- This topic has 33 replies, 20 voices, and was last updated 3 years, 7 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
Check out our coffee! ► broadporchcoffee.com Join the conversation in the forum>> Our Store Week May 30-June 5, 2021 Total Items in Store: 748
[See the full post at: Scavenger Life Episode 517: Dumpster Diving, Back Again] -
Cool scavenger tip if you change your own oil. If you are garage sale(ing), ask if they have any oil for sale, hopefully your type and you should be able to get great deals sometimes.
-
Be careful- I put part-synthetic 20w50 oil in a 70,000-mile Ford Zetec engine and ended up with an oil leak through the crankcase seal. Otherwise, as far as I can gather, you can mix viscosities to a limited extent.
-
-
-
-
-
Items in Store 1489
Items Sold 20
Total Sales $582.00
COGS $39.00
Total Profit $543.00
Average profit $27.15
Average sales price $29.10
New Listings 30
Items scavenged 85Had a fun “all-in” purchase at a yard sale this weekend. Came upon a sale that had a TON of new in box star wars toys. Some really cool stuff I had never seen before. Typically when I come across things like this at yard sales the seller wants ebay prices or higher, so I didn’t have high expectations. There were no prices, so I asked what things cost. Seller said “you mean like for all of it?” Well I didn’t actually, but I responded “yeah I’d be interested in all of it”. Seller came over, talked about how her husband and kid were big into star wars once upon a time. They took a bit eyeballing everything and said “how about $100 for everything?” Man I think I set a record for the time it took me to whip out my wallet and peel off 5 $20’s!
There were 20 loose figures and 43 new in box. I’ve already created all the listings and done photos for half of them. Total list price is $1430 and I’ve already sold 3 items within hours of listing.
The big disappointment that caused my original scavenger high was that there was some things there that were wrapped up at the sale with just a label on the front. The seller told me they were the mail in figures. I was freaking out thinking they might be the 70’s mail in toys! Once I got home and inspected everything…I found that they were the mid 90’s mail in toys. I had forgotten that they redid the mail away toy thing in the 90’s. Boooo!!!! Everything at the sale were the mid 90’s toys with a few from early 2000’s.
Still, $1400 on a $100 investment is definitely nothing to sneeze at! After offers and fees I’ll net close to $1k profit.
-
That’s the way to do it. Doesnt happen often where someone is willing to sell everything that low.
So weird that someone would collect and store those figures for 20+ years, then just dump them for $100.
-
I think alot of people think they are making an investment and 20 years later realize that the investment is worth less than they originally paid.
Sports cards, comics, toys, it’s all the same. The average person collects the common junk. The savvy people have the good stuff.
I vividly remember the moment my passion for sports cards broke. I brought my prize cards to a card show when I was 18. Turns out my prize cards weren’t so “prize”. The ones that meant the most to me are in my Slugfest arcade game: Cheap 1990 fleer cards. They’re worthless but they are what I have a sentimental attachment to.
I still have my small box of “prize” cards, put all my favorite early 90’s cheap cardboard cards in the card dispenser of slugfest, and chucked all the rest in the trash.
So yeah, I can see how a person can just toss their collection out in the yard sale for $100.
-
-
-
Hi all – had a great week on ebay. Sold more HVAC controllers… that rare repeat customer!
Sales: CAD$8641, 15 sales, COGS: $471, Fees: ~$1123, Postage: $553 –> Gross profit: $6494
Expenses: $788, New inventory: $375 –> Cashflow: $5802
Sourced a few things on ebay, nothing huge though. Looking forward to auctions later this month.
-
Thanks for the podcast. I’m glad you are still appreciating the margins in Ebay so you’ll stay with us. 🙂. Ebay is terribly slow for me but I haven’t been listing or running a sale. Had a change at my day job that is keeping me extra busy and my daughter is out of school and not in camp yet. I started consolidating some inventory and organizing boxes this weekend. In the past I was determined to list all of the death piles but I’m having an argument with myself to just shed some lower dollar stuff since it’s hard to find time to list. Stay tuned.
-
5/30/21 – 6/5/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 365
Items Sold: 16
Gross Sales: $395.91
Highest Price Sold: $90 – incredibly awful amateur abstract oil painting done by my wife’s grandmother in the ‘60s.
Return: 0
COGS: $78.86 (including consignment commissions but not including cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 50
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0It was a great week on eBay for me. I managed 50 listings, which I think is a record for me, though many of them were low dollar bread and butter items like books, DVDs, and postcards. My INR buyer from last week got his patch finally and contacted me to repay what I refunded him, which was very kind of him, considering I had no proof of delivery. He also had already given me good feedback praising my good customer service and quick refund. My faith in humanity is restored.
You mentioned my chargeback in the podcast – it ended up that it was decided in the buyer’s favor but eBay covered me under seller protection so I did not have to refund. It was done automatically; I got a message about the chargeback initiated and the next thing I got was an email telling me of the result and being covered.
-
-
Cool museum. I think it would go in the Unseen Forces collection:
[img]https://i.imgur.com/4LumhjR.jpg?2[/img]
The only way I knew which way was up was that she signed the back. She painted two like this and in the other one the colors are worse, if you can imagine that.
-
Your link got messed up, but I was able to follow it. It isn’t horrible. I hope you’ve listed the other one as well.
-
Glad you could follow the link – I seem to have lost the ability to post photos from Imgur in my forum posts as I have done in the past. I’ve tried a few different ways and nothing seems to work.
I did list her other abstract: https://www.ebay.com/itm/274149568414 I’m also glad you don’t think it’s horrible- I’m counting on a buyer somewhere out there who agrees with you. 🙂
-
It probably benefits from the Nogbert effect. A painting viewed at a greatly reduced size often looks far better than it does in real life. Named after an artist, Nogbert, who obtained a one-man show after he submitted 6 inch by 4 inch photos of his paintings.
On opening night, the guests huddled in the middle of the gallery, trying to avoid looking at the paintings.
He left town, and became a traffic warden in London, leaving behind his paints and paintings. I took the paintings to the town dump.
-
-
-
-
-
Weekly sales 5/30-6/5
Random Item Store
Total items 521
Items sold 9
New items listed 14
Gross sales $284.77
Net sales $117.36Patch Store
Total items 2384
Items sold 25
New items listed 56
Gross sales $163.08
Net sales $69.62Etsy
Orders 8
Gross sales $90.85
Net sales $77.22Net sales total $264.20
It’s looking like the patch market is going down for now. I was selling $50-$100 a day worth of patches a few months ago. I’m kinda surprised I’ve been able to make as much as I have from the patch store though with it only having a couple thousand listings and prices being so cheap. Once I get my listings up to 10,000 or so it should be a nice income stream. I had a $225 sale in my random item store yesterday so next week’s numbers should be up at least.
One of my best finds ever was a box of stuff that people were going to throw away at a yard sale. It was a bunch of dusty old electronics and I just threw them in my car not thinking much about it. When I got home and looked them up I realized they were super rare vintage CB radios and I sold them for parts for over $700 total. Haven’t done a lot of dumpster diving though except for getting boxes.
-
5/29/21-6/4/21
Total Items In Store: 2303
Items Sold: 25
Gross Sales: $592.01
Highest Price Sold: $100 (Amprobe Ground Resistance Tester)
Average Price Sold: $23.68Returns: 0 $0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $107
Number of items listed: 66- I didn’t post in the forum last week, but pretty much the same low sales I’ve seen recently. $525 last week and $592 this week. 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.
- I’ve had a pretty good couple of weeks of listing new items. 79 items listed 2 weeks ago and another 66 items this week, it was nice to get the time to put in a few solid listing days.
- Scavenge of the week: I got a large box of items at an auction this week for $9 that had over $200 worth of items in it that I could see from a glance. In the bottom of it, I found a Bose Wave Radio. The sound from it is awesome, so I listed it for a fairly high price and am keeping it in my office until it sells. I’m kinda hoping it doesn’t sell for a while!
- Your talk about ketchup packets reminded of when I would go skiing in Colorado when I was young. Food was always super expensive and my friends and I would always pack our own food and eat in the parking lot. One time we brought a guy who went into the resort to the condiment table and made what he called snowboarder soup with a cup of water, ketchup packets and a sugar packet heated up in the microwave.
-
-
When I was a kid at the mall, I would eat by going into the long John silvers restaurant and request the free “crunchies” and a cup of water. The crunchies are the batter bits leftover in the fryer. That with some ketchup was delicious. Occasionally I’d even get a fry or two!
why did I do this? So I could spend my money in the arcade instead of course!
-
I enjoy hearing about your coffee shop. I’m looking for an opportunity to check it out, but it might not happen until the fall.
Slow week, but nice after the previous week that was very busy on the non-eBay front.
Week of May 30 – June 5
Total Items in Store: 1364 eBay, 44 Etsy
Items Sold: 7 eBay
Cost of Items Sold: $6.80 + $19.62 Commission
Total Sales: $116.65
Highest Price Sold: $36.50 set of 6 cobalt blue drinking glasses (on commission)
Average price: $16.66
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 21 -
-
140 orders shipped out last week. Sales were down a bit for the week or two before that, but they appear to be back to normal now. Several orders were multi-quantity consisting of 2-15 items per shipment. The bulk were individual orders. I’m keeping busy!
Buying is sort of crazy right now. I’ve been buying collections daily for the past 2 weeks it feels like. Anywhere from 5-500+ items at a time. I haven’t seen buying opportunities like this since the 2008 recession, but we’re in a completely different economy now. It just feels really weird out there now, but I’ll take advantage of it and buy when the opportunity arises.
-
almasty,
I mostly sell modern trading cards and do almost all of my sourcing on eBay, and I am also finding amazing buying opportunities right now. A lot of sales in modern trading cards are through large consigners who have thousands of auctions ending every night. eBay’s recent decision to eliminate individual sport subcategories in favor of the subcategory “trading card singles” has led to even more volatility than usual in auction ending prices. Some of my best deals have been similar low prices to when a seller makes a major listing error (like the complete wrong category, or failing to include details of a valuable card), but without those obvious errors. Sellers who don’t use item specifics, in particular, are almost certainly not getting as many eyeballs on their listings. It’s been particularly surprising to see some of the ending prices on auctions I’ve won considering the overall high prices in desirable sports cards.
eBay is requiring sports card sellers to add item specifics to all listings by July 12th, so I expect things will stabilize somewhat by then. But I will have quite a stockpile of inventory to list built up by then if I keep winning auctions at the same rate I have been the last few weeks. It’s nerve-wracking (despite the fact that I know that my buying strategies work), but as you said always worth taking advantage of.
-
-
Thanks for the podcast. I listened while I hiked around the hills near my home at sunset. An evening hike and Scavenger Life in my ears is the perfect combination.
Here are my numbers for the week:
Items Sold: 94
Total Sales: $2210.96
Cost of Items Sold: $350
Average Price Sold: $23.52
Average Cost of Item: $3.73
Highest Price Item Sold: $369 1960 Oakland Raiders vs Houston Oilers First AFL game program.
Number of items listed this week: 119
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +29%I had a great week. I sold more items last week than I’ve ever sold in one week (in 6 years of reselling).
My highest price sale came from an estate sale full of sports ephemera. It was dumb luck that I grabbed this football program in the first few minutes of an estate sale. I didn’t know what I had and I only paid $4 for it.
I can relate to the comments about the price of cars. I’m trying to help my son find a used car. He’s currently driving mine. There’s a shortage of used car inventory for sure. Nationwide new car dealers only have 23 days of inventory. They normally have 60 days. A car dealer told me they are expecting it to get worse before it gets better.
By the way, belated Happy Birthday to Jay!
I hope everyone has a good week.
-
-
5-31-21 to 6-6-21
Total Items in Store: 1531
Items Sold: 2
Gross Sales: 40.87
Net Sales: 27.24
Cost of Items Sold: $ 0
Highest Price Sold: $ 25.00 Sealed copy of Microsoft Onenote software
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 0
Number of items listed this week: 45Slow as dirt. I just keep listing. I’ve already sold more items in the past 2 days then I did last week. Summer gonna summer. Taking a weekend off for a road trip. Will be nice to get out of the house.
Dumpster Diving is the best. And those are always my favorite sales, $15 bucks for something I found out by the trash can WOOHOO!!
-
So good to hear that things are still going well with the store. Love those free garbage finds. Nothing like driving along the street and seeing a good item on the curb.
Had an OK week of sales, at least an uptick over last week. Had a great $200 sale of a unique figurine of a pig in a flag colored top hat by an artist named Christopher Lamontagne. We paid $2.95 for it as part of a lot of someone’s pig collection. I pulled a number out of the air since I couldn’t find similar sales and asked $199.95. It sold for full price. Had a few other nice sales from my most recent auction buy. Both items sold within 24 hours of posting. Two of my sales came from my Webinterpret listings, where they translate listings over to other languages. Jury is still out for me on whether it is worth continuing, but they were nice to see during this slow period.
Sales Report for: 6/5/21
Total Items in Store: 1143
Items Sold: 14
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $711.81
Net Sales (After fees): $571.13
Cost of Items Sold: $49.93
COGS Percent 8.74%
Net Profit Margin: 73.22%
Highest Price Sold: $199.95 Figurine
Average Price Sold: $50.84
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 8
Promoted Percentage: 57.14%
Average Days Listed: 246.31
Longest Listed: 1212
New items listed: 9 -
5/30/21 – 6/5/21
Total items in store: 2515
Items sold: 64
Gross sales: $3139.11 (up 36.6% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2185.97 (up 38.3% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $125.98 — 1/1 silver pack Shohei Ohtani card from the 2019 Topps Transcendent VIP party
Lowest price sold (net): $4.02 — jersey card of former Montreal Canadiens Hall of Famer Larry Robinson
Really enjoyed the podcast and everyone’s posts this week. I’ve been listing a lot over the last few weeks and finally got over 2500 listings, which is basically a high. More importantly, the items I’m listing are in the $50-$100 range and some higher. In the past, growing my inventory always meant listing lower quality items less than $20. But I am fortunate enough to be able to spend a bit more on higher quality inventory now and that is what keeps the pipeline going.
It’s important to acknowledge those little moments, but it’s on to 2600 this week.
-
5/30-6/5
Items in Store: 922
Items Sold:9 (5 Ebay, 4 on Facebook)Total Sales:212
COGS:13
Total Profit :199
Average profit 22
Average sales price 23.5The 30th-2nd were solid days, but I’m still going days at a time without a single sale. It’s been like this since April. I listed my most expensive item this week, a piece of signed numbered art for $900. It’s framed and huge, and if I get $400, I’d be happy with it. I’ve been listing a bunch of art this week because I finally got my art boxes in so I have the means to ship out art now.
Not ebay related, but I started doing focus groups through focusgroups.org and findfocusgroups.com and have had some success with both sites over the last few months. I really enjoy talking over zoom about stuff like technology and coffee and whatever and the pay ranges from around $75-$150 a session, so I’m hoping to front some of the building expenses with focusgroup income while ebay’s slow. I know I haven’t been posting, but I have been listening and it sounds like all of us in the cooky oddity boat are seeing some slow times right now.
-
Careful if you sell with eBays global shipping, potential for losing many listings.
– Your listing was reported by for offering shipping into the EU (European Union) or EEA (European Economic Area) without their permission. eBay’s Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) program offers intellectual property rights owner(s) a way to report listings that they believe infringe on their rights
– Importing certain products from other countries into the EU or EEA without the rights owner’s permission may violate their intellectual property rights. You must exclude shipping to the EU and EEA, and let buyers know they will not ship to these areas
– If you believe a mistake has been made, you will need to contact the rights owner directly. If the right’s owner approves you appeal, please have them contact us directly to reinstate your listing(s)<div>How this affects your account</div>
Because you may not have been aware of this policy, we’re sending this notice to educate you about it and ask that you follow this policy in the future.
You have 48 hours to fix listings that don’t follow this policy, or they will be ended and placed in your unsold items.
Listings that don’t follow this policy in the future will be ended.
-
@samnlee – what type of product were you notified about?
-
-
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.