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Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee Join the conversation in the forum>> Our Store Week May 16-22, 2021 Total Items in Store: 7531 Items
[See the full post at: Scavenger Life Episode 515: Knockin’ & Talkin’] -
I think you just hooked a bunch of listeners with the “Dickerin'” sound bites! Despite being only a state away here in NH the show seems like another awesome world. I’m kind of jealous of how fun they make it all look.
I didn’t mention that we’re watching it on Amazon Prime (it’s free there) but may be available elsewhere.
It was a History channel show, and sadly only two seasons.
https://www.history.com/shows/down-east-dickering
“That’s how you Dickah!”
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I started a subscription with Broadporch a little over a month ago. I went with the smaller size bag for now, and I’ll see how it goes. We enjoyed the Southern Split last month, but I’m not sure what we are getting this time. It is supposed to be delivered today.
Yep, we’re all feeling that slowness right now, but a few sales kept the numbers acceptable.
Week of May 16 – 22
Total Items in Store: 1344 eBay, 44 Etsy
Items Sold: 11 eBay
Cost of Items Sold: $22.50 + $12.95 Commission
Total Sales: $307.14
Highest Price Sold: $99 Electrical Icehouse beer sign
Average price: $27.92
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $2
Number of items listed this week: 23-
just looked up your order, but not going to tell you so it’ll be a surprise! 😀
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Your note reminded me that I did not receive it with my mail today. I looked up tracking, and it says “In Transit, Arriving Late”.
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my ebay shipments from the same date got delayed in Richmond VA as well. should be on it’s way. USPS seems hit or miss these days.
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Total Items in Store: 164
Items Sold: 8
Total Sales: $454.25
Highest Price Sold: $275 Ford fuel pump
It was a super slow week until I got talking to a buyer and managed to bundle 14 VHS tapes into one sale. I am super happy to move some old stuff and it is so much easier to pack one box than 14! For once my high sale did not come from a model horse but a car part. It took a lot of research, as the number on the part and the number on the box it came in were different, but the price was much higher on the actual part so I am glad I spent the time and noticed there was a difference!
I attended no sales this weekend, but it was neighborhood yard sale season. Mom went to one and remembered what I told her to look for – she got me 80 trucker caps (only one vintage, but mostly new with tag sport teams!) for $20. I will have a ball listing them. I need to work on listing more and buying less for a while, it is hard when the buying is easy but my sales area is full and I do try not to clutter up the house for long while I process stuff.
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We love the coffee. I stopped our Kuerig pod shipments, purchased reusable pods and order our coffee from you guys now. Big win all around. We’re in our 60s. Quit the corporate hustle a few years ago moved to a small mountain town here in AZ and haven’t looked back. Thanks for all the inspiration.
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May 16 – 22
- Total Items in Store: 4,188
- Items Sold: 42
- Total Sales: $1,257
- * ABOVE yearly average of $1,087
- Highest Price: $180 (Large Lot of Pre-Recorded Reel-to-Reel Tapes)
- Average Price: $30
- Returns: 0
- Cost of Goods Sold: $67
- Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $13.25
- Number of New Items Listed this Week: 17
I had a great week on eBay. It was weird how sales really picked up in the last few days though. On Thursday night I felt like I was packing for hours.
Yard sale season is picking up again here in the Ohio Valley, but we’re not seeing a lot of good stuff yet. I don’t know if there are more scavengers now than before or if people are getting smart and not selling the good stuff. I still much prefer auctions, and even the online auctions are slowly winning my favor.
I wanted to share a fun group of sales I had. I bought a flat of Wagner-ware aluminum pots and pans at an auction last fall and just recently went to list them. The sold prices on the aluminum stuff wasn’t very exciting, but I saw that the black plastic handles on these things were selling for more than the entire pieces themselves. So I removed each of the handles from the pans, cleaned them up nice and just sold my last one (out of six) for $40 each. I wouldn’t have gotten more than $25 per pan had I sold it all assembled. LOL! I ended up giving all of the aluminum to my brother who collects scrap metal to recycle.
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@doublythumbs – That is crazy about the pans. Good for you. A bit more work, but much easier to pack on the back end. And, the rest gets recycled.
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Thanks for the podcast. I listened while I did an evening hike in the hills near my house.
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 4584
Items Sold: 71
Total Sales: $1724.9
Cost of Items Sold: $212
Average Price Sold: $24.29
Average Cost of Item: $2.99
Highest Price Item Sold: $191 Monitor Audio Speakers MA 700G MK II
Number of items listed this week: 78 worth approx. $1314
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +26%I had another solid week. I keep expecting that my run of good luck will end but it’s been consistently good for me. I guess that my extra focus since my “retirement” is paying off.
Regarding your comment about the lavender clothesline videos showing her shopping and explanations for what she bought and what she passed over:- I watch a lot of Youtubers while I list on ebay. A couple of years ago there was maybe one Youtuber that did that kind of video. He used a spy camera in his glasses to show garage sales which I found pretty fascinating. In the last year or so there have been an abundance of YouTubers doing the same thing in much less subtle ways with GoPros strapped to their chests or just with their phones. eg: Thrift Mine, Paper and Moose, RVA Flips, Froggy Flips, Cincinnati Picker. If you like that kind of YouTube video their are lots to choose from.
Last week I took advantage of my freedom from the 9-5 world and spent Monday – Wednesday around Lake Tahoe. It felt great to be able to go on a mini vacation on days when everyone else had to work. 🙂
I hope everyone has a profitable week.
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I had a week, over $2500 in sales, lots of large expensive items sold which you’ll see in this weeks video.
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Hi, had a good week on ebay although it seemed slow. Didn’t have much time for scavenging.
Sales: CAD$3865, 13 sales, COGS: $501, Fees: ~$502, Postage: $377 –> Gross profit: $2485
Expenses: $0, New inventory: $0 –> Cashflow: $2985
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5/15/21-5/21/21
Total Items In Store: 2214
Items Sold: 25
Gross Sales: $542.92
Highest Price Sold: $66 (McCasky Receipt Registers )
Average Price Sold: $21.72Returns: 2 $53
Money Spent on New Inventory: $89
Number of items listed: 36- Pretty rough week for sales. I even had a day with no sales at all. Been quite a while since that has happened. My plan is to just keep listing…it’ll come around eventually.
- The new Habitat Restore store opened in our area this week. I was very disappointed…prices were very high. I might be able to pick up a few things for my rentals if I need something they have, but it’s not going to be very good for Ebay. Maybe their prices will come down over time.
- Doublythumbs: Thanks for the heads up on the Wagner Ware handles. I see those at auctions often and pass on them bc they don’t seem to sell well. I’ll have to keep an eye on them in the future.
- I has now been just over 2 years since I quit my career job and started doing eBay full time. I still wake up every day thankful for the freedom I have to just do what I want when I want to.
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About ten years ago, our local ReStores were incredible. We renovated our home with brand new Anderson windows and Hardie Board siding for cheap.
But now our Restores are either picked over too quickly or just way too expensive. I feel one of the stores is storing away the good stuff to sell to their favorite buyers.
Plus, construction material is crazy expensive now and they now this.
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For consistency, you can buy coffee right off the Broad Porch website: https://www.broadporchcoffee.com/
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Weekly sales 5/16 – 5/22
Random Item Store
Total items 511
Items sold 7
Gross sales $176.40
Net sales $74.22Patch Store
Total items 2297
Items sold 27
Gross sales $254.75
Net sales $203.98Etsy
Orders 10
Gross sales $90.95Net sales total $369.72
I need to start posting every week and keeping myself accountable. I’d like to go full time eventually but have been kinda stagnant lately. We moved in March and it’s been hard to get back into a routine ever since. I’m slowly piecing a process together though. The slow sales also cause some discouragement and on top of that, eBay has suspended my patch store recently due to a “counterfeit” suzuki patch. They said, “if you can’t guarantee that an item is 100% authentic, don’t list it”.
I thought that was funny since no one can guarantee that an item is authentic if they buy it used from somewhere other than the original company… It just sucks cause I plan to build the patch store up to tens of thousands of listings but if a patch has a company name on it there’s a chance I will get slapped for counterfeit or VERO. Guess I’ll have to ditch the patches related to businesses if it keeps being an issue.
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The new house has been great so far. There are several big expenses on the horizon though. Need to get a tree cut down, get gutters, and a lawn mower. We at least kept some of the cash we got from the sale of our old house so all these new expenses will be covered. I still haven’t gotten around to getting my huge storage building the way I want it but it’s going to be sweet once I do. We have an 11 month old baby so that throws a wrench in my productivity as well.
I haven’t had any issues buying patch lots so far. I have only had issues trying to sell certain ones lol. I bought 2,000 USPS patches a while ago and then figured out that I couldn’t sell them on eBay. It was just a thousand each of 2 versions of patches though so I made two listings on Etsy and have been selling about $100 a week of them each week with no issues.
My current death pile of patches is a lot of about 10,000 I bought from someone in Canada who worked at a patch company that went out of business in 2004. I paid about $1,500 total and if I just sold them all for $5 a piece that’d be $50,000. I regularly sell some for $10-$15 a piece though so I’ll probably do better than a $5 average. At my current listing rate, I won’t have to buy more patches for a year probably.
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5-17-21 to 5-23-21
Total Items in Store: 1459
Items Sold: 3
Gross Sales: 103.03
Net Sales: 78.80
Cost of Items Sold: $ 1
Highest Price Sold: $ 50.00 Promo button for Stephen King’s IT book
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 65
Number of items listed this week: 30Slow week but I didn’t do much Ebay work this week as I was out of town for a long weekend and taking a break.
Found some nice stuff thrifting and got in a huge lot of items I bought on Ebay, hence the big (for me) amount spent on new inventory. I’ll have over 1000 items to list from what I bought so I’m AOK with that expense. Going to visit a friend of mine who runs an estate sale company with his wife. First time I will see their retail space. I haven’t seen them in over 18 months, can’t wait to catch up.
Lots of inventory work to do. I save stuff up for the summer since if I’m not in the pool I am indoors until Fall.
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5/16/21 – 5/22/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 328
Items Sold: 4
Gross Sales: $91.67
Highest Price Sold: $25 – another consignment challenge coin from the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force (Navy).
Returns: 0
COGS: $17 (including consignment commissions but not including cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 0
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0Last week was another slow week with lots of real life interfering with listing and sending out offers. This week was busier and more productive on eBay with a couple surprisingly positive interactions with eBay customer service but I’ll report on those Monday.
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I forgot your status. Did you ever move to Florida? Wasn’t that the retirement plan?
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Yup, we’re here in Jacksonville since early last summer and it’s great. We were stationed here 2014 – 2017 and fell in love with it.
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“I bet real estate prices are crazy in FL right now.”
Around here the asking prices are up a bit, but not that much except for a few outliers and those aren’t selling. We bought this house in 2018 and renovated it from afar (NOT recommended… but it wasn’t too bad) before moving down last year. We could make money on it if we sold it now, but we’d have nowhere to go. Trying to buy in this market is painful with bidding wars on anything nice or well located.
Other parts of Florida are much worse, though. Jacksonville has had a bad reputation nationally that it has not fully outgrown. The area gets lots of military retirees like us who were stationed here and know what a great place it is and the job market is always growing as a major transportation hub but other than that, it does not attract new residents. Everyone wants to go to smaller towns further south especially in and around the Orlando – Tampa – Ft Myers triangle on the Gulf side. It’s REAL crazy right now down there. Over 100 people a day are moving into Orlando alone.
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5/16/21 – 5/22/21
Total items in store: 2375
Items sold: 47
Gross sales: $2779.59 (up 34.7% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1973.14 (up 33.4% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $144.19 — autographed 8×10 print of former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham
Lowest price sold (net): $6.17 — 15 year old autographed card of former Vancouver Canucks (hockey) Daniel Sedin
My highest price item sold this week happens to be an item with an interesting back story because it really illustrates how the trading card market has changed in the last few years. I’ve mentioned before in these posts that I acquire almost all of my inventory from eBay auctions and relist using buy it now or best offer. But another method I have to pick up new inventory is through redemption points with one of the main manufacturers, Panini. Here is what their rewards site looks like.
https://www.paniniamerica.net/rewards.html
These redemption points are originally found in packs and boxes, usually as a substitute for an autograph where the player couldn’t sign their card on time or to make “card math” work in terms of the number of types of cards (autographs, jersey, inserts, etc) in a box. The points cards range in value from 150 all the way up to 15,000 and 25,000 which are obviously much less plentiful. Panini adds new cards to their rewards site on a weekly basis, and if you have the points in your account, you can pick out the card or cards you want and “buy” it. How they determine their values is a mystery to me, and often there are massive discrepancies between “points” value and dollar value.
The resale market for rewards points had always been pretty consistent at around $5 per 100 points. Until, of course, the early stages of covid last year, when the world (and card manufacturing) basically went on pause and prices for rewards points bottomed out. I had always tried to keep a few thousand points in my account, but those expenses really add up! But when the market bottomed out, I started checking saved searches daily and bought tens of thousands of points, as many as I could afford. And I’ve been eating off those points ever since, which has been particularly useful as the prices for points has risen significantly.
Anyway, to the item I sold. A regular autographed photo of Cunningham, who was a star quarterback in the 90s, would probably cost $20, but this was an 8×10 print with a background in Panini’s color blast design. Color blast cards are only inserted in a few specific sets and they are very highly sought after, with prices that would probably surprise you.
I don’t understand the mindset that would compel someone to spend hundreds of dollars on any collectible, but I can see the aesthetic appeal of this set. It’s a nice design. And so the color blast autograph prints have a moderate following, too. Especially because they were only released on the Rewards site one time and never again. I purchased a few others with the Cunningham and had sold all of them, often for my full asking price. I had not seen another Cunningham listed besides mine in the last two years. Predictably, the listing had a lot of watchers and lowball offers over the last two years, but I couldn’t pass up the offer I received this past week and the buyer basically got a one of a kind item.
Coincidentally, Panini released a new round of Color Blast autographed prints a few weeks ago. I had been eagerly waiting for them since the first batch were so popular, but things have changed so dramatically in the card world in the last few years. I couldn’t add any to my cart, let alone purchase them. They were sold out within minutes — seconds really — on the rewards site. This is because the trading card world has become infiltrated with the methods that resellers of other limited edition items use — bots, cook groups, the types of things associated with sneakerheads. Those resellers are basically playing a completely different game than scavengers. They buy and sell almost immediately so they can use the funds from that sale to buy the next thing that continues the cycle. Some of them probably get lucky and stumble on something that’s particularly valuable that they can make $5000 on in one day. Maybe that is enough for some of them, maybe that’s all they want.
But I will get over the hurdle of 2500 items this summer– hopefully to 3000 — and it is so rewarding to see the inventory grow and see this level of sales sustain. This was a really satisfying week after a few slower weeks. A lot of nice high dollar sales and a lot of items which sold very quickly. Had three $100+ items go to the same buyer within a day of listing them. There’s no bot you can purchase or Youtube course that will teach that level of knowledge.
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Very late this week. I’ve been very focussed on listing this week since I had my worst week since I started recording my weekly sales a year and a half ago. I was hoping it wasn’t just me but see that it’s not affecting everyone. Definitely makes me go hmmm.
Had a good auction haul last week and posted everything from that lot then unearthed a box from the death pile and posted everything from there as well. Maybe that will bump things up.
Not only did I sell low, my profit was extremely low due to my big sale being a wash. I bought a vintage reel-to-reel that ended up needing all its transistors replaced. Too big a job for me so I listed it for what I paid and it sold in a few hours. Actually lost money on that one due to fees.
Here’s hoping for a better week next week.
Sales Report for: 5/22/21
Total Items in Store: 1121
Items Sold: 7
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $261.25
Net Sales (After fees): $218.59
Cost of Items Sold: $123.55
COGS Percent 56.52%
Net Profit Margin: 36.38%
Highest Price Sold: $110.00 Reel-to-Reel Recorder
Average Price Sold: $37.32
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $129.00
Sold via promoted listings: 4
Promoted Percentage: 57.14%
Average Days Listed: 374
Longest Listed: 1279
New items listed: 2-
We’re also on the slow sales train. Wonder if slows sales are mainly for us sellers who deal in weird, old stuff. Not everyone’s sales are slow.
We used to sell big old electronics, but also had issues with them not working properly. Old turntables was our bread and butter for while until we started getting hit with expensive returns. Never had the passion to learn to fix them.
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<p style=”text-align: left;”>@Jay – I like fixing them, but my skills are on the bottom range. And, I’ve seen that the time I spend fixing is usually better spent posting simpler things. When I first started I bought every vintage electronic item I could get my hands on. I’ve since realized that better than 50% are in need of some repair. Same with typewriters, but they are easier to fix. If there was just more time in the day…</p>
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Total Items in Store: 308
Items Sold:
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $279.79
Net Sales (After fees): $218.62
Cost of Items Sold: $52
Highest Price Sold: $155 (One new pillowcase)
Average Price Sold: $72
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $20Well things are getting pretty close to normal at least until school gets out. I’m back at my office 4 days a week while my daughter is in school and it’s great. I like clean dividing lines between my work and my home life (and Ebay at home). It really has been good for me. Also the stressful worst-year-ever college admissions cycle has pretty much come to a close. Tomorrow I plan to consolidate and organize some Ebay inventory in storage. No need to shop unfortunately. This weekend I should have a some time between activities to list. A woman paid me $155 plus shipping for ONE discontinued print pillow sham, and told me not to ship the duvet. UM, OK!
Hope you guys aren’t working too hard on the coffee shop and everything else but are enjoying the adventure. It looks amazing. My Southern Split brewed has a nice kick vs. the dreaded Kerig.
We had someone write to us offering to buy our house and pay all of the closing costs, etc. Housing market is off the charts here as inventory is low. Too bad we are not empty nesters yet but then, I’m not emotionally ready for that.
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Items in Store 1495
Items Sold 16
Total Sales $591.00
COGS $44.00
Total Profit $547.00
Average profit $34.19
Average sales price $36.94
New Listings 30Getting caught up because I was out of town last week. My sales are down, but I’ll take it since that means people are getting out and about again.
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