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Join the conversation in the forum>> Our Store Week June 2-8, 2019 Total Items in Store: 8457 Items Sold: 44 Gross Sales: $1,915.19 Cost of It
[See the full post at: Scavenger Life Episode 414: $15 is the new $5] -
Awesome! Nice early Sunday Podcast! Going to try hard to save the listen for tomorrow morning though, easy enough to post the numbers now before heading out, thank you again! Everyone, be in good health and prosper.
6/2– 6/08/19 (no cross listing is done between platforms)
eBay store: totommyto
Total store items: 646
Number of items sold: 12
Total eBay sales (not counting s/h): $329
Cost of items sold: $41
Consignment payouts $12
Highest price sold: $50 – Columbia beach vice – paid no more than $10
Average price sold: $27.41
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: $134
Number of new items listed this week: 26
Sell through rate for the week: 2.0
Number International sales: 1Etsy store oldfleatoymarket
Total store items: 637
Number of items sold: 9
Total Etsy sales (not counting s/h): $230
Cost of items sold: $41
Consignment payouts: 0
Highest price sold: $65 – small Steelmaster vintage tool cabinet (paid up $21, these things sell)
Average price sold: $25.60
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: $97
Number of new items listed this week: 7
Sell through rate for the week: 1.4
# International sales: 1Normal good listing week for me, aggressive buying week, lots of big, bulky, heavy, weird, nautical and vintage hardware box lots, so I will be busy. Found a 65 pound vintage tool Cabinet for $10 deep into the market, got the picker’s high, and shoulder carried it out of the market doing my best to breath normal and look casual. I think of Jay’s NYC street book scavenging every time I do this. Took photos of the heavy bulky stuff and wrote descriptions Saturday outside in the Florida sun and humidity. Found a 65 pound vintage tool Cabinet Slept very well.
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When I have that Scavenger’s High, I can carry twice my weight for multiple city blocks.
Ryanne is smart and just loads up the granny cart.
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2019-06-02 – 2019-06-08
Total Items In Store: 3013
Items Sold: 16
Cost of Items Sold: $ 60
Total Sales: $ 606.89
Highest Price Sold: $ 70 (Boombox)
Average Price Sold: $ 37.93
# Items Listed: 15
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 275Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales were sparatic. Higher priced items still selling.
Challenge of the week: Trying to get all of the great items I bought this week listed.
Scavenge of the week: The story again this week was subdivision wide garage sales. I am finding great items at these sales. I found 3 items worth close to $200 each that I paid $20 each for. These $200 items are similar to others I have bought before, but just a little different to be worth a lot more. Well, one of them was completely out of my wheelhouse and a new kind of buy for me. It was a new bathroom marble sink in the box. I remember R&J talking about something similar, so I looked it up and it was worth a lot. Found out later it is close to $200.
Mark S
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It cracks me up when you guys talk about not wanting to sit on high inventory costs. I’m like, you’re REAL ESTATE INVESTORS! 😉
Whew, this was maybe my craziest week ever on ebay.
Sales: CAD$4152, 10 items, COGS: $517 –> Item profit: $3051
Expenditures: $2206 –> Cashflow: $1362
Hours: 11, $124/hr
Listed: $5630, 29 itemsNotable sales: -Spectrophotometer $950, paid $20 or so. High risk of return on this one, however.
-3 medical transfer boards, bought for $30 each, sold for a total of $1250. I shipped this on the buyer’s DHL account to Saudi Arabia.
-Bought 15 microscopes for $125 each (total $1875) on Friday. I was fairly uncertain about this buy, but I have sold 3 over the weekend for a total of $1290, they seem to be really hot. Once again, more often than not, it pays to go all in. I am keeping one for myself, and waiting for payment on one more, so I have 10 left to sell.
-I sold one of my Herman Miller chairs with the desks for $100 to a collector. A little disappointed as he kinda kicked the tires a little and wasted 2 hours of my time (local sale), I thought he was going to buy 4. He said he may still buy more, not holding my breath. Still! It pays off the COGS for all 10 of those white ones I bought.Scavenging: apart from those things aforementioned I bought and sold in the same week, got a lab shaker, some projector bulbs, and picked up & listed a big auction lot including an envelope printer (hoping for a couple grand outta that), and 16 water valves (hoping for a few hundred each).
Trying to keep grounded, but man, if only things could always be like this.
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yeah that’s a good point. but real estate is much different than buying a high dollar, long tail item that might never sell. real estate is a much more solid investment historically than some random high dollar item (art, rugs, furniture) we find, so less risky. i mean, yeah real estate is the highest dollar item we could buy, but we know we’ll be able to rent or, worst case, sell later.
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Well, there’s two aspects: time horizon and risk. I was mainly talking about time horizon – you don’t see a dollar back from expensive building renos for years, whereas ebay *usually* pays off within a year or two.
On risk, which is what you spoke to – I agree that any individual item you spend, let’s say, $500 on, is more likely to be a dud than the whole regional housing/rental/vacation market is to tank. However, if you buy multiple such items and stand to gain quite a bit from each according to your research, you should do OK in aggregate. It’s analogous to “having a diversified portfolio”. (Obviously there’s no replacement for being shrewd about individual buys.)
I think it’s super cool what you guys are doing with your rentals; however, in your place I would be somewhat worried about correlated risk. If housing/tourism craters in your area you’ve got a lot of eggs in that basket. That’s part of why I got rid of one of our rental houses, it seemed to me we were uncomfortably “all in” on the local housing market.
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I’m glad Ryanne isn’t worried!
Good news is that margins on our vacation rentals are very high. Even if we made half as much, we’d easily cover our costs + profit. We’d just have to slow down on any new project.
Recession and economic crashes are never easy. The important thing is keeping our costs down at all times.
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That’s awesome! You have mortgages on those properties, no? Do you make a *cash* profit even after mortgage principal & interest & tax? (If you don’t mind my asking).
For my long-term rental, it’s very easy to make an “equity profit” but very hard to make an after tax cash profit unless there’s no mortgage on the property. So mine runs cash negative at -$240/mo after tax.
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For the record, I’m happy to sit on high dollar inventory 🙂
Speaking of high dollar inventory, this is one of those weeks where all your bets paid off. Do you scavenge at one location for all your inventory? Since its all industrial, I assume it comes from one place.
If true, does that ever worry you?
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Hey Jay – the big ticket items this week are mostly from one place, which probably makes up 40% of my scavenging right now. I do worry about what you mentioned – it’ll be a shame if that well ever dries up. Right now I’m just making hay while the sun shines.
However I bid in multiple auctions that make up the difference. I could ramp up my spending at those and get quite a bit more. Partly I avoid them to avoid travelling. They are sporadic but there are at least 5 auctions I see every year that could supply me with a huge quantity of good inventory if I were willing to fork over a bit more.
In general I would say even without my favourite source I can find lots of good stuff to buy. It’s cashflow that limits me more than it’s opportunities.
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Week June 2 – 8, 2019
Items in store: 4059 Listings for 6099 Items
Items Sold: 95 Transactions for 102 Items
Gross Sales: $4813
Highest Price Sold: $180, MIU MIU Coat
Lowest Price Sold: $2.74(shoe laces)
Average Price Sold: $47.19
Cost of Goods Sold $345, Plus consignment
Number of new items listed this week: 204 items
$$ spent on new inventory this week $0
Repeat Customers: 13Amazon
Items Sold 0
Gross Sales $0
Cost of Good Sold $0 -
Items in Store 1179
Items Sold 16
Total Sales $411.00
COGS $50.00
Total Profit $361.00
Average profit $22.56
Average sales price $25.69
New Listings 71SUMMER GOAL:
Week Goal Actual Difference
6/10/2019 $875.00 $411.00 -$464.00Not a great start to my summer goal. I did get alot of items listed though so that should help going forward. This week I have a stack of VHS and combo dvd/vhs players I will get listed. Those typically don’t take long to sell and should boost my numbers.
I knew this was going to be a tough goal that I may not meet, but I’m gonna push myself hard to make up ground. If I hit a couple home runs this month I’m right back in it.
Scavenging was fun again saturday at the yard sales. The highlight was a 1974 Schwinn Voyageur Road Bike. It’s in excellent condition. I brought it to work today so our resident bike expert could give it a once over, and possibly recommend me a local buyer in his biking circle so I don’t have to list it.
Have a great week everyone!
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According to Outright/Godaddy, I have had 30 sales between $500-$945 (only one was sent to me on consignment) since 2011 when I started using the bookkeeping service…I’m sure I had none before that. So far, I’ve never had a single item sale over $1000 on ebay….I did sell all those ties for $1569 in one transaction if that counts.
I did however once find a blazer with solid 14K gold buttons for $6, I sold the buttons to the local jeweler for about $1100, replaced the buttons and flipped the jacket for $200.
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You have a great store model because it seems many of your items are over $100. You also seem to spend very little on inventory. You’ve really found a magical combo.
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Thanks. I think I’m averaging about $5 cost/item right now….it was a little lower, until I bought 2800 NWT ties in November which brought the cost up a bit.
Don’t forget I pay out between $2500-$3000 a month to consignors lately as well, but I usually don’t look at it that way. I set up my consignment operation so that I take my % off the top, the client pays the fees out of their portion and of course the buyer pays the shipping. This way I can look at it as profit per consigned item. Some consignors send better stuff, so their ASP is a little better. My profit/item for my worst consignor is about $18, while it is about $26 for my best. I typically average about $22 profit per consigned item across all 7 consignors.
Example: I received 298 lbs of consignment from my top consignor last week, roughly 220 pieces, I can easily estimate that the lot should net me in the ballpark of $5700 profit when it’s all said and done…not counting tax of course.
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June 2 – 8
Total Items in Store: 2304
Items Sold: 18
Total Sales : $892
* ~EQUAL yearly average of $887
Highest Price: $182 (Subzero Lower Freezer Basket)
Average Price: $50
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $42
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $3
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 68Great podcast this week! I was just thinking the same thing about costs of stuff these days. I went to McDonalds the other day and bought a combo meal. In the back of my mind I had the price of $5 or $6 because that’s what meals always used to cost at McDs. It didn’t dawn on me until I was driving away that I spent ten bucks! I checked the receipt and sure enough it was $10 for my burger, fries and drink. Geesh!
I had a nice week of sales. Things have been on the up-and-up lately. There were a few $100+ items that I was really glad to get out of my inventory. Another refrigerator part sold. I just checked and so far I’ve grossed a little over $1600 from parting out that old Sub Zero brand fridge that came with the house. If I see any more of those being sold for cheap because they’re not working, it might be worth it to do it all again.
I really hunkered down and listed over the past week. And it felt so good to get back in the swing of things. The weeks prior, I have been working on various projects around the house which is nice and needed done but my store just felt stale. This week I’m going to try to learn how to install a utility sink. I scavenged a really nice 3-bay stainless steel sink for cheap and it’d be perfect for my basement. I’m hoping that I can do it all myself and save myself a plumber bill.
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Been a few weeks since I posted because of the holiday weekend, a wedding weekend, etc… but I have been listening! Below are my numbers for the past 3 weeks.
Weeks May 19 – June 8, 2019 (3 weeks)
Total Items in Store: 1008
Items Sold: 45 (5 Amazon)
Cost of Items Sold: $495.99 (24.2% of sales)
Highest Price Sold: $300 (1991 Nirvana Nevermind LP)
Average Price Sold: $45.59
Returns: 4 (plus 2 cancellations)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $730
Number of items listed this week: 42
Promoted listings test: 23 sales, $1,258.61 (61.4% of total sales), $54.69 fees (4.3% of sales)Pretty decent 3 weeks, especially after the slow week heading into Memorial Day – although I did see an uptick in returns & non-paying bidders; went months without one but had 6 total over this 3 weeks span.
My high dollar sale was that Nirvana album, which I really didn’t want to let go but priced high where I would let it go. Similar to you statement on the podcast, I too usually sell a $100+ item every week to every other week – and these three weeks produced not only the Nevermind sales, but also this Grateful Dead bootleg for $129.99, 1960 Miles Davis Sketches of Spain for $129.99, and another early Barbie for $100 from that big lot I bought (think I have 2 left).
While not a high dollar item, about 3 years ago I got a case of 50 of these WWII small biz window posters for like $20. After research, found that the drawing was done by a Corporal D. Parla in 1942. Poster showcases Uncle Sam with a zeppelin, a plane, a ship, and a tank in the background, with also factory smokestacks cranking hard. Uncle Sam is rolling up his sleeves to get down to business. The bottom of the poster has a blank spot so that local businesses could show their support or post messages to the troops. They’ve been a good pipeline maybe selling 1 or 2 a month, but recently I’ve been selling multiples each week – not sure if it’s the actual cause, but my theory has been it’s because of the upcoming elections and the growing divide between left & right leaning ideologies.
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I had an awesome record collection from the mid-1980s-1995. When I graduated from college I gave them all away to a friend.
I know I had that Nirvana record.
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Jay,
Maybe see if you can find your friend and see if he stills has the records. A shot in the dark, but who knows. At least you can get in touch with an old friend st the very least,
Mark
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Jay,
I get it that you gave them away, but seriously, who listens to records anymore these days? Well, people here do and some buyers on eBay do, but the average person hasn’t listened to them in a very long time if they haven’t already tossed them. That is most likely – they tossed them.
Mark
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@Mark_S – the answer is probably more than you think, so much more that record companies are actually pressing records again (brand new releases and reissues of old stuff). They wouldn’t be doing that if there was no money in it.
Of course just like any other collectible, condition, titles, artists still matter – like I’ve said on here before, you’ve gotta dig through thousands of polka, show tunes, classical music before finding something worthwhile.
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lol. everyone listens to records these days. there are cheap garbage usb record players in every thrift store i go in. new records are being sold in urban outfitters, on amazon. reissues are getting released for record store days. even whole foods has been selling new records over the past few years. the resurgence has been going on for a few years now.
there’s such a problem with all these reissues that a lot of small record labels have gone out of business because they can’t get releases made. there aren’t enough record pressing operations to take on all the work. record store days get first dibs on business from the pressing plants over smaller music labels.
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Yeah, 90s stuff is so tough to find because everyone had converted to CDs by then. By comparison, Dark Side of the Moon probably had a good 50 million records pressed whereas Nevermind or Pearl Jam Ten or Garth Brooks No Fences were all #1 albums that had only 50,000 copies pressed.
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yep, i found a cache of 90s british import 12” singles 3 years ago and that was it. it was so memorable that i still remember it, but not the times i find all the normal folk/rock 60s/70s records that are fairly common if you’re out there enough buying records. there are some cool ones that come out of those finds, but it’s really not the same like finding certain 90s ones out in the wild for like $2 apiece that are genuinely good and desirable.
the closest to that find were 2 boxes of late 2000s/early 2010s rap records i found at a thrift store 2 years ago. so rare.
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Records/Cassettes/CDs seem to be Gen X’s version of Baseball Cards to Baby Boomers.
I remember taking my music collection to a pawn shop – probably 500 CDs, 250 or so cassettes, and about 100 albums and singles. Sold it all for 50 cents an item, with the odd item going for a few dollars. It was about the same price as a 2nd Generation iPod when they were new, as that is what I spent the money I got for my collection on.
I still have all the music, and it fits in my pocket now – just miss looking through the covers and listening to deep cuts.
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My high dollar sale was that Nirvana album, which I really didn’t want to let go but priced high where I would let it go.
That’s the name of the game in my life now. I’ve lost all sentimentality for material things.
A couple months ago I sold my two prize arcade games – Paperboy (very rare) and Tron (demand far out paces supply, so somewhat rare). I always said I would never sell them, but I put “i can buy another one later” prices on them and waited. Sold both for premium dollars even in unrestored condition.Everything is for sale except my family for the right price.
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I became a fan of sending offers this weekend in eBay. I heard Ryanne talking about it and wanted to give it a try. First time I did about 25 offers on items about $50 and up. Nothing. Then I Sent about 30 offers on items $36.99 and up. Bam! Got a sale on 1 within a few minutes. Then 2 more sold by the next morning.
This is great because this is a way to boost sales. Plus, it is good physiologically, because it makes you feel like you can directly do something to help sales.
Mark
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Good point Mark. And if we can think we are doing something pro-actively to help boost sales and don’t have to pay Ebay “extra” for it, that makes me feel even “‘mo better”. 🙂
Our Sales are way down, but one reason could be the transition from WonderLister over to SixBit and it has taken awhile and we didn’t do much listing at all for 6 to 8 weeks. We were doing a lot of trial and error things within SixBit getting the hang of it, but we are on solid footing now.
But our monthly Sales avg. has dropped from $2,000 to $2,200 monthly down to $1,300 to $1,500. Overall about a $500 to $700 dollar decrease give or take.
So, now that I have some time on my hands, going to give the “Make an Offer” to as many as I can and see if Sales start to “pop Back” a little bit.
Also using SixBit to identify all the old listings that have gone very stale and ending those listings a few at a time and modernizing them to our newly created template, wrapper and allocation plan within SixBit and relisting them as new listings. That may help some. But I will try the offer’s first to see if any will sell so I won’t have to bother updating and modernizing those listings. For every one that sells, that is one less I will have to revise.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
We’ll see.
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Mike,
This is the “problem” I always seem to have. If I stop to make things better and fix things that are broken or not quite right, then I take for foot off of listing and sales go down. I don’t mean small things you always do, just more major like you mentioned – changing over to Sixbit. So, I don’t get major things done very often.
If you or Troy could do a video or hangout on Sixbit, that would be great!
Mark
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Yeah.. I know Troy has mentioned it several times. He is ahead of me with the “hands on time” he has spent with SixBit. I dabbled with SixBit on and off over several years while I was still using WonderLister. Just didn’t want to loose the time it was going to take to make the transition. But I finally bit the bullitt, knowing full well it was going to take us a while to get our feet on solid footing, so it took six weeks.
Also during this time Susan got diagnosed with Endometrial Cancer of the Uterus. So, we have had some doctors visits and testing along with the time spent on the SixBit transition.
Her surgery is scheduled for this Thursday at 5:45 AM. She will be out by about 10am they say and will go home the same day. Then 6 weeks of recovery of which the first two weeks will be not doing much of anything except getting up and walking around and downing as much water as she can.
Over the next few days we have to sterilize the bedroom and bathroom completely. Everything in the rooms sterilized, linenes, furniture and then she has to body prep for the last day and a half.
I am going to have to do the cooking and shopping for the first few weeks, so good luck with that. LOL 🙂 Plus she will only be able to eat soft stuff.
Anyway.. a video would not be in the cards for the near future and troy is getting ready for his long hike and has been visiting family and friends out west. So maybe in the fall.
Also with SB now I am going back and re-doing so much and still trying to go forward with new listings, I get spread fairly thin. One reason I haven’t had the time to post much on SL. Plus Jay is not a big fan of my “Wall’s of Text”, Ha-Ha 🙂
Also two of the houses we are building are about finished and hoping for a CO this week and closing in about two weeks on both of them. Then next my partner and I have to decide what we want to do with the other two lots we have. These will be both 2 story, walk out basements, so that will be a bunch of planning if we decide to move on them quickly.
Well that’s enough for this rambling for now..
Mike at MDCGFA in Atlanta
But I will keep plugging away.
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@Mike: All our prayers that Susan has a quick recovery!!!
Yeah, I’m really behind on the live session. The problem that I had before was that my Laptop never was upgraded to Windows 10. Then when I got an encoder for the desktop and did some tests, the screen resolution was really bad.
I will see if I can get some time here in Montana to upgrade my laptop to Windows 10. If so, then I can try to get another crack at the live session software.
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Ryann:
If you jump back to the shipping forum and catch the last posts I did toward the bottom, I address the iisue of size agagin in cubic inch terms. You and Jay keep mentioning 12x12x12. Well that is just USPS way of saying, 1,728 cubic inches. You can use any box, any splice together process, make your own or buy a brown box and ship it USPS Priority as long as it is under 150 lbs. and doesn’t multiply out to over 1,728 cubic inches and is under 108″ long.Now I know your painting will be bigger than this, but 50″ long is not a problem if it would fit in a box 50″ x 8″ x 4″ [I know it won’t]. This equals 1,600 cubic inches.
I invite you to go to http://www.flippertools.com [developed by one of the Scavengerlife members] and scroll down to the shipping area. He has two shipping tools that are great. Just put in any 3 dimensions and the weight and Bingo, it will tell you how to ship it and how much it will cost. You can even change it to show retail over the counter costs or to show your Top Rated Seller rates with your discount applied.
It is just the easiest way to determine how to ship we have found. It also will compare USPS and FedEX so you can select which way you want to ship.
As I mentioned in the Shipping Post at the end, I have shipped several 96″ (8 ft.) long x 4″ x 4″ engineering tripods before and it only ran $17 to $19 dollars.
When u use the Flipper tool “Fitshipper” put in this zip code for guestimates on costs scenarios: 67547. That is the zip for Kinsley, KS. Wkipedia says that is the center of the US and good for estimating costs on a package.
One of the Flippertools also has an estimator that compares several zip codes with varying distances from your zip.
USPS Parcel will handle packages the same way, by cubic inches, BUT allow up to 175 LBS [I think] and up to 130: in length.
So I would drop the 12 x 12 x 12 part of the conversation and just say as long as the L x W x D is under 1,728 cubic inches you are good to go, and NO you don’t have to use a USPS box to ship Priority. Any brown box will do as long as you buy and pay for the Priority postage.
There are a few other details but they are minor.
Simply put LxWXD = 1,728 or less and you are good to go with any box you have in the whole universe!! LOL 🙂
mike at MDCGFA
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I TOTALLY feel the same way about feeling like an adult, Ryanne! I’m 37 (I think…I don’t pay attention anymore) and I’m just now starting to be mentally aware of being an adult in work situations. Is that a product of our latch key upbringing in the 80’s/90’s I wonder, or is this just the way things are for everyone?
I’m trying to raise my children to be aware that they don’t have to wait until they are “adults” to follow their dreams. They can absolutely do it now. Oh to be a child with the vast amount of connectivity and information that is available today…
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Week of Jun 2 – 8
* Total Items in Store: 1380, eBay, 3 Etsy
* Items Sold: 12 eBay
* Cost of Items Sold: $8.85 + $4 Commission
* Total Sales: $200.43
* Highest Price Sold: $59 Vintage brass andirons
* Average Price Sold: $16.70
* Returns: 0 (1 non-paying buyer)
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $31.63
* Number of items listed this week: 20Slow slow. I would have had another $100 sale except for that NPB.
I’ve been not buying much lately. I did go to an auction on Friday, but couldn’t stay for long. I bought a set of silver plate for $20, much more than what I usually pay. I was bidding against one of the owners. When I got home, I looked up the brand – Wellner. It’s a German brand, and the box had close to service for 12. I found a listing for service for 8 that sold for $500! So, not a bad buy after all.
One other thing for this week: I received an eBay email giving me a 25% off selling fees until June 10. So, I created a 25% off sale for items that have been in my inventory for a long time, and I’ve sold about four so far! All small potatoes, but I’m happy to get them out of my basement.
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Week of Jun 2 – 8
* Total Items in Store: about 100
* Items Sold: 5
* Cost of Items Sold: $39.25
* Total Sales: $440.00
* Highest Price Sold: $250 serigraph
* Average Price Sold: $88
* Returns: 0
* Number of items listed this week: +/- 10I generally have only about 100 items in my shop, at least recently, and I feel like I get a decent number of “send offers to buyers.” So far, it’s only worked a few times, and always on items around $30. I do seem to get a different array of items on desktop vs. mobile. I’ve noticed that the number of watchers is not always the same as the number of people eBay sends an offer to… I’ll have 5 watchers, say, and the eBay prompt will be “send an offer to 1 buyer.” So that could be why the same item comes up multiple times.
The school year is winding down and I’m looking forward to loading up my store over the summer. This school year my responsibilities were increased (although my wages weren’t) and it really cut into my eBay (sourcing/listing) time. For next year, they’re creating a different position for me, which has higher wages (I don’t know yet how much higher) but “will be more work.” I haven’t seen the job description yet so I don’t know exactly what’s involved. Anyway, my plan is to really fill up the store this summer (I’ll still be small, but maybe 250 to 400 items) in anticipation of not being able to source/list much next school year, either. I do have lots of unlisted inventory so I can hit the ground running when school ends Friday.
Oh, yes — except that I’m in grad school and will have all the kids at home! Ha!
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Hello, Just popping in to let you know that I just listened to the Podcast and liked how you were able to make offers from your Iphone. So, I went through all those items that had watchers and made offers and what do you know, I sold something right away. I am always learning new things from you both and am thankful for all that you do!!!
Side note … I can make offers from my Ipad when I am in eBay’s app but do not see this same option when I am looking at my listings on my home computer that is not an apple product. So eBay app or Apple product not sure which is the deciding factor that allows me to make so many offers.-
@Theresa – when you’re on a computer, the feature to send offers is a little different. Go to your active listings page and look for the “Send Offers” quick filter. Click that button to select the listings that are eligible to send offers for. You can send one offer at a time on the list that you’re shown. You’ll probably get a completely different list to anything you saw on your phone.
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Thank you Simon …. yes that did the trick. Having fun and hopefully selling some of my “stuff”.
Theresa-
Sent out about 30 offers yesterday and had 3 sales – not groundbreaking, but those are 3 old items that are now out of storage!
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How is everyone wording the messages in the text box. Ebay allows 250 characters for the seller to say something to the “potential Buyer”.
We were curious to just what everyone here is saying in that message box area when they send out the offers.
Also interested in what the average amounts everyone is using in percentages. The offer amount is in dollars, so is everyone just taking a random percentage off of the listed price and entering that amount in the “Offer Amount” box?
I did one last night for an item that is listed at $398 [I think], calculated a 25% discount and sent the offer out at $298. But didn’t say much in the message box except we are offering a special discount to our watchers or something like that.
Any other thoughts of something enticing to say in that 250 character box or are you guys just shooting out a number without commenting.
Just curious..
Thanks,
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art -
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I’ve been using my own wording as I felt it was important to make this offer seem personal to distinguish it from the usual eBay junk messaging. I avoid mentioning the specific item in the text so that I can just re-use this same text over and over. I have no way of knowing if customizing this text improves the conversion rate of my offers.
Hi There,
I saw that you were watching this item so I wanted to send you this offer in case you were waiting for a lower price.
Thanks very much.
Simon -
Depending on the age of the item, the relative interest in the item (number of watchers, views, previous offers, etc) dictates my discounts. If it has a lot of watchers & activity and I’ve had it for only a few months, I might only discount 10%-15%. But if the item has been sitting around for 2 years with little to no activity, I may discount as much as 50% just to move it out. I’ve had success with both.
@Simon – agree with you on the personal message, even though I didn’t actually do it in the past. Moving forward I will include some short semi-personalized message.
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I didn’t do my Monday morning commute this morning so I haven’t listened to the show yet but here are my numbers for last week:
Total Items in Store: 3047
Items Sold: 40
Total Sales: $1042
Cost of Items Sold: $137
Average Price Sold: $26.06
Average Cost of Item: $3.43
Highest Price Item Sold: $119.95 Apple AirPort Express 802.11n
Number of items listed this week: 53
YTD Sales: $21935
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +14%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 379
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 225
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 89
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.31%
Hats sold this week: 26 (65% of sales) worth $454.03 (43% of sales $)Nothing new here. Sales continue to be strong and I had a good day of sourcing at Saturday’s yard sales so I should be posting some more good items this week.
I might have made one bad buy on the weekend. There was an estate sale for a Levis executive. On of the things I bought from there was a dozen Levis branded new-in-box vintage transistor radios. For the life of me, I can’t get regular AA batteries to fit in them. Either batteries are slightly longer now or these weren’t made very well. It feels like a dumb problem to have.
I hope everyone has a fun and profitable week.
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June 3-9
Total Items in Store: 425
Items Sold: 6
Gross Sales: $440.00
Cost of Items Sold: $8.40
Highest Price Sold: $150.00 (Vintage Velour Track Suit Nike- Hip Hop style)
Avg Price Sold: $53.00
Money Spent on Inventory: $8.36
Number of Items Listed This Week: 48It has been a couple of months since I posted my numbers. I was down for a couple of weeks with a virus, my daughter and her family (husband and two kids) moved in with us while they sell their house. That was a big adjustment, I had to move a bunch of stuff to make room for them and figure out where to put some of their stuff. They sold or gave away all of their big items such as furniture and home decor. After a couple of weeks, we have adjusted to living with each other and I am enjoying the heck out of my grandkids. Their house did get a contract in about a week, and should be closing at the end of June. They are going to live the RV life after the sale of the house is complete. That is a whole other thing!
I work at an elementary school and the teachers are always putting items they no longer want in our sign out room. The last week of school there was a ton of stuff and I did snag a set of 25 Value Tale books and sold them for a quick flip of $80.00. It definitely helped my numbers this week.
It’s nice to get back to the listing groove and build up my store listings. Hope you all have a great week!
~Lisa
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just finished listening to the podcast. happy birthday ryanne!
i’m actually sort of relieved to hear that mcdonald’s and other places have meals $10+ around the country. i seriously thought it was just in the super expensive city i live in. since i live here without a car, i depend on places like grubhub and uber eats to order food on days no one feels like cooking. meals at mcdonald’s are now $10-$13+ apiece on uber eats! i thought it was just a higher fee for it being on that site, but it sounds like it’s everywhere. ugh.
i stopped eating meat 2 years ago and really only started eating it regularly again earlier this year. 2 years ago, burgers were still cheap. prices have really gone up a lot over the past 2 years! even popeye’s is $10+ for a meal. so lame.
good points on the 2 main topics of conversation on feeling more adultish & anxiety. nothing really to add. to be honest, i still don’t understand people that have difficulty selling on ebay. that is seriously the least of all of this. it’s more integrating it into other aspects of your life and being able to sustain yourself on it as you focus on other tasks. if you can’t get the very basic flow of selling items steadily on ebay, i don’t know what to say. while ebay is subsistence, it is not sustenance.
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items sold: 37
sales: $931.66 (i don’t include shipping revenue)
average selling price: $25.18
cost of goods: $140.97
returns: 0
purchases: $170.25
store listings: 1009
inventory $ risk: $3,844 (what i paid for all existing inventory)
listed this week: 43
ebay hours: 19what’s on my mind: removing best offer. I have been averaging about 1k/wk for past 40ish weeks. 10 wks ago I turned on best offer for the first time. My ASP is $25.16 in those 10 wks, prior to that it was $30.25, so down 20%. I am not making up the $$ in volume.
Looking through sales reports from 2018 & 2019 & not enthused. There were 30 weeks in 2018, for example where, I sold >1k, with <500 listings. Doubling my listings to 1,000 for 2019, has raised my wkly sales about $125 on avg.
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Maybe this is old news, but this is the first confirmation I have seen that Goodwill is now selling their own merchandise online. Of course, they are selling the good stuff.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/goodbye-to-good-thrifting-goodwill-is-going-the-luxury-resale-route/ar-AACMiii?ocid=spartandhp -
June 2 – 8
Total Items in Store: 1352
Items Sold: 12
Total Sales : $315
Highest Price: $48 (Lead Soldier Mold Castings)
Average Price: $26
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $28
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $12
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 30Hello all,
Really late on posting my numbers. Unfortunately I ended up catching a cold last Friday evening. I was out of commission all weekend. I managed to get my batch of cassettes I bought awhile ago sorted and listed/prepped before I got sick. It was neat going through them.
We went to some crappy yard sales last Friday. And I ended up not going to an auction Saturday morning because I felt like death. Didn’t miss much since it was a bust too.
This cold still has me in a funk but I’m trying to play catch-up with everything, lol. I hope everyone has a great weekend! -
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Hi all:
Susan came out of surgery just fine Thursday. Doctor said it went smooth with no complications or any unexpected hurdles or results. Everything sent off to pathology labs and she will get the results at her next appointment June 27th.The Dr. said he was still in the 97 percent range of expecting that the surgery got everything in one fell swoop and that no chemo or radiation would be expected, but that still leaves a 3% window and we will see what the lab results are on that. If we get a bad report back then further treatment would be decided at that time.
Yesterday she was sitting up and fairly attentive. Today most of the internal IV pain killer meds have left the system and she is pretty sore and painful to move, but she has some pain meds. Thay gave her 5 Oxycodine to take every for hours [20 hours worth], she looked up at the doctor and said “Are you kidding me!”. We all burst into laughter. Dr. are too scared these days.
So she went home 3 hours after the surgery,[complete hysterectomy, fallopian tubes, ovaries and some local lymph nodes]. They said to get home, then get up and start walking and moving and call if any problems.
Guess this day and time it is, “Slam, bam, thank you ma’am and here’s your bill, how are you going to pay for this, now go home?” culture LOL 🙂
They say 6 weeks recovery, but I think she will be back buying and picking with me by first of the month and back doing the store photography. Hope so.
Keep on truckin guys..
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
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Total Items in Store: 248
Items Sold: 4
Total Sales : $87
Highest Price: $34 (Set of new plates)
Average Price: $21
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $31
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 0Well it seems like about 5 weeks of no listing pretty much killed sales. All of these sales came on one day – Sunday. I ran a sale over the weekend. Focused on non-Ebay at the moment.
R&J, I’m reminded lately of how expensive renovations can be. Like you, I don’t like to skimp on quality and labor is just so expensive here. Are you over the pain at this point since you are so experienced?
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We’ll never get over the pain points on renovating. But since we are working on income generating properties, it’s all about doing the numbers so we know the pay off. Usually its about 5 years to pay off the building and renovations once we get it in service.
We also remind ourselves if we cheap out now, we’ll just spend more money, time, and stress redoing and fixing problems later. One and done.
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I’m going to start using the send offer feature quite a bit more. I had only dabbled with it a little until listening to this last episode. I heard that part while I was on the way to an oil change, so that was a great way to kill some time in the waiting room. I had one employee send offers on our two smaller accounts and that has led to almost $1400 in sales for about 20 items. It’s a great feature, thanks for making me take another look at it!
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Week of 06/02-06/08
Total Items in Store: 3,250 (Up 48% YOY)
Number of Items Listed: 34
Number of Items Sold: 72 (Up 6% YOY)
(Includes 2 Etsy, 2 Poshmark, 1 Bonanza, 0 TrueGether)
Weekly STR: 9% (Down 4% YOY)Total Product Sales: $1,691 (Down 2% YOY)
Sales Volume Variance to Prior Year: Up $102
Sales Price Variance to Prior Year: Down $138
Cost of Items Sold: $316
Cost of Labor: $80
Highest Item Sold: $90 – Vintage Woolrich Jacket
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Troy wins the week and Veronica leads for the year 13-11.Clothing
# Listed: 1,925
# Sold: 47
STR: 10%
ASP: $22.32Shoes
# Listed: 730
# Sold: 18
STR: 11%
ASP: $28.99Hard Goods
# Listed: 595
# Sold: 7
STR: 5%
ASP: $17.16EBay
# Listed: 3,250
# Sold: 68
STR: 9%
ASP: $22.17Etsy
# Listed: 230
# Sold: 2
STR: 4%
ASP: $54.86Poshmark
# Listed: 786
# Sold: 2
STR: 1%
ASP: $37Finally catching up on the business, and I post this from Montana. Unfortunately, my father passed away last Saturday. We were up here with him in the hospital with him starting Thursday morning after driving through the night to get here. It was good that my boys and Veronica were able to be there with him one last time.
I am staying here on the ranch in Montana through the end of the month to help my mom with work around here. My uncle (my mom’s younger brother) is here as well, having driven from Arizona. Starting in July, we will be working with each other on who will be up here to help with ranch work for the remainder of the year.
Right now, Veronica is running the business down in Colorado with me doing some admin work from here. I think the lack of listing and the extended handling was hurting our sales, as we dipped below last years numbers recently, but we seem to have started to stabilize a bit.
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So sorry to hear about your Dad’s passing. It’s good that you were with him and are able to be there with your Mom.
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@Terri: Thanks. We stayed really busy all week, but took it easy today. Then the reality that it was Father’s Day hit and it was a lot tougher.
But they cut the North Field today so we are going to be busy next week! Moving forward like he taught me!
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Hey Troy. My heart goes out to you and your family. That’s gotta be tough. I haven’t lost anyone so close to me yet, so I can’t know how it feels. But we’re here for ya and I know a lot of us will have you in our thoughts.
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Thanks Doubly, much appreciated. The one good thing is that on a place like this, there are always things that need to get done to make you move forward. The downtime yesterday was both a good break and a bit tough with time to think, but that is needed as well.
Today it is time to keep working!
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That’s great you could be there when you’re father died. Many people don’t get that chance. I bet your Mom appreciates you being there.
It’s great to see your store keep cranking even as you attend to life matters. I know our sales will drop some but will be relatively steady for good lengths of time. You’ve earned the time from all the listing you’ve done up front. Let us know if you need anything.
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Thanks Jay, I appreciate it. Just talked to Veronica and she is doing well and handling it solo just fine. I married well above my station. We have a long history of strong and amazing women in our family, and she is carrying on that tradition.
My mom is doing well, probably going back to work on Wednesday. We should have the ranch stuff handled by then where I can run stuff by myself here while she is at work. We are basically there now, but there are just some other items she wants to get behind here before she goes back to the office.
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Susan says thanks for all the best wishes. She said she will try to be back in the office and working on listings in a week or so depending on the pain levels. But she seems to be doing very well and is getting up and moving around a little more each day.
@Troy.. So sorry to hear of the loss of your dad. As we aged we lost both Susan’s and my parents along the journey and it is not easy.I figured you were very involved when we were not hearing as much from you. God Bless you, your family and am sure your mom appreciates you and your brother giving the help to running the Ranch.
Take care and we all will catch back up after you are back home and back into business stuff.
Take Care..
Mike in Atlanta -
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