of an inch, your trajectory is vastly different over three miles. Life is a long road, so small changes change your destiny. Constant growth and change…

And I disagree somewhat with why our inventory is growing. Yes, our long tail items are growing. There is no denying that. But we are now listing 150+ items a week. Since March, our number of new weekly listings created is up 80% over last year. When you list 80% more each week than what you did last year…that is going to grow your inventory… 🙂

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

T-Satt: I just thought of something. I mentioned in a post to Luftmentsh about getting his whole original premise and those of us using dBase inventory management, a quick sort, filter and double sort presents us with this type of data lickety split.

But you just said something. Jay and Ryannes inventory has been building a long time. If I am correct, most of it like the shoes were piled in big bins by color or something like that. You and I have a custom SKU number on each item in our inventory. That number then is “managed” by software that tracks, when we bought it, where we bought it, what we paid for it. contains notes on our research. We have a ton of “item specific data”, to search. sort and analyize in a split second.

But even though J&R have a new, fantastic storage building, the specific items may be lacking any data to analyize in the first place. Other than what Ebay provides , which is fairly weak and thin to what fire power we have at our disposal, along with strong spread sheet creation abilities, I think J&R is fairly hard to review tis type of data. And because of that I get Jay and Ryannes point.

If it can’t be proven, absolutely without question, that these types of manuevers really work, why should they do it. In other words, why should we go back and put all that time into looking over our inventory when it is not known when something was bought or what was paid for it. I have heard Ryanne say many times or ask Jay, when did we buy that, how much did we pay, have we had it long??? Will hard to do deep analisis along the lines being put forth if you don’t have the data in the first place.

We knew the importance of this type data and started a SKU number system and Inventory control Management spread sheet on our first items we ever bought to resell. We have just improved on the tools to analysis that data as we grew. BUT J&R took the approach, “let’s go, let’s grow, let’s make those sales, rinse and repeat”.

Tracking all of this has been a ton of work for us and I can completely understand why J&R would be hesitent, especially if doing so would require going back and putting in tracking data on 6,000+ items, to worrying about any of this stuff at all.

I think Ryanne said that they are now starting to use SKU’s and having their helpers participate. Well maybe a few years down the road that info. may have a value like what you guys are talking about. But I think it is more of a “tool” for them to help find the items in there storage more quickly, thus they can do more with their time, than to be present for a deep mathematical process formula.

Just an opinion of an old “artist-former operations guy” down in the deep south. That and $.50 will get you half a cup of coffee! LOL 🙂

respectfully posted…
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art [for Google!! :-)]

[Inglewood]

I think a lot of the “fishers” on here should also realize that some of the sharing is well appreciated.

The old saying “you can give a man a fish, and feed him for a day, or your can teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime” goes for some of the tips shared on this forum.

A steady stream of extra catches comes my way these days as my scavenging net is wider and I know more about other species to fish for!

I would estimate a good $100 to $150 a month extra I make these days on items I wouldn’t have given a second look at based on the sharing of finds and what sells well on this forum. Scientific Calculators are something I thought was worthless these days that someone turned me onto on this forum and I sell a couple a month now. There are countless other oddball items like this I now go hunting for.

[T-Satt]

Inglewood: And a good fisherman is ALWAYS learning.

Every true Master I have ever met was always improving their craft.

I figure my deathbed will have an open book I’m still reading…or at least a podcast that is currently playing…

[Jay]

My metaphor is probably a bit strained, but I’m more the lazy fisherman just strolling down to the local pond.

[T-Satt]

LOL! 😂😂😂

That fits perfectly!

[Ryanne]

yes we are the relaxed fisherman/woman but i have my laptop open and i’m listing on ebay while we float down the stream…

[T-Satt]

Ryanne: I can see you in your sun hat cranking out on the laptop! 🙂

[Retro Treasures WV]

The best fun I’ve ever had fishing was filling a 5 gallon bucket with bluegill in less than an hour with my late Uncle on a beautiful lake in NorthWest Wisconsin.
Catching a bass is fun, but it takes forever and I get impatient. My preferred lure is surface buzz bait because even if I don’t catch a fish at least casting and reeling is fun.
I have no desire at this point in life to invest the time or money to become a tournament quality fisherman. Just give me the easy low hanging fruit and I’m a happy man.

Huh, the fishing analogy is eerily similar to my ebay style.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

I hear ‘ya man… and when you are 69.5 years old, I really don’t won’t to have to reach very far up for that fruit either. I will take the lowest of the lower now that I have the aches that I have. 🙂 🙂

mike at MDCGaFA

[T-Satt]

I have a (loose) theory that how a person handles fishing says a lot about how they handle life…

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

With all the dialogue that has gone back and forth on reviewing “old” inventory and then deciding how old is too old and what to do about it, I haven’t heard one word about putting a 50% Off Sale on everything either over a certain age or under a certain dollar amount AND CLICKING ON M/O!! If some thing is “Old” whatever you define that as.. the if it is a $10 item at 30% OFF Sale AND M/O may just get it sold and out of your hair.

No use changing prices all the time, just run a % Off Sale and take an Offer. Or take anything over 5 years old and place M/O and include in the Title Gotta GO.. Make an OFFER.

I’d take two dollars for a $10 item I had for 5 years and it is still staring me in the face.

Our some buyers scan for deep discount Sales. So anything under $XYZ dollars at 85% OFF Sale. Even run a promotion on that Sale.

Just a different angle I guess.

[T-Satt]

Mike: we will do this regularly. Stuff we want to move will be added to a Clearance Sale category, then we run a sale on that category.

[Retro Treasures WV]

I did an experiment where I put all of my “stale” inventory on 50% off sale for a week. I didn’t sell a single item that was on sale in that experiment.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Guess that sort of blows my deep discount sale comment out of the water, except for going even lower than 50%, maybe 75% or even 80% like some of the stores do, then throw in the “make an Offer” on top of that. If the items are at a level where they will be pulled and donated, then why not. Easier than having a yard sale in this heat or having to pull it all out of inventory, kill it in our software, load it all up and take to donation center.

[T-Satt]

Retro: I would say that 1 week is too short to tell. The buyer that would have paid that may have been gone that week. Or 50% may not be enough.

This is why I don’t do auctions much anymore. Unless the demand is high, the chances of a sale are low.

The bait has to be in the water longer than that. Our average sale is 120 day. Meaning the average time it is on eBay before a sale is 120 days. And that is just the items sold (doesn’t count the long tail items that are still Unsold).

I think any test on this platform has to be much longer. A month at least. And even then, depending on seasonality of the items, it may not be long enough.

I got a lot of christmas stuff, sweaters, jackets, and suits that are looking long tail right now… but will be nice to have come Q4.

[Anonymous]

The metaphor that came to my mind was a roadtrip: if you want to drive to California from the east coast (say, Virginia), you could just point the car west and go. And even without a map (or GPS nav), clock, compass, etc., there’s a good chance you’d hit the target–eventually. US roads are almost universally passable, fuel is plentiful and relatively cheap. You’d maintain good speed (mostly) but, you’d doubtless waste much time, money and resources like fuel, wear and tear, etc. Lodging would be hit-or miss. You might end up in Mexico or Canada. You might run out of gas in the Nevada desert in the middle of the night (I almost did that one time). Point is, there are tools to assist your drive, tools you probably don’t hesitate to use. And there are tools to help with your sales analysis, including my two new ones, PA/T and VA/QP.

I wonder, though, Jay, if part of your resistance to acknowledging the utility of these tools is that you guys don’t, in fact, have item-level data in a form that would allow application of these tools. Not a criticism–that’s y’alls’ style and it works (up to a point). But I would point out, as I did in another thread, y’all don’t, in fact, have a steady-state income, as you imply. Y’alls’ revenue is basically flat-line despite years of inventory accumulation and continuing growth (owing to STR degradation) which is what originally got me pondering how one could devise analytical tools to combat STR degradation.

And I’ll touch on another subject that T-Satt mentioned, and you guys actually addressed in this week’s podcast, but that really needs fleshing out. You said:

As I and Almasty have broken down the math, there’s no extra carrying costs for an inventory under 10k once you pay for the Anchor subscription. So any worry is more just a self-created sense of “something must be wrong”. When long tail items dont sell for a while, I dont feel there’s anything wrong.

In fact, as soon as you acquire an item, the clock is ticking. Without exception, a number of forces are potentially at work gradually degrading the value of any item you’d choose to sell. Forces including:

1. Fungi: Not much it won’t eat–wood, paper, cotton, hemp, linen, adhesives,plastics, rubber, leather, etc.–given the right conditions.

2. Humidity: Alternating cycles of high and low humidity will eventually destroy some items by physically breaking adhesive or internal material bonds. Antique furniture veneers rarely survive southern US humidity. And, of course, fungi love humidity–see 1, above.

3. Gravity: Items jumbled together in storage can easily be damaged from transient or prolonged pressure–remember the vinyl chairs Jay had to iron? Some items permanently deform by the force of gravity acting on their own weight.

4. Heat: Many materials are vulnerable to heat damage–plastics, paper, wax, rubber, adhesives. Many materials begin internal, chemical decomposition the day they’re created, and heat accelerates the process–y’all talked in the podcast about the returned shoes with the hardened soles–heat + time. Rubber can harden or turn to goo with time. Many tape decks, turntables, disc players, and other motorized devices use rubber drive belts.

5. Oxidation: Rubber, plastics, iron, copper, brass, zinc, silver, paint, to name a few, are all vulnerable to oxidation. Sometimes the effect is benign, mostly it degrades. Steven S. is forever using Deoxit on hifi controls–because they’ve oxidized.

6. Water: Don’t, just don’t.

7. Light: The radiant energy conveyed by a beam of sunlight and most types of artificial light works like a jackhammer, slowly but relentlessly breaking apart the molecular bonds of materials exposed to it.

8. Vermin: Mice, rats, moths, ants, flies, termites, dust mites, bacteria–remember the ladybugs in the backpack, wasn’t it?

9. Dust and Dirt: I’m always amazed at the amount of dust that settles on everything in our house between cleanings–where does it come from? Some is brought from outdoors, some is shed by people, animals, or other decomposing items–an item that was stored “clean” will not stay that way forever.

And then, of course, the force that T-Satt mentioned:

10. Demand change: Fads come and go. Tastes change. Even jewels and precious metals experience market fluctuations.

I’m always amazed to find items at estate sales or thrift stores that have somehow survived the ravages of time in mint condition–especially items that I own and have watched go to shit over the years owing to 1-9. How? Were they in a vacuum chamber buried in the desert sand?

Anyway, the forces of decay do not stand still (Rust Never Sleeps), and must be factored into the cost of holding long-tail goods.

[Ryanne]

will analyzing old listings help make sales happen? gps and fuel for a road trip will certainly assist in getting us cross country. but we’re talking about a vehicle (ebay) that we have little to no control over. we list random, odd, unique stuff and hope that it sells. for 10 years it has.

the basis for your formula is the assumption that we have control over the platform, which we don’t. sure we have control over how our listings and prices are presented (though not on how or if they’re found through search).

the list it and forget it idea came from these very types of conversations. the question is do we consider listings stale if they have been sitting for a while? sometimes, but mostly not.

[T-Satt]

Ryanne: I agree that we never have any “control” over sales. If we did, this business would be a WHOLE lot easier.

But (back to the fishing analogy)… we can change the bait. If anything, we are all fishing out there. Putting bait out there to see if it will land a fish. Sometimes the bait is right, but the fish that will want that bait only comes around every 5 years. Bait is good, just have to wait.

Sometimes, the bait is old and just needs to be switched out.

Or I’m fishing for the wrong fish.

All case by case basis…

Does it make a sale happen? No. Can it improve your chances? Possibly.

[Jay]

Does it make a sale happen? No. Can it improve your chances? Possibly.

This is the proper perspective. Maybe little tweaks and changes will help. Can’t hurt. But there’s no evidence it really moves the needle on long tail items.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

And then there are those who don’t care about fish, fishing, fishing equipment, bait, techniques or anything.

They go out to a pond, throw there line in the water, sit back and smoke a joint and never look to see if they have a fish on the line, much less if the bait is still on the hook!! 🙂

Then get up and go back home and forget that they left their pole behind.. 🙂 🙂

mike at MDCG

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

[Ryanne]

Does it make a sale happen? No. Can it improve your chances? Possibly.

you made my point. the answers are “No” and “Possibly (but we may never know for sure)”. so we just list it and forget it (99% of the time).

[almasty]

Long-term sellers think of their business like x.

Fast-paced, commodity based sellers think of their business like x.

They are just two different strategies for selling. To me, I find it more odd how people base their sales on the expectation that a person will like x due to factors such as x in a time period of x, vs. me buying an item because I find interesting, knowing that within a day, or 10 years of listing, someone else will find it interesting as well. It doesn’t matter when, but they will at some point. Enough “at some points” add up to a full-time income based on all of my previous efforts listing.

For fast-paced sellers, there are a lot of bad buys to cull. For long-term sellers, there are very frequent “bad buys” in comparison. For fast-paced seller, time is finite. For long-term sellers, time is infinite.

[almasty]

very infrequent bad buys – i don’t want to freak out the editing bot by editing my post too quickly.

[T-Satt]

Very good points. The mindsets are different between the two. The key may be in how to use the tools that are at hand in conjunction with the type of items that are sold and the goals of the seller.

There is only “good” and “bad” metrics based on the type of store and goals. You and Jay and Ryanne have shown that long tail stores can be successful. They just require large inventories, and the risks and rewards that go with it. Possible obsolescence, but less requirement to “feed the beast”.

Just don’t think you can get rich quick or recoup capital fast with this type of store. It is long term strategy, and pretty much a lifestyle. It is definitely a winning strategy. But sales are less frequent, storage is an issue, and if cash is an issue, know that you will invest in inventory and labor (if you have employees) and you will not see that investment pay off for a long time.

If you Churn and Burn, know that you will get your investment back, but less money per hour, you will always have to source. Inventory is less of an issue, but more work is required.

I love metrics on our store (and others) as it shows what each store is generating. All types can be successful, you just can’t expect A when your store is B.

[almasty]

I feel like with long-tail stores, obsolescence isn’t a “problem” with the store, but a perk, and the ultimate driver of sales to the store for that seller. It is required of the long-tail store to have items that people don’t necessarily need, but want.

Or, will eventually want. Or, that tv shows and movie studios will want as props for period pieces. Or, a collector will need to finish his collection. Or, a specific article that someone needs to read in a magazine. Or, an item someone does actually need, but can’t find anywhere except for the one long-tail seller on Ebay or Etsy that bothered to stock it in the first place for them.

[Anonymous]

I’ve done rapid-fire edits in the last 24hrs with no problem. Seems like there’s a transient, recurring problem. Unless I’m just holding my tongue in the wrong postion.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

There is one bit of control we haven’t mention and it is an absolute control factor. That is to pull any real old items, especially those you paid under a dollar for and take then to a local auction house. We have a real good one just 25 minutes down the road. Almost everything sells and usually $5 is the lowest price. If lower then can lot them up or tray lot them. Jay loves tray lots. At this point it doesn’t cost you anything, especially if you are going to this auction anyway. They do take a commision on the Sale, but that just substitutes for the Ebay fees.

At our favorite auction house they have several days a month just for dealers to dump off there items. This is where we get some of our items for our Ebay store occassional. But this is a “point of control”. Pull it, haul it in, sell it for what someone bids”. If it doesn’t sell leave until the next week and do it agagin. We sold a bunch of the big furniture pieces we had at the booths this way. Got close to $2,000 for a bunch too large for our new Ebay online venture.

Mike at MDC Galleries

[almasty]

What the…?

For my large inventory, I do sometimes remove items from inventory that have been damaged while in inventory due to any number of reasons. However, I don’t assume that my entire long-tail inventory will somehow destroy itself in its entirety over the course of 5-10 years and I will have to start from scratch at some point due to the forces of nature.

At the very least, having a large long-tail inventory allows for certain items to be junked for any number of reasons, all the while still being able to hold onto a substantial inventory without any fear to loss of income if a few items have to go for whatever reason you feel like it has to go.

As for fads, I would argue that the lack of a current broad underlying culture (i.e. post-internet culture) allows for either a very fast cycle of fads, or even the absence of fads. Someone looking for a weird item on the internet is doing it for themselves, not because culture dictated for them to be interested in it. This has also applies to people of a certain age (maybe 30-35+?) who are not buying items to look “cool,” but maybe for historical/genealogical reasons, or aesthetic reasons that do not fit in with the current perceived norms of “coolness.” Let alone what people are interested in in Europe, or Mexico, or Asia… I find this to be a very interesting topic, but too much for a paragraph or two tacked onto the end of “but what ifs?”

[SilverFoxFinds]

07/01/18 – 07/07/18
Total Items In Store: 875
Items Sold: 10 (bah!)
Total Sales: $451.61
Cost of Items Sold: $57.50
Highest Price Sold: $115 (incl shipping) – All-Clad 12 Qt MultiCooker Stock Pot w/ Steamer Insert; $90 – Silver Fox Fur Capelet Shawl Wrap
Average Price Sold: $45.16
Returns/Refunds: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $40.40
Number of Items listed this week: 0

[Theresa]

Having two stores that are both Top Rated Plus and jumping through all the hoops to do so I have become frustrated by returns for really no reason and because I sell a lot of shoes, having them be returned after 26 days. So, after listing to the podcast explain the difference between Top Rate Seller and Top Rated Seller Plus and checking eBay’s definition, I decided to switch all my listings in both my stores (thingsbotholdandnew & closeteditions) from 30 days to 14 for returns and changed seller pays for returns to buyer pays today.
I meet the requirements for Top Rated Seller still, but after searching eBay and my own listings, I find that the only badges I see are for Top Rated Seller Plus and wondered why? Anyone have listing with Top Rated Seller badges on them now? All of this has me really rethinking my business model and how to go forward from here. I have so worried about keeping my Top Rated Seller status and then Plus, that I think I am about done with that and will just concentrate on listing, selling and doing the very best I can for my customers.

[T-Satt]

Theresa: I did a check on our listings. We have either Top Rated Seller+ badges (99%) or no badge at all (on the items we didn’t provide Free Returns.

[Theresa]

To be a Top Rated Seller Plus you have to offer free returns and it looks like they give you the badge and 10% off listing fees. To be a Top Rated Seller you do not have to offer free returns you just have to have all your stats like shipping time, returns within their limits which I do. And for that right now you do not even get a Badge by your listing. So I have decided to no be so hyper about all of this and just keep doing what I am doing. List accurately and honestly and provide my customer with a wonderful item and great service as I define it and not as eBay does.

[Jay]

I noticed that the only place that shows we’re a Top-rated Seller is on the page that shows our feedback profile. And even then it’s not a badge. Just say “Top Rated: Seller with highest buyer ratings”.

On indivdual listings where we’ve jumped through all the hoops we do have the Top rated Seller Plus Badge.

So what’s the exact benefit of being Top Rated Seller without Top rated Seller Plus items?
–shipping discount?
–???

[T-Satt]

Top Rated Sellers get the shipping discount. Outside of that…can’t think of anything. Maybe a boost in search, but who knows with Cassini…

[Theresa]

That is really the question Jay, what is the benefit of being a Top Rated Seller and stressing over the dings you can get for cases closed without seller resolution, late shipping and transaction defect rate. For me, I took great pride in the fact that I had worked hard to obtain their Top Rated Seller and then Top Rated Seller Plus for both my stores, but with that came a lot of frustration and time fretting over little things which stopped me from listing and just getting on with life. Right now, having removed free returns and going back to just Top Rated Seller, I feel like a load has been lifted and I am just going to get on with the tasks at hand. Listing and more listing and enjoying my wonderful life here in Iowa.

[almasty]

I switched to a 2 day handling time because I was getting dinged by Ebay for shipping on items I was sending out even the same day of sale. Making that change alone pushed me back to a TRS status on Ebay.

This might be controversial, but just like how I never look back at my listings once I’ve created them, I never check my defects or anthing else on the dashboard. I would probably look if I was scheduled to be below standard or whatever the lowest rating is on the next cycle, but I feel if I have the green Top Rated Seller or even Above Average on the dashboard, that’s good enough. Nothing to worry about.

[SilverFoxFinds]

PS – On the food front, I made this for dinner last night, am enjoying it again for lunch today, and am going to put it into a regular rotation. For the cauliflower lovers out there…

Used pancetta (rather than prosciutto) I ordered from Smoking Goose meats in Indy, after tasting their Hillbelly breakfast sausage on a recent trip to Louisville – yum! Highly recommend their stuff, if you’re able to try it.

https://food52.com/recipes/7000-roasted-cauliflower-with-spaghetti-squash-and-crisp-prosciutto

[T-Satt]

Very good sounding recipe!

Interesting on how they roast the Spaghetti Squash. We usually cut in half to start with, then roast them at 400 for 25 minutes face down.

Love Spaghetti Squash!

[SilverFoxFinds]

@Theresa – The 14 day return option is being phased out by eBay, to 30 as the minimum, for those items you accept returns on. I’m getting notifications on my dashboard each day for several items that need official updating on that front (basically accepting eBay’s automatic changeover from 14 to 30 days). I’m making some changes to my shop, taking fewer and fewer returns overall – mostly just keeping some for clothing and shoes.

Being a hoop jumper, esp for eBay, takes away the enjoyment from making this means of income – at least at my level/volume of sales. It could make sense for other Sellers to get those small wins from eBay, as they add up, but not for me. Even trying to track what they are, how they change every few months…..ugh. Back to listing and cooking.

[Theresa]

SilverFoxFinds … I just looked at all the listing I changed and now see in red “You must select a return period which is supported” so it looks like 14 days is no longer an option yet, when I changed them this morning business policies let me select 14 days as on option.
So, I just put in 30 days and buyer pays return shipping and all is right with the world once more. I find it very frustrating that they are limiting my options as a seller and how I want to handle my own store.

[BrianB]

Jay, Ryanne: Maybe for the next podcast you could (with the help of sellers outside the U.S.) provide some insights into how sales taxes are handled in other countries. As we’ve been discussing the Supreme Court ruled recently that states can now have more say over collecting online sales taxes. I would like to know how sellers in other countries handle this issue. Thanks.

[Annalisa]

Jay and Ryanne,

I would love to see if you could do an experiment on your second store. I’m wondering if you “refreshed” your items on a weekly basis or ended them and reslisted them every 7 days as a caller indicated, if you would see an increase in your sales. Since your sales are pretty consistent over there, it might be a good time to conduct the experiment before the fall when sales are expected to go up regardless. I sure would be interested in the results 🙂

[BrianB]

Annalisa: They tried that experiment. It didn’t yield any increase in sales. Also, Griff on Ebay Radio has stated that eBay’s algorithm isn’t fooled by this tactic. You are better off just creating new listings.

[Annalisa]

Thank you Brian B! I had no idea that they did that. I guess I missed that episode~ Thanks for responding as well, sometimes I feel like Jays profile pic “Do I even exist” lol

[Mark S]

This is a new one for me. A buyer bought separate items, both shoes (totally different sizes which was wierd).

Ebay blocked the sale because they said it was a suspicious buyer.

I could not relist the items so I called ebay. They said in this case, they don’t allow the items to get relisted because they don’t want that buyer to buy them again (possibly with another account). I blocked the buyer. I have to relist from scratch.

Pain to relist? Not too bad. I just went back to Wonderlister, went the listing and copy the info to a new listing. Another reason to have a backup.

Still haven’t heard from ebay on the 198 items that have photos missing from their June glitch. I could get them from Wonderlister, but that would take about 8-10 hours to upload all those pics, so I am hoping ebay can do it.

On another front, I brain stormed some reports I want from Wonder Lister. I just made a pick report with my bin number. Next, I am going to do a query that gives me all my cogs for items sold at the item level in one query. This will be my year end query for taxes. There is some pre-work to this, so I have to also do that, but this will make tax time a breeze. I am starting to sell too many items to do this manually. This will be a great and much needed improvement to my processes.

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

To those who use 3rd party dBases like WonderLister or SixBit or the slread sheet program AuctionTracker.. watch your listing carefully. This Ebay flip flop on the 14 day dwell time a new listing or a 30 day end and relisted item having to sit before a Sale can be applied vs. it’s reversal of that and saying that a GTC listing can roll over and not fall into that trap created a bucnh of confusion within our dBase.

We had about half or store on 30 day then end and then relist as a new listing duration and the other half still GTC. We had a Sale running for a week and when some on the listing came due for their renewal time in the middle of the sale, Ebay got some of the Sale prices confused again, just like they did last year, and some of our listing got relisted at the lower Sale price instaed of rolling back to their “pre-sale price”. Thank goodness WonderLister now has a maximum hitorical price column. We loo at this column which is side by side to the “Current” Ebay price it shows us which items did not revert back to their correct price.

We had 181 items that relisted at that lower Sale price. But thank goodnesss the WL tech guys got it straight for us. Once we all figured out that Ebay was having some issues handling this flip-flop on the 14 no sale allowed rule and then the reversal on that postion, we decided to bulk edit all of ourlistings, remove the 30 day duration-end-relist auto rule, and converted all of our listings back to GTC.

T-Satt if you guys have run a Sale within the last few weeks, you guys may want to double check and see if all your listing did relist back to their “pre-sale” price.

Also now that we have gone back to the GTC duration status that will help the Google searches and also start to shore up the new Shopify store organic traffic.

The WL tech team also said that now that the Ebay engineering team is starting to alter the Cassini search engine away from static keyword searches but go toward the analysis of their buyers behavoral searches and past historical archival search analysis the 30 day, relist and see us as a new listing will be a whole lot less important. And the end and relist every 30 days technique gets wonky with all of the Ebay changes as the listings get ended and relisted continueasly, Cassini is seeing those as now “redundent” listing they said, especially if no “major” changes is made to the scope and make up of the listing.

I told them, no way am I going to relist over a thousand items every 30 days AND THEN go and take each one of them and do a rework on it so it seems like a more relvant presentation of that item. That would be almost like re-creating the whole listing every month. No way. So, back to the GTC.

They agreed that in order to increase sales, the time would be more well spent listing on other platforms to “expand” our audience, thus increase traffic to the item, rather than worrying about trying to trick Cassini to build more views within Ebay itself. They said that traffic will be there and is there for all the reasons we won’t ever understand. So now take our same item, cross list it on Etsy and our own Shopify store and expose it to a whole new audience, some who don’t even go to Ebay or don’t think highly of Ebay.

Made sense to us, so back to GTC on everything for us.

Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art

[bcfol440]

Mike – Thank you for sharing what the engineers told you. I have heard other sellers talk about going in and “gardening” their listings to see if it kicks up in Cassini. It is a huge time suck! I started with my top most 50 expensive items as an experiment to constantly tinker. My final step is reshooting photos to see if that helps.
Instead of the hack a thon that is eBay cassini tricks, I have expanded to Posh to unload my clothing/accessories/shoes. Better use of my time and showing results !
Speaking of Cassini, I awoke this morning to 2 international buyers asking about shipping charges within minutes of each other in germany and netherlands. Seems like my store light is “ON” in Europe for my older items.

[T-Satt]

Thanks for the heads up Mike. We only had a couple of items on sale recently, and those that were are no damage.

Interesting news on the GTC vs 30-Day issue. I hope to talk to the eBay folks at length on this issue, especially how “stale” listings are ranked in search. I have no problem going to GTC as long as we don’t get dropped in search by being “stale”. Last time we did GTC…sales tanked for 3 months. We went back to 30 Day and sales popped back up.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Troy. Funny that you mention this. we had just the opposite experience. You know we did the 30 day switch over starting a few months back Now not to fall into the “Jay Trap” that we don’t have any way to prove any of this.. And I can hear him saying.. “See I told you so” all the way down here in Atlanta, but after we went to the 30 day listings, which meant we had to kill every item that had been in our store for a long time, our sales tanked. We went from over $2,000 in sales monthly to less than $700 over the past sevral months.

It was after I did that, the team here, Lisa and Susan both said what about any organic traffic we had gained out the the Google-o-sphere, any watchers and follwers and those that just visited us occassonly without watching that saw all of our items disappear due to us canceling them. Sure they got relisted but with different ID numbers. Then one of them said that a friend told them that she copied items she was interested in aand pasted the stor eitem into a MSWord document and occasionally clicked on it as a link to go back to our store. Well that click produced a “this item no longer exits” statement. She said she went back to the store and re-found the items and rebooked marked them. So the questioned susan posed was, well what about the next month and won’t this happen again and when will fooling around with our store and items take a reverse tole on our sales?

There is also one thing I have thought about. Even though all the gyrations are quick, a few minutes, if I did enough looking, pokeing, anaylsis, sorting, filtering, how much time would all of that add up too. Susan said I needed to be down in the studio and creating and designing products, not poking keys on a computer and she also included my participation on SL in that comment. And she is correct. If you add up all of the time I have spent working with the SixBit and WonderLister teams, the old spread sheets, the old AuctionTracker, participation on this and several other forums, she said i could have created a bunch of art works and products that would be listed for hundreds and the resulting sales from those would out weigh all of the key punching on the keyboard. I did a rough calculation and it could be in the neighbor hood of several months of my time on things that may or may not have any affect at all on out stores success.

Interesting take on it. I guess. She and our helper seemed to be in agreement. But at least now going back to the GTC format it sort of puts my mind more at rest. Based on what I just said, I guess I should be down in the studio creating products, not talking about products, so to speak. Hhhmmm..

[T-Satt]

Interesting on your take on GTC. Have you looked at your traffic numbers on eBay? Specifically the eBay Views vs the O/S eBay Views, both before the switch to after? It would be interesting to see if you can follow the O/S View drop to your switch from GTC.

Always an opportunity cost in every action taken. Yes, you could have done more new listings. But your knowledge of your business, what works, what doesn’t, would be less.

There are few paths of new learning that don’t yield a positive result. You don’t know if you don’t try. And skills in one place yield skills in another.

Had I never spent time forecasting our numbers, I would have been freaking out when cash is low after hiring a new person. Yet I know the hole is 4 months long, and we have about one more month to go.

All in perspective on what you learn with your time…

[SalarySlave]

MDC brings up many good points on proper time usage. Especially for people like me that are doing this part time. it’s a much much better use of time to source and list new product then to try and do search engine optimization or spend too much time forecasting / analyzing.

I’m a Financial Analyst at my day job, but I only do the bare minimum of analysis on my Ebay store after a product is listed. I’m gated by what I can find in the wild and the time I can devote to searching.

At point of purchase I use sale price, item size/fragility, competition, and sell through rate, all of which can be determined for 99% of items by doing a few quick Ebay searches. After an item has been listed for two years, I will revisit and determine if the market has moved, prices have changed, if the listing has errors, etc. It’s worked for me so far.

[T-Satt]

Absolutely agree with you SalarySteve!

I should probably preface this more often, but we always come from a perspective of Full Time Sellers where eBay is 80%-90% of our income. If eBay is on the side, or not your major source of income, then the validity of any advice to forecast, review listings, etc. has to be seen through that lens.

I think the forum is great because of these different perspectives. Many, many part timers, some retirement sellers, some where eBay is one of a few strong streams of income, and some where eBay is the One Thing.

And cash needs for the business revenue is different as well. Single and no kids? Low burn rate. Married with 2 kids in college in an urban setting (US!). High burn rate (and we are frugal everywhere else).

So needs for the income change the work invested to gain the most profit potential.

[Mark S]

SalarySlave,

My thinking was close to yours because I am also part time. T-Satt challenged me with finding my real STR. I ran some queries in Wonderlister and found sme interesting info.

I just ran this again and I have some action points: Don’t buy backpacks, they are not selling. Only buy higher priced sweaters. Games are long tail and high STR – I will still buy those.

You don’t have to go crazy on this, but running thing like this can give real insight into your store.

Wonderlister makes this real easy. I wrote a procedure I can call and create these, so it is real easy for me now.

See my analysis I ran today:

https://imgur.com/a/9H2oPXu

Mark

[Mark S]

Here is the rest of my STR queries:

https://imgur.com/b2cTJM1

I just ran this for the phase in the title. I know that I sell a lot of the items I have, so this is a good start for me.

Mark

[Mark S]

I also know that my average STR per month is 3.8%. My ASP for the year is $37.22. So, as T-Satt says, I am in the 10X, 4% camp and I am good with that. My store tends to mirror J&R’s in terms of that.

I think this analysis is telling me that the following is selling well for me and keep buying these types of items:

Shoes \ Boots \ Skates
Coats \ Jackets
Vintage
Briefcases
Games \ Blankets \ dolls \ cases – Good ASP, but Long Tail
Sports equipments (including baseball, golf, hockey, motorcycle, etc)
hats are doing ok

Stop buying the following:

– Stop buying lower selling priced sweaters
– stop buying backpacks. They take way to long to sell and have a low ASP.

T-Satt – let me know if you have any more insight into my numbers that I posted above.

Mark

[T-Satt]

Mark: Looking at the numbers that you posted on your IMGUR link, everything looks good.

Question: How are you calculating your STR? Is that a monthly rate?

[Mark S]

T-Satt,

The STR is calculated: Num of Solds / (Num Unsolds Listed + Num Solds) for the time period. In this case the time period was from 1/1/18 – 7/11/18.

Mark

[T-Satt]

Mark: Ok, so the STR that you are getting is the STR for the six-month period. You would have to roughly divide by 6 to get it to a monthly rate.

[Mark S]

Oh, I also created my query to produce my year end report of all items sold, the bin\item #, price, shipping charged, etc. The only thing I need to do now is load my COGS for the bin\item#. I have all this info in separate spreadsheets, so I have to merge it all into 1 spreadsheet, then load it into a table on the WL DB. Then link that table with the query I just wrote.

In the end, I will just run this 1 query at the end of the year and it will give me YTD sales with COGS. It will also give me state of Michigan Sales and Sales broken down by each month in the year with ASP, and possibly STR if I get to that. The tricky part to this was backing out the Cancelled, Unpaid, and Returned items. I also then have to keep appending each lot of items I list to the COGS table, but no big deal after I have that set up. I know Mike is going to say, “Why not put the COGS in a custom field?” Well, that would be a lot of work now for 2400 items already in my store. It is much easier to load the data I already have in spreadsheets and link to that. That will also give me the date I bought the item and the address where I bought it (not sure that is needed, but you never know). I could use this in the future to run further analysis on how long it takes to list an item after I buy it, etc.

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Hey Mark: Funny..”Mike would say just create a custom field and put there”. Well Yes and No. Under most circumstances yes. We use about 6 custom fields to enter and track things that the standrd dBase entry form doesn’t have a field [space] for. But in this case, WL and SixBit has a field for Avg. Unit Cost. We just enter our item cost into that built in field. Most of our items are only a quantity of 1 so that is where we put it. If we bought a box lot of 10 items for $10 we eneter the avg. per item box lot price in that field. [i.e. $1 each since we bought all 10 for $10]

WL will use this field in it’s Sale’s Report Tab on the report it generates to auto-calculate the COG by the item and also include it in the total Summary Report”. And of course those reports can be sorted by any age-date period you want.

On multi-quantity on the same item you are selling, use the single dollar amount for just 1 unit. Use the $1 cost and WL will calculate the total COG multiplied times the total quantity. In this case $1 ea. x 10 items in inventory = $10 COG

Now to reply to how long it will take to get caught up. Ok, true if you have thousands of items listed in your store and have never used that field, then yes you do have to back track and enter them but not earth shattering. If you click the “Active Listings” tab, then sort by that column then all listings will be presented that have no number entered. You can highlight each listing line by line and when you do use the Quick Entry pop out form on the right and just type in that cost for that item and hit “save”. Now don’t hit “Send to Ebay” yet, that will take too much time. But when you hit “Save”, then go to the next line and do the same. Continue to do this until you have done say, 100 listings. Now look at the “Edited Locally” tab that says “need to synch with Ebay”. Click that tab, highlight all that are in that folder and clcik “synch with Ebay”. This way you will be updating a hundred at a time. Do this 10 times over saw a week or so and you ahve a thousand updated.

After you eventually get all costs into WL then the individual cost is available from the internal reports WL offers. And of course from this point forward start inputting the individual unit cost for every item you buy.

The first thing we do when we come in from an estate sale or auction is take one of our pre-printed and pre-numbered small item tags, open WL and use the Quick Entry form to add a short quick title, the tag number as part of the SKU [but not all of the SKU-that comes later], the date we bought it and where. That gets the new item into WL within about 15 secs and starts the dBase trail of the items journey through our process. Of course we fill that form out more fully as the item progresses through our process. Susan and our helper enters there part into the form as they do there respective work on the item.
All I do at the end is review everything, do the prices and hit upload.

On some weeks an item travels through our system in a few hours other times it could be weeks before we finish a listing for various reasons. But every item has a date, title, where and how much we paid on it from the get go.

In any case you probably already know all of this but thought I would throw it out for others who may not.

Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta

[Mark S]

Mike,

I track about the same info you do for items that I buy. The only difference is that I put that info into a spreadsheet. I guess that is just habit. But that can save me time because if my buy lot is number 222 and I bought 50 items at the same place at the same time, then I just have to put buy lot 222 into my table of buy lots and only enter that information 1 time instead of 50 times. That is the power of a relational database.

That was helpful giving the step by step procedure of how to do that if I wanted to enter it directly into WL. I like WL, but that user interface is not the most intuitive interface. I guess that is why I try to stick to the db. That would be faster than ebay, but that would take a lot of time to find my COGS for 100 items at a time.

Mark

[Mark S]

Mike,

Also, I don’t think you can use the WL Sales Report to accurately get your COGS. It will be close, but they will be over-stated because that report includes unpaids, cancelled, and returned items.

So, if you run that report at the end of the year and just take that COGS number that is shown in the summary for the report, your number will be over-stated. For me, that would be about 10% more than it should be. Do you just live with giving the IRS an inflated COGS number or do you have a way around that?

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

There has been a lot of discussion here on SL by both SL Mebers some which are also accountant types. Many of those SL discussions lead down rabbitt holes and into deep weeds. So fearing not to re-open a whole lot of back and forth I will make some more general statements about our accounting methods that I will leave as just my opinion.

We don’t use WL as an accurate COGS. In fact SB and WL both are not accounting programs. An appropriate booking system will be based on Journals and Ledgers and proper set-up of what is called a COA {Chart of Accounts]. We used to use QuickBooks but about closing the remodeling business and spary foam insulation business, we found that Quicken Bookkeeping for Business was sufficient and much less expensive and complicated.

But tracking the cost of an item sold involves much more than just the price one pays for the item at source of finding. Did you use a sheet of a paper towel to wipe it, did you use 2 ozs. of Windex to clean it, did you amortize all of the equipment you use to photograph it like how many minutes of photo lighting did you use, how much electricity, the time you have it on the scale, etc., etc. Now nobody in there right mind would track those types of things. [but as an operations VP in mfg. I did] but on Ebay, heck no.

So by using proper [as Jay calls it “Robust Accounting Software”] we track COGS by the use of Journal entries [automatically classified of course] along with a properly set up Chart of Accounts and a Profit and Loss report and balance sheet pulled from that software. We derive our financial status and where we are with regards to P&L and data for reporting. All of this termonology is well known to CPA’s and accountants.

So having run much larger companies than our current Ebay store we utilize our accounting software to arrive at not only our COGS but also our profit at any time period we select when we pull a report, which I usually do about every two weeks. I do not believe in posting these numbers every week like here on SL. I believe [in my opinion] doing this is like buying stock in the market on Monday, then just watching the ticker tape and DJI every day. That is crazy. Watching this closely, week by week, leads more to anxiety than to insight into your business financial strengths and weaknesses. Decades ago companies only watched these factors quarterly, but every few weeks is ok and will show things you need to do, as a small company, that one can react on fairly quickly. It took us months at 18 million dollars to make a turn in the direction our company was going.

But that all being said, our CPA for IRS reporting, uses, the alternative way to calculate the cost of goods sold that fits our mind set better, and right or wrong in SL memebrs eyes as has been argued in the past, is to use the periodic inventory system, which uses the following formula:

Beginning inventory + Purchases – Ending inventory = Cost of goods sold

We always take an inventory count on Dec. 30-31st at the end of each year. Then we close out the books. Then we use that close out inventory count number as our Jan. 1st start up costs for the next operating year. Having very good accounting software and the use of a thorough Chart of Accounts we record all expenses of our business monthly. Payable and receivables are set up according to the american Standards of Accounting. All income and expenses are pulled in automatically from our banks and PayPal and automatically categorized into there proper journals and classifications. Again just standard accounting.

Come the end of the year when we do the end of the year count again our CPA applies the above formula. It is a very simple system. All monies are downloaded automatically by Quicken, or any of the many programs out there, and placed in the auto P&L statement.

Our Monthly P&L reports shows us the percentage spent on New Item Inventory purchased, Ole-Used Inventory Purchased, what our advertsing expense was, janitorial supplies were, what our procurement costs were both by category and also totaled by Main journal entries. Again I stress, all we have done is years ago create a chart of Accounts and mapped those categories to the place we but something [vendor] or cross reference the charge cards. And something fairly basic, never, never mix personal money and expenses with personal monies. Have two bank accounts, two charge cards, everything for the business is separate from our personal accounts.

If we need money we make a transfer of monies from our business accounts to our personal accounts. That is classified as “Owners Draw” in accounting terms [otherwise known as paying ourselves in our terms].

Bottom line, no way would I rely on SB or WL to provide an accurate picture of our COGS sold because it was not designed for that and it shows. Sure it gives a ballaprk, maybe even closer, look at the cost we paid for an item, and shipping costs and fees to Ebay, but not that great at it. But our Quicken software is dead on. There is just no substitute for “robust accounting software and practices”.

If you think about returned items that were damaged, items pull out of inventory, theft in B&M stores, internal dropped and broke items, just way to detailed to track, but easier when one does a “hard count” on inventory.

Do we pull every bin and go through every piece once a year. Heck no, we use the WL report of what we paid, etc. But every 5 years one should. Bet you have seen big stores with isles blocked off and employees using a scanner and scanning every product on the shelves out on the floor, then they go in the back and do the same for what is in their storage. At some point a hard count reconcillation has to be done.

But talk with your CPA about the “periodic Inventory System”.

Someone like Mark Tewes, who is a CPA and a SL memebr and other accountants can chime in and give a better idea of the best way to account for COG and COG. A COG is just the cost of the item, The COGS is cost and other expenses that go into the sales of that item or atleast all of your items over the year.

I know there are other SL members that do not subscribe to the Periodic System and say, it has to be directly related to the “EXACT” item sold, but remember IRS just wants their share and the overall picture is fine with them. My CPA says they don’t care if their money is coming from a small mirroe you bought 5 years ago or from a paint by number picture you bought 2.75 years ago. They just want their lump sum money / share based on “what all you have sold vs. what all you are going to claim as the cost”. Also I think Marks dad or someone here on SL said that the IRS is real impressed when you show an “honest effort” to track all your costs and have the data and documents to back it up. But are they going to throw you in jail form not getting a few used items down to the penny? Who knows.

The use of WL and SB is as they advertsie themselves, Inventory Management Systems” IMS not accounting programs. Great for back up and useful as such.

One last ting, when I make a painting in the studio, I may have $15 invested in canvass and stretcher bars, but I also buy paints and chemicals and brushes. I use those on dozens of paintings. Short of weighing every ounce of paint I apply to each canvass, and how many strokes I put into the wear of a $40 Red Sable brushe, how is the individual cost of that item calculated when sold, especially when I created it 4 years ago and sold it after 4 years in storage. But using the Periodic System seems to satisfy our Accountant and us in turn.

Now hopefully I don’t get racked over the coals like has happened in the past. We do just as J&R and others here do, “WE FOLLOW OUR CPA’s ADVICE”. If audited, he is the one that will have to go and explain everything. That is what we pay him for. LOL 🙂 🙂

Respectfully posted and replied…
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.

[Mark S]

Mike,

Your response was a little over my “accounting knowledge” head.

All I know is that WL tracks every single purchase that is made. If I back out the unpaids, cancels, and refunded items, I am left with the items that left my store and never came back. I take the COGS for that and it should be right on. I suppose it is possible that it is not 100% exact, but pretty darn close. I would guess that I am closer than 99% + of most people here on the blog.

But I am confused about your cogs in your QuickBook. How do they cogs get in there? How do you know they are 100% accurate? I take Go-Daddy as spot on because it is done electronically, but that can’t track COGS. Enlighten me.

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

When it comes to accounting software, including Go Daddy, one of the “categories” that gets set up is Purchase of Inventory.

We go to A&Z Auctions Inc., buy $100 worth of stuff and charge it on our business card. When we update our software, GDB and Quicken or others goes out and pulls in that charge. Because we previously set up our COA and listed A&Z Auctions as a vendor and mapped all charges from this vendor as “Purchase of Inventory it gets logged in under that journal entry. Simple as that. It is now listed as a Cost of Goods.

We have done that set-up for every “vendor” we buy from, every thrift store, every estate sale [conducted by an estate sale company], etc. So any future purchases from that vendor gets logged in as Cost of Inventory [COG]. If we but from a vendore we have bought from before, we logg them in as a “new vendor” and map that Purchase of Inventory journal category to them. Then every time a purchase from that vendor is made everything bought comes into the software as a COG.

If we buy from a Yard Sale, we use our Petty Cash” funds. We alsways keep a zip up pouch with some cash in it and fund that with transfers from our bank account. We reconcile our “Petty Cash” account monthly just like any other account. We have a small pad of blanks forms we use as receipts. If we buy $60 worth of stuff, we create a hand made receipt using the street address, city, state as the vendor and we also list each item we bought and what we paid for it. The total amount and that address is entered as a vendor and just the total purchase as far as accounting [Quicken goes].

Now for WL, though. We have itemized lists from all our merchant and professional business source so we use their print out receipts and we use our hand made receipts for wonder lister. We us WL quick entry form, Drop in a short title, enter our pre-printed SKU number from the paper tags we use AND THIS IS WHERE WE enter the individual item number in to Unit Cost Field of the item just like you do. It is only in the WL program that we have the individual item cost break out.

But in the accounting program we have the over all costs of “all” items we purchased. The Quicken program, nor our accountant wants a line by line, detail;ed break out of individual items. They only want to know we speny $8,000 last year on “stuff” we bought to resell, have logged it and put it into inventory. He says, that is all IRS also wants.

So a $20,000 day one starting inventory on Jan. 1st + $10,000 worth of Purchases in that same year = $30,000 in our inventory. Now we sell a bunch of stuff through out the year. The CPA doesn’t care what each item was or each individual item cost. Our Sales report tells him the amount we sold for the whole year. Again only the total, not each,individual item’s selling price. So that is why I am not even going to mention a hypothetical number. At this point all he wants is an end of year count of the inventory we have left in storage and the associated total cost.

So with that, we as shown above now have 2 figures. The amount we had invested-bought” in the items in our hnads on Jan., we added $10,000 more to those items and now ait for it… we sold a bunch and now the year end inventory count shows there is $25,000 worth of inventory left. So adding the start value + the bought value = $30k – the $25K remaining inventory cost it is at = $5,000 of our Cost of Those Goods Sold cost that represent what we sold. Our CPA said he doesn’t care what those items were and any details about them individually and nether does IRS. Now if we want details for our personal analysis, then there you go. We have in WL that we paid $2.00 for one item and sold it for $10 leaving a GROSS PROFIT of $8 but that $2 as far as accounting goes is just a small part of the $5k worth we sold through out the year.

If we gave our CPA a stack of paperwork detailed like that per item and he had to delve through it, it would cost our first born child.

Just thank about J&R with all there “stock”. I have heard J&R both talk about the “Summary Sheets”, they give to there CPA. Also heard Ryanne talk about her mothly adjutments. Bet she is assigning categories to some of the entries GDB pulled in that they hadn’t previously linked to. The others she had already mapped previously and GDB keeps those memorized and will just reapply them if they buy in those categories in the future. Bet those summary sheets of J&R from GDB has a line that says, “PURCHASED” or something like that. They also have a totaled “Sales” or “INCOME” category. Maybe now broken down a little into sub-categories by “Rental Income”, “Ebay Income” and few years ago “Amazon Income”. But not too many. The breakdown is more for J&R to see their “sources” of income, but their accountant “could” deal with just a total number, but better for some division because of the “real estate” thing, decductions for mortgage interest and things like that.

But hopefully my explanation of the start at $20k + $10k spent to buy more stuff = $30 invested-your cost into your inventory over the course of that one year only – now minus your year end Dec. 31st count that represents what you have invested that is remaining at year end = and once you subtract that number represents a $5k Cost for the Goods you sold that are no longer in your possession.

Still don’t know if that makes it any clear, just said a different way. But as far as all the spread sheets, WL unit cost by individual item doesn’t see to be of much interest as far as the CPA year end tax return, IRS is concerend. They want the broad sweep total. The detailed item by item tracking is more for us the Sellers and analytical types. Which items sell for more, which items sell vs. which ones don’t, how long they sit, how fast they rotate out is all for driving and analysing how you want to run and conduct business.

Year end tax reporting.. simple You had $20 invested in stuff, you bought $10k more of stuff. You sold a bunch of that stuff and when you compare what you have left at the end of the as far as what you paid for that stuff in comparison to what you started with plus the amount more you put inleaves a number that shows from the $30k you had go into and out of your storage unit{s} through out the year shows that $5k or your cost for that stuff “sold”. ie. COGS. [manufacturing is different and so is the use of accruel accounting, but that is for outstanding invoices owed to you and at what point do you count WIP [work in progress] as “sold vs. in house inventory]. But again that’s mfg. not Ebay selling.

[Mark S]

Mike,

I googled this. It looks like we are just using different accounting methods for our COGS. This is what I found,

“The cost of goods sold is the cost of the merchandise that a retailer, distributor, or manufacturer has sold. … The second way to calculate the cost of goods sold is to use the following costs: beginning inventory + the cost of goods purchased or manufactured = cost of goods available – ending inventory.”

I use the first method, you use the second method. It appears for the “ending inventory” part for you, you are doing inventory counts, correct? I could never do that for 2400 items, let alone the 20,000 I hope to have one day. I would much rather do the first method where I know what I paid for each and every item sold that did not come back to me and get the grand total. That was the point of my query, to do just that.

Am I getting what you are saying, or am I missing something?

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

We use the same method as you and as your formula indicates. The same thing. We use the WL report to give us the COG that we bought all year as well as those recorded in the bookkeeping program.

I think I said, we do not go nto our invetory and do a physical, one by one hard count. If I did , I mis-spoke. No we use our record keeping process [the entry in WL unit cost and also the Quicken reported amounts we spent as a reference.

And as you say, if WL gets a little off or we mis-calculate an item or two in Quicken, it will surfice. I have the exact same data as you have in WL and use it the same way. At year end I can either run an adding machine tape on everything in WL but as you said, we have over 1,000 items and targeting 2,500 that is very time consuming. Just click on the WL totals and see the column Unit Cost and we go by that but also compare that with What Quicken says we have spent on items for the year. If they match great. If not, and they are close, just go in the middle. If a wide spread, then maybe delve into and try to find out why.

But no we are approaching it the same.

I won’t even go into the other method some have advocated here on SL, and it can be found but what a pain it is and our CPA saidd totally un-neccssary, but it is method. You can search here on SL but good luck to you getting into the whole thing. Jay finally got tired of it and I said for him to re-interview Mark Twes and he did, but avoided the COGS arena.

I can warn, before you get caught up in this infinite topic follow the sound SL advice. Get a CPA. If you don’t have one, you should. Then follow there advice. I also don’t mean a person who just fills out year end tax forms. But a CPA who becomes your business advisor. Sure he will do your year end taxes / forms for you, but he is the one who signs your returns. he is responsible for representing you at an audit if [god forbide] you ever get one, he is the one who will have to explain how he has been reporting your COGS over the past years, and you should follow how he wants you to track and in what form he wants you to give him the figures. He will also tell you how he wants you to document everything, how he wants you to keep track of it in case he has to get access to those documents in the event he has to face off with IRS on your behalf.

I call my CPA probably monthly if not more. I talked to mine day before yesterday. Had a home office related expense question. They stay on top of the ever changing laws and keep up with that.

It doesn’t really matter what members on SL say, it just helps other SL members to formulate questions that in turn need to be eventually asked to thier CPA.

Since we are a corporation, we have to file a corporate tax return by March 15th each then, then a state return for GA., then a personal federal return. For the Corp. and State our CPA charges $675 and then $150 for the Personal Return. so $825 yearly. But for that fee he is at at our disposal the whole year as I am sure J&R accountant is also. Bet J&R have had a ton of questions about the expenses related to the renovations of their properties and bet you they asked every question they could think of to him and followed his advice. But I don’t know about Jay sometimes, LOL… I can hear him say to his CPA… “Wellcan you prove that!! Show me the numbers” 🙂 🙂

In any case, you said something interesting to the fact of being way ahead of a lot of people and you are right. There are tons of people who still conduct business online that are nowhere near as close to operating things they way they need to be but still seem to be fine. Thos like us, using your percenatge are 99.99% OK and really well above average with running our buiness online. Rember we are not Ikea or Walmart. Man, could you imagine taht!! Uugghhh.. mc at mdcgafa in atl.

[Mark S]

Mike,

1. I believe in keeping it simple so it is very close to the actual number and doable.

2. I think my method gets me to where I need to be and I could defend it if I were to be audited.

I think my method sticks to the two points above. I was just curious how other people were doing this. I did this manually last year for about 800 sales and it was very time consuming. I just wanted to see what others are doing. My hunch is that a lot of people just “wing it”. That would not pass point 2 above.

This is my process improvement for this year. Once I get this fully in place, it should work fairly smoothly with little time spent. I think this method would easily scale to a 20,000 item inventory.

Mark

[T-Satt]

Mike and Mark: Finally back from the wedding, so I can read through all this. My take…

Mark: To your point on COGS, I have two uses for COGS, and they are calculated two different ways. For our weekly reporting (Management Reporting for Mike), we use the COGS in SixBit. Each inventory item has the cost of purchase plus sales tax. Therefore, when we see what has sold and run our reports, our COGS are already in there. However, for Tax purposes, we use the Beginning Inventory + Purchases – Ending Inventory = COGS calculation. We use our “book” value of inventory from SixBit for Beginning and Ending, and our Quicken reports for Inventory Purchases. Both quick, both correct, both useful for their individual purposes.

Mike: I love how you think, putting a Unit Cost on every item. It is something to be cognizant of. However, to split a hair, cost of cleaning an item isn’t part of COGS, but a part of Unit Cost. COGS should only be cost of the item + sales tax (99.44%). You can argue that packaging (tape, boxes, polybags, etc.) are part of COGS since they are a Direct Material being sent with the item sold. I just don’t because it is small and I don’t want to change to do it. Were I a 100% official Accounting Department, yep, that is what I would do.

Just wanted to put in my 2 cents for the 99% of folks that may read all this and think that they have to include ALL costs in COGS. ALL costs should be in your financials, especially for taxes, but COGS should only be the Direct Materials. For Management Purposes, I do think an all in Unit Cost would be beneficial for people to know. I do this in my head since we run in volume on certain items (clothes, jeans, etc.).

PS – Mark, are you the one that called in this week? Wasn’t sure if you were the same Mark… I would love to talk more about your point about buying at $2 and selling at $18.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Mark.. That is what we do. If I explained in such a way as to ome across as that going into unit cost, then no, just the cost of the item. Everything else that is on the chart of account set-up [COA] is an expense and in the expense journal.

What I wanted to stress was there are a lot of asscoiated expenses that go into the profit picture that affects the NET PROFIT [bottom line, such as.. and follow my list from there]. All the chemicals, papwer goods, monies you pay oneself, part of the electric bill for lights, and gas for heating, on and on. One can make $25,000 in a year gross, then subtract the cost of the goods bought and have $20,000 left over then apply all the fees, taxes, licenses, insurance, support supplies, cleaning supplies, mileage, office supplies shipping supplies and end up with only a $1,000 net profit if everything gets logged against the income to arrive at an “adjusted net income. Meaning what your company makes as an entity within itself after you pay yourself [owners draw].

Companies that make miliions and millions of dollars usually end up with a NET PROFIT of only in the single didigts. 7%-10% net is doing good. Same can apply to the smaller business. Most owners dont expense eneough of there costs because many don’t know how to, what to include and then take the time to compile all the data.

That was all I was trying to say… Yes the COG is actually that, the Cost Of the Good.

[T-Satt]

Mike: Totally agree. You and I both lived in the 7%-10% world… Ebay is soooo much better…

🙂

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Answer to how to know if Quicken is 100% account. First u have to remmber than the journals in an accounting program are also your check book regsiters. They have to be reconciled monthly and jive with your credit card and bank statements. But a simple example.

Quick books is tired to all your credit cards and banks accounts. Every time you click refresh, Quicken goes to your bank accounts [yes you have to give all access to Quicken to every account you have and all of the passowrds it keeps in it’s vaults]. Then when refresh is clicked it goes to all your accounts and pulls in every deposit, every charge, every check, presnt and shows it in your Quicken register. Same goes for J&R GDB [I assume]. If my credit card paper statement comes in at the ned of the month and all it shows is 2 $50 charges on it. I then click reconcile in Quicken, up pops my C/C register and I see those 2 $50 entries. I click reconcile and print out a report. Just like we all used to do by hand and pencil with our bank statements. Now everything is automatic and online. If Quicken matches my bank statement, the Quicken is accurate. If not either Quicken has a error [usualy a typo of the user] or your bank made an error. Very, very seldom have I ever seem the banks been off, but occassionally. Inalmot 40 years of using accounting software maybe had a dozen bank errors.

As far as the categories/classifications. Those are mapped by the user. garbage in garbage out, but if you reconcile your credit card and bank statements monthly you can catch the mis-calculations and correct the categories and save.

You heard me mention that Ryan has to take a short period at the beginning of each month for accounting reconcilleation. Well bet you dollars to doughnuts, this is what she is doing. Looking over the entries GDB has pulled down, adding in any empty categories for expenses, [usually where I find most of my Ooopsies] or cahnging some mis-categorized transaction and correcting them.

If you use online banking and reconcile monthly, then using GDB and Quicken is an electronic checking account / register [journal] and works pretty much the same. If you balance most of the time, then it will be accurate most of the time.

If ther eis a wide open gap or something, your CPA will tell you and either he will do it or tell you to make a General Ledger enetry, usually a correction, and you are then back on track.

My suggestion the use of GDB or Quicken is much easier than QuickBooks. And the General Ledger adjustments in there is better left to the CPA. Makig journal enetries is as easy as just correcting your check book register. deletion is like using an eraser in the old days :-).

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

The date we bought and item and where we bought it are two of the 6 custom fields we created in WL so it prints out on any reports we want to include it in.

And the tech guys at WL just like JC and the guys at SixBit will also write code for you to include a field into your database, but that you will have to pay them for. The 6 custom fields work for us to capture what extra data we want about an item just fine without paying for it.

[Mark S]

Mike,

What about the COGS in the Sales Report?

Mark

[Mark S]

This is a sample of what my year end report looks like. I can run it any time for any date range, but is meant for tax time. The First table is the details of all the items I have sold for the year. This is going to include COGS at the item level. I will also be able to sum up the cogs for the summary tables below it.

https://imgur.com/a/tMPfNyB

Mark

[T-Satt]

Those look great Mark. I should look into any custom reports in SixBit. Right now I just send to Excel and add to my current spreadsheets.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

T-Satt. Custom reports came up in a conversation I had with JC at SixBit a few weeks back [you know why I was talking with them]. But I said too bad you guys don’t have a user report generator built into SixBit where a user could design, build, create their own custom reports. He said he agreed BUT he said they do have a report generator in SixBIt…but no where as robust as Crystal Reports and he had to admit it was sort of clunky and sophomoric but it was there and a user could create a custom report.

You may think about what reports you would like to have, or screen shots of your spread sheets, shoot them over to JC and then get on the phone and see if they can walk you through it, or just do it for you. Worth a “talk” at least.

Mike at MDCGaFA

[T-Satt]

Thanks Mike. I’ll have to add that to my eBay Open list. I’ll be meeting with the SixBit guys there, probably try to duck out of one of the breakout sessions so I can talk with them when they aren’t putting on the Dog and Pony show…

[Mark S]

Mike,

That is one thing I really like about Wonder Lister, I have complete database access to all my data and I can slice and dice it with queries any way I want. And after I have created the query or procedure once, it just takes a couple seconds to run it again for any date range I want.

I am going have to hold myself back from creating more queries because it can suck a lot of time. Right now I think I have the right amount of analysis and reporting capabilities. I have concentrated on creating the reports and analysis that I thought would be most helpful – such as year end tax reports. I may add a weekly comparison of this week, compared to this week last year (Weekly YOY).

Mark

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Just made a Sale on Etsy. They don’t come often, but occasionaly. But first time I have seen this.

Sold a Steuben designer signed glass ashtray / candy / nut dish for $99.95 [our cost $2.35 BAM!] Ok, has some weight to it and the buyer wanted expedited shipping. So the total was $123.90 to the buyer. Then comes a small line on the invoice that says Etsy is collecting ststae tax for the state of Washington for me and will pay that when due. The total on that was $12.39. Dang, that is a 10% Sales Tax rate.

The only setting I have on my store, both Ebay and Etsy is to collect Sales Tax for the state of GA. SO, is Washington state one that is now wanting to collect the state sales tax. And wow! 10% at that. So a $99.95 item just turned into a $136.29 purchase for the buyer.

Silver Lining for us is that we sold a piece of glass. That in itself is something to rejoice about.

Mike at MDC Galleries

[Punk]

Hi Mike. Yes, Etsy is collecting state taxes for WA and PA. They’ve also decided to raise the 3.5% seller fee to 5% which will (as of the 16th) include shipping.

Great podcast, very informative thread y’all have going on here. Thanks!

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Thanks Punk: I thought something was different going on. I know that Etsy has a whole lot of changes going on. Seems like 2018 is the year for everybody to start doing a ton of new changes to their platform.

We have about 196 of our items Cross listed from our Ebay store as a start up test. We have made 25 sales on Etsy so seems like it is going to be a viable second platform for all our vintage stuff. Over 20 years old [pre-1998] as far as Etsy goes.

I have not read all of the Seller Updates that Etsy has recently published. Been too busy keeping up with all the Monkey Shines of Ebay, changes and glitches combined. But about ready to get probably our whole Ebay Store cross listed on Etsy. Our 3rd party listing program we use, [WonderLister] is getting ready to go live with their new Etsy interface module, so moving all our listing over should be much easier than a manual process.

Thanks for the reply..

Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art in Atlanta

[Paulo H Leocadio]

About missing photos

Since birthday (June 13th) I have accumulated so much to ask, comment or just tell I think I will never get there.

Just quickly, my store has 700 items and just about 10% got pictures erased. In all cases I’ve edited so far, it keeps only the one made as cover/main picture.

cheers

PH

[Paulo H Leocadio]

About Make a Copy from Drafts

I use quite a bit. Remember my store has 700 items only, so no comparison to most of you.

Anyway, will give 3 examples. In a nutshell, it is related to “testing” an item whether or not worth listing at all, do I list solo or as a bundle? Not to mention that I can copy the draft including all photos, description and the details (those check boxes and blank fields that describe the item).

(1) Pack of approx 70 first XBOX games: decide whether it is worth one by one, bundle of some, bundle of many. So I just create one draft, usually the item with higher price potential. On this case I decided to bundle. Even though one or other would yield $20, altogether gave me $200
(2) Pack of 10 PSP games + 10 PSP movies: similar to the above, however I listed individually. As usual, I use the UPC to grab as many details as I can, fill most if not all checkboxes (you know these items have plenty of details, and gamers are hardcore with details, like most collectors). So when I copy I chose to copy everything but the pictures and everything is ready. Just change UPC code and the fields adjust automatically because I chose everything.
(3) Toys from my kids (or anything usually in my house I have something close to a collection): there were these video games in game characters you use actually in the game, they work on any modern platform. So I created one and went out to research since I had no box, no knowledge. Between Amazon and a specialized site, I found everything. From there was like #2

I think none of these cases the create several at the same time would help at all. Also, when I make a copy, among many choices I can choose how many copies to make. For example, I made 19 for the PSP and it was just a matter of uploading pics. Same for the >30 figurines from my son.

Cheers

[Mark S]

I just ran across this site that has the title, “10 Records You Might Have Owned That Are Now Worth a Fortune” at:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/77144/10-records-you-might-have-owned-are-now-worth-fortune

I have been buying and selling records for a while and I didn’t know this information. Very interesting.

Brian and Paul – you sell a lot of records, were you guys aware of these records?

I know, this is the scavenger lottery and will probably never happen for most of us. But, with over 4,000 people on this site, there is a lot of scavenging going on. I bet at least a couple people here will come across one of these at some point.

Mark

[Rydell Relics]

RR Store Week July 1-7, 2018

Total Items in Store: 1620
Items Sold: 16
Cost of Items Sold: $48.30
Total Sales: $665.88
Highest Price Sold: 179.99 (Arabic record)
Average Price Sold: $41.62
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $78
Number of items listed this week: 34

Things got so crazy I forgot to post my numbers! Now, on to this weeks numbers.

Paul

[Marjean28]

Not sure if this is the best location for this comment, but there is a board on eBay for technical issues announcements and you can sign up to get the RSS feed on it. It’s located at: http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml

there is also an area where an ongoing blog is kept for technical issues on eBay. It’s located at: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/bd-p/technicalissues-db

Thought this may be useful information to some.

[Jay]

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml

Just clicking on a couple of the posts, it just seems to be users griping about issues. I dont see eBay employees solving anything. Feels like the rest of the eBay forums.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/bd-p/technicalissues-db

This page is blank. If it was to be useful, eBay would list all the known issues and how they’re working on them. My sense is that this is a dead page.

[Author]

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