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Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee Join the conversation in the forum>> Our Store Week April 25-May 1, 2021 Total Items in Store: 7532
[See the full post at: Scavenger Life Episode 512: Want To Hear A Sad to Happy Story?] -
Congrats on the grand opening of the coffee shop. If I ever make it to the East coast I hope to stop by for a hot chocolate or tea.
This past week, sales have been very slow for me also. On the 27th, 28th, and 29th I didn’t have a single sale, so on the 30th, I went through my listings older than 3 years that had calculated shipping and used the eBay make offer page to do a 50% off sale. So far I have had 14 sales from that but still no other sales. I hope my eBay regular sales pick up soon.
Numbers for the whole month of April 2021
Total listings: 1250
Items sold: 68
Sales: $1,290.60
Highest price sold: $100 WWII Bayonet
Average price sold: $18.98
Cost of items sold: $125.68 / Average cost: 1.85 each
Spent on new inventory: $467.50
Number of items listed: 83From eBay Performance Page:
Gross Sales: $1,751.08
Net Sales: $1,044.48I only had one customer issue which was my fault. A person purchased an Oxford Bible and I sent them a hymen book by mistake. When they started a return, I emailed them and told them to keep it and that I would ship them the correct Bible – so far seems to of gone okay.
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It took me a moment to realize you meant to say “hymn” book. I hope you didn’t send them the other thing, lol.
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I sell mostly collectables and vintage, very few new items unless I come across them at an estate sale. Books are my favorite because they are easy to list and have a high profit if you find the right ones. Paper items, old tools, old rusty hardware, maps, basically what ever I am able to salvage from estate and yard sales. By the way, eBay announced that they are expanding the standard envelope shipping option to include postcards, stamps, paper money and coins: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/We-re-expanding-the-eBay-standard-envelope-shipping-service-to/ba-p/31822590. Although, I wouldn’t recommending sending coins as I thing the likelyhood of them being lost in the mail not be worth the risk.
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When I first use the eBay announcements link in my post above it worked, but I just checked and it comes up with an error page. This is a link to the main announcement page. You will need to scroll down to the Standard Envelope notice and click on it to get to the information: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/bg-p/Announcements.
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On the wagon, off the wagon, I’m back on.
Items in Shop: 897! (There are 4 listings sitting on my desk for tomorrow, going to go for the big 900 tomorrow!
Sales on Ebay: 8
sales on fb: 4
Total Sales: $229
COGS: $12
Income: $217 – Fees
I’m back in the FB Marketplace game. Got unbanned, but it took like a week and I have honestly been avoiding the forum because my numbers have been that bad. It seems like I’m not alone in that though? Pandemic…life…yada yada. Here’s the tea. I took that third job. I was working like 60 hours a week. Got burned out. Stopped listing on ebay. Got really sick. Sales tanked. Got fired from third job because I was sick. Went to doc. Ran some tests. Turns out my cartoid arteries are only operating at like 50%. So I’m literally not getting enough blood to my brain, all the time. So, everything’s on pause. Taking it slow. No more jobs. Started listing on ebay again, started getting sales again. Figures.
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Hi Lauren,
You are smart to slow it down and focus on your health. You are young and your older self will thank you if you get healthy now.
I just started hiking again. Regular exercise helps in so many ways, both mentally and physically.
Good luck.
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@Lauren – Sorry to hear about your health problems. Take is slow and take care of yourself. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Best wishes.
Mike
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Morning all – congratulations again on the big opening!
Had an auction pickup on Friday with a decent amount of stuff. One lot was a supply closet, which I bought for the $1000 worth of toner in it, but which also contained so much stationery that we’ve been giving it away to relatives and friends all weekend. Other than that, nothing too exciting on ebay. May 11 there are two big auctions I’m hoping to score a lot of new inventory at.
Sales: CAD$3643, 13 sales, COGS: $279, Fees: ~$474, Postage: $634 –> Gross profit: $2256
Expenses: $736, New inventory: $468 –> Cashflow: $1131
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Nice. We actually sell a lot of stationary when we find it. Slow sellers but there are collectors out there. Was it just brand new paper?
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Mostly pens, highlighters, tape dispensers, etc. Nothing in enough quantity per SKU to bother selling really… there was also a lot of branded “swag” type stuff of decently high quality that I am unsure what to do with. E.g., I am trying to sell a huge box of branded “golf divot repair kits” on ebay, we’ll see if anybody bites. And there were like 20 golf club cleaning cloths that are now seeing an actual useful life as household rags.
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Items in Store 1487
Items Sold 25
Total Sales $543.00
COGS $64.00
Total Profit $479.00
Average profit $19.16
Average sales price $21.72
New Listings 3
Items scavenged 25
Sourcing Allotment 2Plenty of sales, but LOW dollar this week. The good news is that I sold a bunch of the 3+ year old items that I’ve aggressively discounted. This is my lowest ASP since April 2019.
I’m not gonna get too down on the low sales, because this time of year is historically slow. I’m actually gonna take this as a positive as it is a good sign we are getting closer to being back to normal! I’ll GLADLY take lower sales if it means we can soon ditch masks and live life freely again.
This week already started off better with a $200 sale this morning. Let’s keep that big ticket item sales trend going!
I didn’t really do any listing this week again. Life is very very busy. I did decide to buy a new Toyota Sienna hybrid minivan to replace my car. If anyone is interested in a really nice single owner Chevy Sonic, hit me up!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265145824583
Ebay pays for itself, my main family car payment, vacations, and occasionally the house payment if sales are good. My ebay account grew this past year and I actually put away $2k into savings from my ebay account on top of all multiple vacations. Now ebay will pay for two car payments. The Sienna gets 36mpg and it can fit all of us – it’s important that our backup car also seats 8 since we will soon have 6 children.
Never in my wildest dreams as a youth did I think I’d have not one, but TWO minivans when I was an adult. Here I am with my two minivans and I’m perfectly happy about it.
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You are going to need an econoline church van if you keep growing! I agree that we always forget that slow periods happen with sales and then we all freak out.
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Oh we’ve pondered the passenger van. I strongly considered getting a 9 passenger Suburban, but it was cost prohibitive for a new one and I’m not spending that much money just so my mother-in-law can come on trips still with us. I also didn’t want to buy an older model with miles/years on it and have to deal with costly maintenance issues popping up.
I’m not quite ready to say 6 is our limit, so maybe in a few years I’ll have to move to a passenger van. Lol!
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Oh I did want to make a TV recommendation for you guys.
So for close to 2 years we’ve pretty much only watched K-dramas. Netflix had a few, but I actually got my wife a subscription to Rakuten Viki so my wife would have a larger selection.
Well Netflix is going all in on K-dramas. They’ve been making a few big budget shows. Currently we are watching Sisyphus. It’s time travel K-drama. If you’ve never tried a subtitled K-drama before, you should try it out. You get used to the subtitle thing pretty quickly.
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4/25/21 – 5/1/21
Total Active Items (2 different IDs): 331
Items Sold: 14
Gross Sales: $3,936.40
Highest Price Sold: $3499.00 – golf ball flight monitor on consignment; runner up: $175 book from a yard sale free box.
Returns: 0
COGS: $2620.21 (including commissions but not including cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 19
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0I took the golf monitor on consignment from a friend for 18% of net, based on the usual live auction commission in that price range, so I netted $568 on it after shipping and fees were taken off the top. I don’t play golf but it’s a pretty amazing device. It’s a doppler radar originally developed for the military and adapted to provide multiple data points on your golf shot. This was a less fancy model – you can spend 5 figures on one, if you want all the bells and whistles.
Pro wrestling was awesome. The Arena in West Philly was the place to see it for me in the ’70’s, plus they had roller derby there, the real thing on a banked track. Andre the Giant – everyone’s favorite, and mine too – debuted there in 1973 for the WWWF. Good times.
To Retro’s point, we’ve also been watching Babylon Berlin, a German series, and New Tricks from the UK. It is very entertaining to see things through the lens of foreign cultures, and refreshingly different.
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On the pro wrestling stuff, if you ever find vintage wrestling merchandise from the late 90’s and before, it is BOLO for sure.
I sold a hot pink late 80’s Sting hat to a buyer in Japan for $100+ a few years ago.
There are lots of wrestling fans with DEEP pockets, especially overseas. There is even a new show on A&E where the executives of WWF/WWE are hunting down old collectibles from wrestling’s yesteryear.
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That was my instinct when I say tis stack of Wrestler magazine from the late 1980’s. But many are not listed very high: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2499334.m570.l1312&_nkw=the+wrestler+magazine&_sacat=0
The high dollar comes when people sell lots: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=the+wrestler+magazine&_sacat=0&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1&_sop=16
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Last week I achieved the most items ever on eBay at one time – 73. This week I beat that with 75.
Total items For Sale: 75
Items Sold: 2
Items Listed: 4 (Goal Achieved!)
Average Profit: $29.47
Highest Profit: $42.96 (Hermes Silk Pocket Square w/ a small stain)
Goal This Week: 2
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Week of April 25 – May 1
Total Items in Store: 1323 eBay, 44 Etsy
Items Sold: 5 eBay
Cost of Items Sold: $2 + $8 Commission
Total Sales: $56.89
Highest Price Sold: $20 for Set 2 flower paintings
Average price: $11.38
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0Yeh, really slow week, but also I had guests over then a weekend trip and no new listings.
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Total Items in Store: 151
Items Sold: 6
Total Sales: $326
Highest Price Sold: $228 Breyer chalky Quarter Horse
Closer to an average week for me. Only grumpiness was a buyer cancellation (said their account was hacked – uh-huh), and a non-paying buyer. One sale was from a listing 2 years ago, I am going in and rearranging photos and changing up titles on older listings, hope it moves some older stuff.
My big entertainment for the week was an estate sale I almost didn’t go to. It was 2 hours away, in the middle of nowhere and I couldn’t go until the last day. Glad I did – got there and everything was free! I found out I am woefully unprepared, it was hot as heck and I didn’t have enough water or food to keep me going for more than about an hour. I hauled out a carload of stuff and when I left there was still (literally) tons of stuff left. The items I saw in the ad that I wanted were still there, so I got 8 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle VHS tapes – those sell well. Plus books, china, and I randomly grabbed some vintage radios, lamps and TV’s! Now I have to figure out if they work, and how to sell. How does one ship an old TV? (they are portables, but still!) Had a ton of fun, and will now be sure to keep a bag of granola bars, trail mix and bottled water in the car.
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Congrats on the great grand opening. I hope the coffee business numbers are sticky. My Ebay was dreadfully slow (no listing) but picked up this week for some reason.
My S’ college admissions season is mostly over, though he hopes to get off a waitlist. He’s going to Colgate WAY over there in New York. It was a stressful season and I look forward to just sitting and listing sometime soon. I don’t feel like sourcing at all, feeling guilty about the remaining death piles.
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April 25 – May 1
- Total Items in Store: 4,152
- Items Sold: 45
- Total Sales: $1,324
- * ABOVE yearly average of $1,099
- Highest Price: $100 (Mitutoyo 0-6″ Dial Caliper With Original Case And Manual)
- Average Price: $29
- Returns: 0
- Cost of Goods Sold: $70
- Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $7.50
- Number of New Items Listed this Week: 27
It was a nice week of sales. I didn’t get to list a whole lot like I said I would. Spring-time chores really took up most of my time. Maybe this week will be different since it’s going to rain pretty much every day.
Last week I mentioned a return request for one of those rare cassette tapes. I thought it seemed fishy seeing as how it took him almost a full month to open the return, but I accepted it anyway. I later received a message from him asking for a partial refund because he didn’t want to return it. Nah, that’s not really how it works there, bud. I’m just going to ignore him, but it sucks that my $70 is now held up for another month until I can get it closed (if he really doesn’t return it).
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Thanks for the podcast. The subtitle of the episode could have been “Tears of Joy”. I enjoyed hearing Jay’s description of the first 15 minutes of the day in the coffee shop.
Here are my numbers for this week:
Total Items in Store: 4537
Items Sold: 83
Total Sales: $2036.56
Cost of Items Sold: $645
Average Price Sold: $24.54
Average Cost of Item: $7.77
Highest Price Item Sold: $250 AMORC Rosicrucian Illuminati Twelfth 12th Degree Monographs
Number of items listed this week: 98 worth approx. $2287
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +26%
Hats sold this week: 54 (65% of sales)I’m sorry that other people had a slow week of sales. It was a very good week for me. Selling 83 items in one week is a new record for me.
Congratulations on the successful opening of the coffee shop. I hope it continues to be a great destination for locals and tourists alike.
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68 items! That gives us hope that people are buying (just not our stuff).
Now that you’re retired, selling on eBay, enjoying life, how much time do you put into the business? Does your wife still help? Listing 100 items in a week is no small feat.
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Yes. I still put lots of hours into the ebay business. It doesn’t really feel like work most of the time so I haven’t been tracking my time very closely but I’d guess I probably put in 30 – 40 hours spread across the week so it’s probably close to full-time hours. My wife still helps with creating listings for hats and doing the photos for hats. I take care of everything else (sourcing, shipping, pricing, customer service and inventory management). My wife probably puts in 20/hrs+ per week. We typically seem to list 70 – 100 new items every week.
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4/24/21-4/31/21
Total Items In Store: 2175
Items Sold: 34
Gross Sales: $715.27
Highest Price Sold: $70 (Consignment for Cricut Flamingo Vinyl Figure)
Average Price Sold: $21.04Returns: 0 $0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $42
Number of items listed: 4- Another slow week for me as well. $700 is not bad though.
- Scavenge of the Week: A friend of mine that I sell for once in a while brought me 3 little Cricut vinyl dolls. They were some type of promotional item for Cricut cutter machines. For some reason, they are crazy collectable. I sold 2 pink ones for $285 and 325. I also have a purple one still for sale and I’m hoping to get $100 for that one. They were super easy to list and I got a great commission for selling them.
- Congrats on the store opening. I also love a great cup of Americano!
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4-26-21 to 5-2-21
Total Items in Store: 13
Items Sold: 11
Gross Sales: 253.63
Net Sales: 170.22
Cost of Items Sold: $ 1
Highest Price Sold: $ 41.99 Gotham Book Mart pin
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 27Decent week, slow but steady. I’m happy to spend about 20 minutes a day on my Ebay stuff between listing and shipping.
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A little late to the game this week. Listened to the podcast on Monday, but it’s been busy with non-eBay life stuff. Glad to hear that your first week was a success. I can imagine the satisfaction you must get from watching it all in motion. Best wishes for your continued success.
Not a crazy week for sales, but not the worst. I’ve got a good portion of the store on a 30% off sale (items over 2 years). Not driving a lot of sales but two of my 13 from last week came via the sale. Sold a really long tail item after 1596 days. A new record for me. It was an old Chinese wooden shelf that I has listed for local pick up because it was too large to ship easily.
I sold the last of my lot of pre-Columbian pottery that I purchased at an auction several years ago for $40. A lesson learned regarding the importance of provenance for some items. These items were mostly vase-type vessels likely over 1000 years old. With provenance of place and ownership they would be museum quality pieces that could fetch big prices in the thousands. Without provenance, they ended up going for anywhere from $50 to $200 each and it took a few years for them all to sell. Too many fakes out there. Someone here on the forum warned me that might be the case. Fun to research though.
Spent the week listing a bunch of ephemera I had sitting on a shelf for ages. Lots of interesting items from cabinet card photographs to antique church programs.
Sales Report for: 5/1/21
Total Items in Store: 1146
Items Sold: 13
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $499.93
Net Sales (After fees): $408.84
Cost of Items Sold: $94.24
COGS Percent 23.05%
Net Profit Margin: 62.93%
Highest Price Sold: $125.00 Pre-Columbian Pottery Kero
Average Price Sold: $38.46
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 9
Promoted Percentage: 69.23%
Average Days Listed: 459.69
Longest Listed: 1596
New items listed: 28-
Without provenance, they ended up going for anywhere from $50 to $200 each and it took a few years for them all to sell. Too many fakes out there.
This is very true. But I also see provenance as “really good marketing”. Like at an auction, they’ll tell some story about where it came from and that’s good enough to make it more valuable. That item could be just as fake as anything else. 🙂
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4/25/21 – 5/1/21
Total items in store: 2305
Items sold: 52
Gross sales: $2242.35 (down 0.9% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1639.79 (up 11.9% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $528.65 — details below
Lowest price sold (net): $7.30 — a jersey card of former Philadelphia Flyers goalie Ray Emery, who passed away a few years ago at a young age
Definitely felt the spring/summer slowdown strongly these last few weeks, but I was saved this week by an unusual high dollar sale. The card I sold hit on all the elements that create value in modern sports cards: the card contained a large and unusual jersey swatch, it was autographed, had a low serial number, a shiny design, it’s a rookie card, from a popular set and it’s a popular player. I knew when I acquired this card that it would sell well, and as I kept getting watchers on the listing (over 30+ by the time I sold), I kept increasing the price slightly. But a $600+ offer was too much to turn down.
Most of the cards I sell get taped in between cardboard and maybe bubble wrap and shipped in a small envelope. The Derwin James card I sold got the premium treatment — double wrapped and sent in a small box with extra cardboard for protection. My buyer’s treasure made it all the way from New Jersey to California (surely to a collector or speculator with a wealth of nice Chargers cards) in just two days. Really demonstrates what an incredible infrastructure USPS has.
The card that I sold is a Derwin James card. James is a talented young football player in his second or third year but by no means one of the best players in the league. And he’s a defensive safety, not a quarterback or running back or wide receiver. And he plays for the Los Angeles Chargers, not the Patriots or Cowboys or Packers.
While this was a huge sale for me (my second highest sale this year), and almost certainly one of the best Derwin James cards, it’s pennies compared to high dollar cards of more popular, or collectible, players. Regular rookie cards (no autograph, no jersey, no serial numbering, no shine) from the same popular set as my Derwin James card (Panini Select) of the best young quarterback Patrick Mahomes routinely sell for over $1000. And this isn’t all pandemic or “sports card bubble” related — this level of speculative frenzy has been around cards, to one degree or another, for 15+ years.
I had another buyer this week who bought 10 oversized autograph cards of 1950s New York Yankees and Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, which wasn’t nearly as lucrative a sale but it felt nice to clear out 10 relatively low-dollar (~$10 each) items at once.
Also, Jay, I loved your sad to happy story. I related to it so strongly, especially in terms of needing to find my own way in my early twenties and struggling to create those strong bonds beyond what my family gave me, which often wasn’t much. It is such a joy to hear about the shop finally opening and to think about all that it will bring to the community, especially for your younger employees for many of whom this will be their first job. That first job shapes a young person so dramatically and it’s great to see how you are taking this step that will affect so many people’s lives for the better.
Keep listing, everyone. Even if this summer remains slow, it will pay off around the holidays.
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Fun to watch your sports sales. What perfect timing to have all that inventory. Do you feel any cooling off of the frenzy around sports cards?
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Jay, there is definitely an ebb and flow to the frenzy, like right now I am selling more baseball than anything else since the season just started. Yesterday I had 5 sales and 4 were baseball. It was a true mix — two were players who are “hot” or in the news right now, one was a vintage Brooklyn Dodgers card and another was a nice autograph rookie of a player who’s hurt and hasn’t been particularly successful yet in his career.
There is more activity with baseball in terms of individual players and their performances right now, and there are more new baseball sets being released as well. But football is about to pick up since they just had their draft (so all the top rookies are joining their new teams) and basketball and hockey are about to enter the playoffs so the prices will get more volatile. The card companies are always timing new sets to correlate with the cycle of each sport’s season. That’s not to say every card collector or speculator is always chasing the newest set (far from it), but there are always spikes around popular sets or a hot player’s best new card with their current team.
Also, a lot of card collectors and speculators buy into what’s known as case breaks, where you buy up your team (or player) for x amount (where x is a fraction of the full price of all the boxes) and the breaker opens the cards on camera and you get whatever cards of your team he gets. This might be an amazing rare card of the best player on the team, or you might get skunked and get nothing very good. It’s all a gamble, but I’m sure for those who get lucky, it’s a lot of fun. The biggest breakers (and this is a huge industry within the card world now — the majority of boxes are opened by breakers) must bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue annually. A lot of them also have eBay stores and they will list your card for you directly on eBay after the break. That’s how I acquire a lot of my inventory, scavenging off of these auctions (some of which have mistakes in the listings, and others end too low because auctions are strange and unpredictable), relisting the card and waiting for the right buyer to come along. But the breaks are such a huge ecosystem for the new sets that I think enough of the speculators who started buying and selling cards during the pandemic (since they were “hot) will remain sucked in. And of course there was already a market for cards before this, with both collectors and speculators.
One of the interesting things about the cards is it’s one of the rare niches where what you buy today might be worth a lot more in a few months or a few years. Versus just the classic waiting for the right buyer to come along. Of course, you have to pick the right players and types of cards, which requires both luck and skill, and then sell at the right time. I could drive myself crazy thinking about the cards I sold two or three years ago which are worth far more today because the player has gone on to stardom and the speculative frenzy around the “next hot card” is probably at (or close to) a peak right now. I used to think about that a lot more. But that’s so much wasted energy, especially when scavenging gives you the gift of time and flexibility. With an eBay business, every day can be the day where you move forward and grow the business a little more.
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@craig-rex – I am fascinated by your stories. I pass on lots of cards frequently because the one time I took a chance and picked one up it turned out to be fairly mundane cards and a lot of work researching for little return. I guess like so many things, you have to put the time in to learn the niche. Thanks for sharing!
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