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Scavenging has been around since the beginning of human existence. It’s human instinct to hunt for something that will keep life going. So when we sta
[See the full post at: The Numbers: January 16-22, 2022] -
01/16/22 – 01/22/22
Total Items In Store: 4226 (was 4238 previously listed)
Items Sold: 13
Total Sales: $ 618.41 (no shipping included)
Highest Price Sold: $ 100 (Yo Yo)
Average Price Sold: $ 47.57
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 95.39
Number of items listed: 0Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales were slow at the beginning of the week, then picked up. There was a run on Mens Ice Skates. I have sold 5 pairs since Friday. That is nearly a 72% sell thru rate for Modern Mens Ice Skates. I only had 7 pair and 5 sold in 3 days!. One guy did a local pickup. He told me he went to Play it Again Sports and they only had Size 6 and smaller. I had a run on Rollerblades in April of 2020 when the Pandemic started. I sold about 30 pairs of Rollerblades in April of 2020.
Focus for the week : No real focus this week. I spent time with friends and family and didn’t do much this week except ship and do a little shopping. I feel like I am slacking, but you need to give yourself some time off every once in a while to just enjoy things.
Scavenge of the week: Picked up a Pioneer CD changer for somewhat cheap. I think I can get $100 for it.
Thoughts for the week: I recorded the first episode for my youtube channel. The editing is still in process by my friend. I have my outline\thoughts on paper for episode 2.
Mark S
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$100 for a yo-yo, wow! What type of yo-yo was it? Great for you.
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It was a 1940’s Whistling Yo-Yo.
I passed it up at first at the estate sale because most yo-yo’s I have seen don’t sell for much. But you have to look closely at items when you are in a house with obviously old stuff. This house had a lot of mid-century items, so I went slowly and tried not to miss items like this. Very cheap at the estate sale because they didn’t know what it was.
Mark
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Total Items in Store: 268
Items Sold: 4
Gross Sales: $200.68 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $128.55 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $65
Highest Price Sold: $66 (New pajama pants)
Average Price Sold: $44
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0Life is calming down a bit for now. I hope to get back to listing this week. I also need to organize and consolidate my inventory. I should probably set aside some smalls that my daughter would like to photograph.
I like how Ebay has the functionality to download the yearly totals. I can also group these by category. So it might be unnecessary to order EZ auction tracker for this year? I think all I need to do for taxes is to edit the Ebay 2021 spreadsheet and then add COGS.
No fun scavenging for me lately but still lots of piles. I’m really enjoying that Lavender Clothesline on Youtube has moved over to mostly hard goods – similar to things I would buy and dishes on how well things are selling or not these days. I really like that she will say what she would pass on – wish I had seen that before my newbie shopping days. Miss the podcast you guys!
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Fellow scavengers: Here’s an episode of Judy Justice (new Judge Judy show) where an eBay seller takes sham buyer to court: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B09HGJMQ9X/ref=atv_3p_fre_c_VP02MC_2_1
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Weekly sales 1/16 – 1/22
Total items 6488
Items sold 179
New items listed 350
Gross sales $1,873.42
Net sales $1,307.00
New buyers 130
Repeat buyers 6Etsy
Orders 23
Gross sales $235.00
Net sales $199.75Gross sales total $2,108.42
Net sales total $1,506.75I’m having a better January than December. Not bad for selling a bunch of hats and patches.
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Thanks for posting your numbers. I find it motivating to see what can be achieved with large numbers of listings!
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No problem! I think it comes down to how much value are you adding to your store each day in order to get a percentage of that back in sales consistently. I do low value/high volume and some people spend more time dealing with finding and processing high value/lower volume.
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I do low value/high volume and some people spend more time dealing with finding and processing high value/lower volume.
This is a great way to verbalize the choice. Spend time listing long tail items that are cheap and plentiful to find…OR spend time searching for rare and high dollar items.
But it’s all time. Havent found a short cut.
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Items in Store 1590
Items Sold 29
Total Sales $1,083.00
COGS $82.00
Total Profit $1,001.00
Average profit $34.52
Average sales price $37.34
New Listings 46
Items scavenged 0
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 49
Sourcing Allotment 21Well that was a nice rebound after the abysmal week last week. Nothing sold over $100, but alot of things over $50. I put my nose to the grindstone and cranked out my 40 listings on the weekend. It feels kinda good to have that goal. On Saturday once I crossed 40 listings created I could walk away satisfied and enjoy the rest of the day with the family. On Sunday I had a clear goal of photographing everything listed the day before. Now I just need to get better at creating a few listings here and there throughout the week so I don’t have to do all 40 on the weekend.
No scavenging again this week. The omicron virus is CRAZY in WV right now and we’re staying home as much as possible. I’ve isolated myself at work by moving to a temporary desk in an out of the way corner of the shop floor (in a huge high ceiling warehouse style building) rather than being in the 20×20 tin can with 5 other people in the engineering building. At one point 2 weeks ago more than 25% of our facility was out with the virus. The “safety” protocols are a joke now too. They have people come back to work after 4-5 days from onset of symptoms and half-ass wear a mask. So to recap – during the lockdown when literally NOONE here was sick at all, they enacted work from home protocols, shifted schedules, spread out breaks/lunches etc. When we are TRULY in a severe outbreak…they do nothing.
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the lockdown when literally NOONE here was sick at all, they enacted work from home protocols, shifted schedules, spread out breaks/lunches etc. When we are TRULY in a severe outbreak…they do nothing.
As a close neighbor to you, I can attest that people are over the virus. Whether it’s because of their political beliefs or exhaustion from two years of having their life turned upside down. Seems people are all just assuming they’ll get the virus and rolling the dice with no vaccine. In our small county, there are several deaths a week to COVID. (Though people often say they died “with COVID” but actually died from other causes)
Glad you’re being safe.
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I’ve been taking inventory due to my county assessing a tax on all inventory on hand this year. I never kept a running total of inventory – I logged my COGs at the time I sold something. The original cost I keep on a little sticker on the item. Its been taking me forever but on the plus side, I’ve been adjusting prices, getting rid of some of the bad buys that have haunted me and been listed forever and cross posting to other platforms where some things sell better. I’ve been doing this while also trying to double my profits over last year. It seems the magic number of new listings to keep the sales coming in at a good volume for me to reach my goal is 40 new listings a week. I’m amazed at resellers who claim to list that many in a single day! I feel like I would be drowning in money if I was able to list that much in a day.
While Ebay is my main platform, Poshmark has really taken off this month, giving me my best Poshmark month since I started posting there back in June 2020. I’m assuming perhaps people got Poshmark gift cards over Christmas. Or people have realized how much cheaper Priority postage is over there compared to other platforms – $7.65 Priority up to 5 lbs no matter where in the US it ships.
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I create 75 listings every day 5 days a week in less than 4 hours a day. 60 patches and 15 hats. I do a quick search of the patch or hat I’m listing to see if someone else has the same exact item to determine if I need to compete on price, then I go to my store and select a hat or patch to “sell similar” from and then I upload the photos, change the title and price and click save as draft. Then I launch 40 patch listings and 10 hat listings every morning 7 days a week which takes about 5 minutes.
If I was selling everything, I’d be doing good to get half as many listings up since I’d have to start most listings from scratch and every item I sold would possibly be a different way I’d have to ship. I have the same size box for all hats and envelopes for patches. I might do just as well selling random stuff in less quantity and just spending time finding higher-priced items and figuring out how to ship them, but niching down was attractive to me since I can set systems up and focus on getting more listings up instead of worrying about finding the next valuable item to list. It was more “fun” back when I was an everything seller since I never knew what I was going to find, but niching down has been more profitable for me and I’m now doing this as my sole income so profitability is more important to me than having fun doing this as a side gig. I also feel like I’m putting less time into it to get more reward so that’s fun in its own sense
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millionairedojo 75 listings every day 5 days a week WOW well done, that’s a lot of listings. How do you ship the patches, letter mail, I’m guessing?
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Yeah, eBay isn’t offering the standard envelope tracking service in the patch category right now so I have to ship with stamp.
I get a few item not received cases every month and I usually end up having to refund the buyer without getting the patch back but it’s still a lot cheaper than paying for first class tracking at almost $4 and every patch seller ships with stamps so you can’t compete with them and charge the customer for shipping.
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Week of Jan 16 – 22
Total Items in Store: 1408 eBay, 30 Etsy
Items Sold: 11 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $27 + $15.80 Commission
Total Sales: $235.96 eBay, Includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: $53 for Dental control box
Average price: $21.45
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 11In the subject of COVID, I found out that the lady across the street from us passed away over a week ago from the virus. She had refused to get vaccinated and had been in the hospital for a few weeks. The ambulance had come by when we were away for our year end trip, so we had no idea. I have several fond memories of her through the years. She was a very nice lady who was active in town and state politics.
Anyway, her husband has asked me to sell her stuff on commission. He had told me in the past that she was a bit of a shopping addict, and now he wants to declutter and eventually sell the house. This is now my project over the next half year or so. I suppose I still need to buy new inventory, but the pressure is off.
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Jay, Your post was very philosophical and literary and brought back good memories. It reminded me of those little epiphanies I had when I first started listening to the podcast three or four years ago which made me feel like I found my tribe of people in this little corner of the internet who understood me and the way I think.
I’ve definitely shared those feelings of wonder, and fear, as I’ve moved further and further into my trading cards niche. I know the ins and outs of what’s valuable and what’s not and why, so I don’t have the fear that prices are going to suddenly bottom out. There are too many hands in the pot buying and selling and collecting and flipping for the market to completely dry up, and I have my own particular niche of the unique and rare cards within the niche. There is definitely more variability in ultra high end ($1000+ cards) and specific types of graded cards (like base cards or regular rookie cards) where the only criteria are how high the grade is and how many graded cards in each condition are in circulation. But I follow the basic principle of buy low and sell high. I will be fine.
Still, sometimes I can’t help but think: what will I do if all the good deals dry up? Because it seems illogical that I will keep finding auctions that end for far below established value, or auctions with bad titles, or large lots with a few valuable cards which cover the cost of the whole purchase. Even considering that I put in the work to find these deals, and considering my knowledge. There are lots of other buyers and sellers searching for the same deals I am, many of them with deeper pockets or who use technological advantages like bots to their advantage.
But every week I win plenty of auctions at bargain prices, and the pipeline continues.
1/16/2022 – 1/22/2022
Total items in store: 3323 (up from 3320)
Items sold: 56 (34 via best offer, 7 via seller initiated offer)
Gross sales: $2826.49 (up 2% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2068.30 (up 0.2% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $8.55 — Chris Conley autographed rookie jersey #09/10
The buyer of this card shares a name with the player. Or maybe it’s THE Chris Conley? Conley is not a star player, but not everyone gets to be the very best. However, since he’s not the best, hi
Highest price sold (net, total for all 3 listings): $481.55 — 1 2 3 autographed rookies of young Lakers star Talen Horton-Tucker all from the same draft set
Talen Horton-Tucker is an average player whose profile is boosted from the fact that he plays on the Lakers and is still very young (just 21) as he applied to the NBA Draft after his freshman year in college. He also wasn’t a very high draft pick, so he doesn’t have cards in every set like the higher draft picks too. Basically a perfect storm of high card values.
This was a particularly nice sale as it stemmed from a question from the buyer about condition of the most expensive of the 3 cards. I usually ignore those questions because it’s always best to ignore buyers, especially when the information they’re asking for is almost always in the picture or description.
But this buyer wrote a full, intelligible paragraph, so I wrote a similar length response and we ended up having a nice back and forth of 3 or 4 messages.
Then the buyer spent another ~$200 the next day. I gave them some pretty generous discounts (50% off on the second batch of purchases) but buyers who spend $500+ are the best kind of buyers, and there will always be more opportunities to get new inventory.
I’ve noticed an uptick in those kinds of positive interactions in the last month, with a few buyers sending me very nice messages about how grateful they were for the little gifts I sent with their purchases and long, thoughtful feedback.
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I’ve definitely shared those feelings of wonder, and fear, as I’ve moved further and further into my trading cards niche. I know the ins and outs of what’s valuable and what’s not and why, so I don’t have the fear that prices are going to suddenly bottom out.
We got some great advice about a decade ago from an older seller. He said if you take 15 minutes to read a webpage or wikipedia article about an item/category, you probably know more about that topic than 50% of the planet. If you spend a couple hours doing internet research about that topic, you probably know more than 90% of people. And if you read a couple books or spend a week doing research, you probably know more than 99% of people on that item.
Lesson: it’s easy to become an “expert” because most people don’t take the time. Knowledge is really key to scavenging.
Craig, your posts always remind me that you make money because you’ve done those deep dives. Anyone could do it, but 99.9% of people will never know what you know about sports cards. That’s the barrier to entry.
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“And if you read a couple books or spend a week doing research, you probably know more than 99% of people on that item.”
@Jay – This is why I am developing a nice library of collectors books. With all the information available on the Internet, it only scratches the surface of what’s available in books, perhaps especially for collecting. I have books on beer steins, penny banks, christmas ornaments, pottery, money, etc. Now if only my memory was what it used to be and I could hold on to what I read…-
This is a guy I enjoy watching on eBay. His challenge for 2022 is to become a vintage toy expert outside his personal favorite collectors items.
To summarize the video, in order to become an expert he decided he needed to physically put his hands on as much stuff as quickly as possible to build up his knowledge. He bundled up all his acquired random low value video game stuff and sold it as a lot for $1200 cash to free up capital. Then He went to a big time toy dealer and said “load me up with vintage toy junk for $1200”.
he’ll earn back his money plus plenty more while doing the research on this big lot plus gain an invaluable amount of hands on knowledge. Pretty smart!
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Summary
Total Gross sales: $1744.06
Net sales: $1560.12
Total sales: 15
The tide has turned – had a great week last week. After several weeks of uncharacteristically low sales, this week had 2 very large sales that brought me up for air. The big sale was a vintage surf movie poster “The Endless Summer” for $799.95. I picked this up in a large lot of posters from an online auction in early December. The lot cost me $4. The poster was up less than 24 hours.
We don’t see furniture much as we don’t have a lot of space, but picked up a nice pair of night tables at an estate sale for $50 and resold them on Facebook Marketplace for $400.
Finally had a nice sale on Etsy, too. Sold an antique spelter bust of Beethoven for $199.95. I’d had this listed on eBay for almost 2 years fending off several low ball offers. Picked it up at an auction for $13.
We stopped by an estate sale on it’s last hour last week and loaded up the van with lots of great collectibles. Surprised a lot of the items were still available. We bought a small cabinet and had to come back the next day to pick it up. The owner allowed us to walk through one more time and gave us some great deals on the remaining items.
The full numbers are below. I need to pare this down a bit, but I like statistics and each data point is nice to track, for me. Probably not so much for others.
Week Ending 1/15/22
Total Items in eBay Store: 1085
Total Items in Etsy Store: 89
Items Sold eBay: 12
Items Sold Etsy: 2
Gross Sales eBay (W/O shipping and tax): $1,524.16 *includes FB Marketplace
Net Sales (After fees) eBay: $1,365.29
Gross Sales Etsy (W/O shipping and tax): $219.90
Net Sales (After fees) Etsy: $194.83
Cost of Items Sold: $99.27
COGS Percent 6.36%
Net Profit Margin: 83.76%
Highest Price Sold: $799.95 Vintage surf poster
Average Price Sold: $124.58
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $440.00
Sold via promoted listings: 10
Promoted Percentage: 71.43%
Average Days Listed: 478.07
Longest Listed: 1713
New items listed: 12-
We stopped by an estate sale on it’s last hour last week and loaded up the van with lots of great collectibles. Surprised a lot of the items were still available.
This relates to Jay’s post above about becoming an expert, for sure. There are definitely a lot more hands in the scavenging pot, so to speak, than there were five years ago and even two years ago. All the different platforms and apps for selling and looking up sold prices have made it so you don’t really need any prior knowledge or intuition or special equipment to sell online — just a phone and a barcode or the eBay app.
But more and more things slip through the cracks that way. I’ve seen it in my main niche of trading cards, and I used to see it when I scavenged at library book sales. I’m sure it’s true with vintage items and unique collectibles, too.
A little bit of knowledge has become a huge advantage in the scavenging world, and as long as you’re regularly listing your finds (not just sourcing) and your prices are reasonable, it’s a solid foundation for a business.
I’m impressed by the detail in your numbers (though I agree it’s a bit much) and it’s always interesting to see how different things sell on one platform but not another. This is something that I see regularly in the trading card world as well. Different types of buyers use different platforms, and figuring out what sells where is just another step in the scavenging process these days.
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