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We’ve been selling items everyday and always fun to see what people are buying. Our inventory is getting so large that I’m forgetting where we found s
[See the full post at: The Numbers: July 3-9, 2022] -
Total Items in Store: 322
Items Sold: 5
Gross Sales: $204.89 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $122.52 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $6
Highest Price Sold: $45 (3 Skeins of yarn, paid $1.5o)
Average Price Sold: $30
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $15
Number of items listed this week: 27Sales were slow for me this week but I found my second best item ever – https://www.ebay.com/itm/334496986587 this fancy art glass for $14.99. Battle story – I went in to Goodwill and it was in the case, I looked at it but didn’t have time to wait in line and pay or even look up the signature before I picked up my kid. I went back two hours later and it was still there! Unfortunately it has some surface scratches which is a real bummer but hopefully I’ll get an offer. Hoping for stronger sales and listing time should be quite good this week.
Had to move in the inventory as the garage will be worked on this week. Kind of a good opportunity to find some things that weren’t listed and reorganize. Hope everyone has a good week!
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Wow, that Rollin Karg piece is really beautiful! I love the color and design on it. It took me a few scrolls through your pictures to see the date and signature, which was helpful since I never really know where to begin with identifying art. Amazing that a piece like that would end up in a Goodwill!
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Week of Jul 3 – 9
Total Items in Store: 1608 eBay, 33 Etsy
Items Sold: 9 eBay, 1 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $10 + $29.50 Commission
Total Sales: $173.13 eBay, $10.50 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $36 wig (on commission); $29 wood sculpture
Average price: $18.36
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $20
Number of items listed this week: 13I tried two more Too Good To Go purchases. The first was a bubble tea store where we got three random cups for $6. Quite yummy, but a 20 min drive. The store posts one a day, and it is very popular, so I had to press those buttons quickly and got it on my third time trying. Probably something I’ll only do every once in a while. For the second, I went back to the organic grocery store. They didn’t have much because their supplier didn’t make a delivery that day, but I got most of what I needed to make another soup. On my way out, he gave me three vegetarian pre-made salads just past their expiration date. One of them will be my lunch today.
I don’t know that I’m saving that much money, and there is only three places within reasonable driving distance, but I’m sure having fun doing it.
As far as eBay, it continues to be slow, and I’m still listing stuff for my neighbor. My attention is diverted by our planning a summer vacation drive from San Francisco to LA via PCH. It’s going to be very expensive with really nice AirBnBs, but we deserve it. I might be able to use a Too Good to Go buy while I’m there, at least in San Francisco or LA.
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Your trip sounds amazing. If you check the Too Good To Go subreddit, you can see some of the hauls from other cities. It appears that the app is pretty popular in California, so you should be able to find some nice deals using the app in San Francisco.
I don’t know that I’m saving that much money, and there is only three places within reasonable driving distance, but I’m sure having fun doing it.
I have a little more variety in what is available on TGTG being so close to Philly, and the savings start to add up once you find the good places and get used to their posting schedules. Last week, got a $4.99 dinner from an Asian place, and there was easily enough rice, chicken, seaweed salad and dumplings for two people. A bakery gave a nice sized quiche and a peach cobbler in a $3.99 bag. I don’t get takeout a lot, but when I do it’s always something I can’t cook myself, and it’s been nice to get a taste of that at scavenger prices.
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@craig-rex – My part time job is in Hamilton, closer to Phily. Sometimes I check TGTG for kicks during the one day a week I’m there, and I see much more variety. Obviously, Jay and Ryanne found lots in Manhattan. If I’m at home and increase the search by a mile or two, all sorts of stuff shows up in Staten Island.
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Had very welcome uptick in sales this week in both volume and amount. 15 items for $1084. My big sale this week was an antique gold pocket watch that sold for $550. I got the watch as part of a bookcase lot just before the pandemic. Most of the lot was a toy car collection and the watch was barely visible in the pictures. I sold the cars, but the watch was missing its crystal. I finally got is repaired two weeks ago for $150. It sold within 30 minutes of posting it. I was surprised as others of the same type were selling for closer to $300.
A few other nice sales were a Newspaper from 1865 with news about the trial of Lincoln assassination conspirators ($100), a George Bush Elite Aviator action figure ($75), and a 1943 Joy of Cooking with wartime rationing recipes ($60).
Won a few auction lots via Maxsold at two different auctions. As usual most lots went for IMO outrageous amounts. I don’t usually buy CD lots but bought a lot of about 300 because there were some fairly rare CDs that should sell well. Another lot had two Coleman lanterns, which are one of my favorite items to sell, and a final lot had a bunch of vintage clocks. I bought the clock because there was one of the GE flip clocks. It unfortunately fell apart when I plugged it in to test. 🙁 There were several others that will sell though. These should keep me busy for a week or two.
Week Ending 7/9/22
Gross Sales: $1,084.73
Net Sales: $913.00
Total Items in eBay Store: 1046
Items Sold eBay: 15
Total Items in Etsy Store: 254
Items Sold Etsy: 0Cost of Items Sold: $187.00
Highest Price Sold: $549.95 Gold Pocket Watch
Average Price Sold: $72.32
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $154Average Days Listed: 296
Longest Listed: 1348
New items listed: 1-
That’s an awesome sale on the pocket watch. Smart to pay to get it fixed for the higher price.
Interesting to hear that online auctions are still expensive. I’m kind of looking forward to the recession when things will be on sale.
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@Jay – I’m with you. You and Ryanne spoke a few times about the people who jump on the bandwagon from watching those Youtube videos then they last a few months until they realize its real work. I expect there were a lot of people who started selling during the pandemic that will now go back to work and move on.
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You had a cool week of sales. Really interesting Americana and ephemera items. Also, as @Jay said, a good reminder that paying a little extra to boost an item’s value can pay off.
Won a few auction lots via Maxsold at two different auctions. As usual most lots went for IMO outrageous amounts. I don’t usually buy CD lots but bought a lot of about 300 because there were some fairly rare CDs that should sell well.
I have looked at Maxsold auctions in my area a bunch of times (even signed up for the emails) but have never found anything interesting in my area. I don’t really check them frequently enough to say for sure, though.
I’m sitting (not literally) on a small mountain of CDs from local library sales so I’d love to know more about what you found in the pictures which made you a buyer. I’ve tried many times to be the kind of scavenger who buys large lots and picks out one or two gems, but I have learned by now that I am much more comfortable buying large quantities of individual listings at a low price, recognizing their value and selling for higher. I did have a rare CD sale last week, a $65 disc of an experimental French ensemble, so make sure to add Urban Sax (especially live albums) to your mental pile of valuable stuff.
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@Craig-rex – Yes, it has helped a few times to let a professional take a look. Problem is that their time is so expensive anything but a simple repair can make it cost prohibitive. I recently picked up a Zenith Trans-Ocean short wave radio for $20 at a thrift. In good working condition they can sell for $500+. I had such a low investment that I took it in for an estimate. It cost $100 just for him to take a look at it and the repair estimate came in at $550. I now have it listed for repair/parts at $200 and hope to get something more than I have invested. It’s a gamble. The watch guy wanted to clean the pocketwatch for $375.
I have some of my best luck on Maxsold. They are pretty popular in the DC area and there are usually 4-10 going on any given week. When I started eBay I used to be able to fill up my car at them, now I’m lucky if I win two or three items. It’s just a matter of time before things settle down though, I hope.
I’ve done well with CDs, though the lots can really be hit or miss. The first lot I bought was of 1000 CDs for $100. I pulled about 100 out to sell and sold the other 900 on Facebook for $100. So far, I’ve made over $1500 off the ones I pulled out, selling a little over half. They are easy to look up and list. I’ve also gotten lots that were complete junk, but that is all about honing the eye as to what is valuable for resell.
What I found sells is stuff that is more obscure. The best sales have been for folk (ethnic), or international artists. This new lot has a lot of them. DC is a good market for finding them since its population if very diverse and international. Signed CDs sell well also, but tough to tell until you get your hands on them.
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Total Items in Store: 372
Items Sold: 26
Gross Sales: $1225.16 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $758.79 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: about $60
Highest Price Sold: $60 (Georges Briard serving tray)
Average Price Sold: $47.12
Returns: 0Sales included an Imaginext castle play set that my son outgrew. I have no idea what we paid for it 10+ years ago, but it sold for $70 plus shipping. We also sold 4 vintage speakers that my husband pulled out of an amp cabinet. He traded a guitar for the cabinet, then sold the actual cabinet for $200 locally, and then I sold the woofers from it for about $300. I have no idea how to figure out COGS for stuff like that, lol.
Other cool sales: This pillow cover I bought at a rummage sale for 50 cents. It sold for $50. https://www.ebay.com/itm/234610383275
A stack of yearbooks from a local high school. A guy bought one of them, then asked if I would make a deal on the other 10 books I had. I sold everything for about $150 shipped. I bought the lot of them for $5 and had previously sold 2 other books for $35. Yearbooks usually sell for my fully asking price (about $30), but you have to wait until the right person comes along. I was happy to cut a deal and get them out of my house faster! https://www.ebay.com/itm/334433588746
The husband and I are experimenting with parting out dirt bikes that he bought off fb marketplace. So far, we’ve sold a gas tank off of a bike. https://www.ebay.com/itm/234610183381
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Hello everyone, I’ve been trying to ramp things back up a little since my last drop in. In the past year or so, I let the store drop from around 5000 listings down to 3400, and had long periods with no new listings added. So, I really felt when things dropped off this season. After my long rest, I am still re-learning my physical limits, and learning to respect them so I don’t wind up in so much pain every day.
Total Items in Store: 3630 listings for 5647 items
Items Sold: 42 (16 Mine, 26 Consignors)
Gross Sales: $3131.51 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: 2660.72Cost of Items Sold: $713 ($72 mine / $641 consignors)
$Highest Price Sold: $200 Brioni Sport Coat, $200 Polo Lobster Clasp Coat
Average Price Sold: $63.35
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 70-
It’s great to see you here again. It’s also great to hear that you’re recognizing your own physical limits. I cut down on my store size as well over the last six months from a high of about 3500 listings to my current level of about 2000. I shifted a good chunk of my inventory, as well as lots of unlisted inventory, to sell on consignment. With my eBay store, I now focus on higher dollar items, quick sellers and very low COGS items.
My sales on eBay are down 15 to 20 percent from last year, but my consignment sales have more than made up the gap. It was scary to shift to a different platform besides eBay, and to give up some control in how I list, and not know for sure that any of it would work out. But now that I’ve made these changes, I can only wonder why I didn’t do this a few years ago.
It’s important to appreciate the flexibility that selling on eBay gives all of us, but also key to acknowledge that continuing to feed the pipeline can become tedious and exhausting. I often think about this when coming across (most times indirectly) the “hustle and grind” mentality that is prevalent in flipping nowadays with the rise of YouTube and content creation. Once you have systems in place to buy, list, organize and ship, selling on eBay is “easy” money, but building those systems and takes a lot of time, energy and a willingness to experiment or change when things become stale or no longer work as well within eBay’s framework. It’s so good to recognize that sometimes the best solution for any of us is to take a step back, put away the electronics and focus on our own mental health.
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Good to have you back on the forum. Glad you’re getting back into it and posting again. Hope you’re feeling better also.
Since you focus so much on clothes, have you seen an uptick with people going back to work? Must have been tough during the lock-down period.
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Did you have an operation to get you back in action? Or is this a long term illness?
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My back started spasming in 2017. I’ve been through the ringer with doctors, tests and scans. They located a bone tumor inside my spinal column between my shoulder blades. Suspect its benign and been there since I was a kid, but caused early arthritis, and frequent rib dislocation and spasms. In the end, they only want to keep scanning me to watch the bone tumor (if it were to grow, it would be bad sign). They don’t want to operate unless it grows, and according to them it’s not causing the pain itself. I’m ok with that, as the surgery would involve removal of half of T6 and a cage built to hold my ribs. He told me the surgery was bad and the recovery was far worse.
The pain ranges from 2-10 every day. Not too bad in the morning for the first hour or two, I’m usually toast by 2PM. It’s moderate when I stand, much worse when I sit. Increases with any back movement or use of my arms. Migrates up and down my spine. So annoying. Hurts to sleep too, at least for me. I was always a stomach sleeper, but that now aggravates my arthritis, as does side sleeping. I try to sleep on my back, (which is comfortable) but roll over in my sleep by habit, and it starts a long nightly cycle. Some nights I can sleep the whole night. Most nights I’m up a few times. Many nights I have to do therapy in the middle of the night just to get some relief.
My latest doc put me on 6 months light duty April ’21 with physical therapy, I decided to really go for it, and only shipped packages during that time.
Then…. last fall, my wife and I became unexpected volunteer landlords for a family member who was incarcerated. The house needed to be emptied, all the belongings packed and stored. Full interior paint job (first one in 70 years) and several repairs. I did most of that alone, which used up all my energy each day for a few months.
Then…. my mother, who lives out town, needed help packing/moving, which involved several trips for me, and still more to go with the unpacking.
After all that, things got kinda slim around here, with not many new listings in so long. So now, I’m working to build inventory back up again a little. Relearning what I can actually do, and trying not to over do it. Photos are still the biggest hinderance for me, but in 2017 I really made my photo setup as hands off as possible, so it could really be much worse. I think there’s a photo of the setup somewhere on the forum.
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Yikes. Sorry to hear of this ordeal. Chronic back pain is no fun. One tip: if you have the money, pay people to do the grunt work that causes you pain!
Are you having any issues with finding quality merchandise to sell? Or are all your scavengers still able to bring you good stuff that sells well?
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I’ve had a couple people help with photos from time to time. But since it’s in our home, I’m very particular about who helps me.
I’m still working on a huge PODS consignment delivery that arrived 3 days before Christmas 2020. Full of mainly suits and sport coats and such, while no one on the planet was even wearing pants to telecommute. I’d say there are 2000 items in my lifepile.
<p class=”p1″>I’ve always called my deathpile a lifepile. I’ve wondered a few times recently how many people’s view of their pile changed when other sources dried up for a while during the pandemic.</p> -
Good point. Many people may never go back to the office. Do you see a slowdown of men buying suits because office work is becoming more remote? I guess there will always be people who like to look really nice no matter what.
I like “lifepile” if you are excited about the inventory and know it’ll sell well. I think many of us have piles of stuff we scavenged for cheap, don’t excite us, have unsure value, but are too frugal donate back.
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The menswear sales, especially suits and sport coats, dropped off severely for 2 years, and just started to upswing in the spring before summer slowdown…..so, I’m optimistic for fall. Not just the business workforce effected me, in fact my regular buyers were still shopping. Having all weddings, funerals, church services, vacations, holidays and events cancelled really was a huge part of it.
Also, there was an enormous down swing in international sales for various reasons.
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My average sales price was unusually high this week, which I think was in part due to ending and repricing a lot of listings over the last few weeks. The National Sports Card Show is coming up later this month, so maybe there are more trading card buyers right now as well. Whatever the reason, this was a really nice week of sales for summer and probably the best week I’ve had in a month or two.
My favorite sale, by far, was a book which I picked up a few years ago at a local library sale. There was a whole stack of thick Aegean archaeology books by a local publisher, all published within the last 10-12 years. I figured there are enough archaeology departments out there that some graduate student or professor would want to add these to their library but look on eBay instead of spending $80 buying it from the publisher. So I put them all up for $50 each and…nothing. No offers, no messages, nothing. I had thought about donating these books back to the library a bunch of times since they are big and heavy, and shelf space is always at a premium for me.
But after I did my end, reprice and sell similar last week, this book with a lot of words I can’t pronounce in its title sold for $40. Even after expensive priority shipping, I’ve made a profit on all those heavy archaeology books — and got a little reminder that sometimes the most important part of scavenging is waiting for the right buyer to come along.
7/3/2022 – 7/9/2022
Total items in store: 2020 (down from 2043 last week)
Items sold: 40 (32 via best offer, 3 via seller initiated offer, 23 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2950.57 (up 25% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2007.98 (up 25% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $73.76 (up 56% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 17 hours (up from 14 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $154.78 — Giancarlo Stanton 2010 Bowman 1/1 cyan printing plate rookie card
I had two of the Bowman rookie printing plates from Giancarlo Stanton (formerly known as Mike Stanton) sold one of these last week and then the other one this week for a few bucks more. The Yankees are having an all-time great season, so maybe Stanton cards will rise if they make their first World Series in quite a while, but I don’t know enough to predict or prognosticate, and I don’t really want to. I like to make a sale and move on.
Lowest price sold (net): $11.55 — Cooper Kupp and Darrell Henderson National Treasures jersey card ##/99
The Rams won the Super Bowl earlier this year, and as they were making their run, I went through my many boxes of unlisted cards in an attempt to list anything and everything Rams that might net me $10 or more. Cooper Kupp is their top wide receiver, and had an unexpected historic season last year. So that’s where the value in this plain jersey card comes from.
I have thought often about experimenting with auctions for these types of trading cards where my cost is minimal and their value to a prospective buyer is time-sensitive. Maybe that’s something I will try later this year as I continue to think about the best ways to spend my time and energy.
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@craig-rex – The library sales you speak of, is this just the bookshelf that most libraries have where they sell overstock, or do your libraries have special book sales?
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I am referring to the annual, or semiannual, sales that most libraries have. At least the libraries in NJ and PA. I use Booksalefinder to find the sales in my area. Small sales are often one day and one room of the library and the really large sales have tens of thousands of books meticulously organized into dozens of subcategories and often take a place in a larger building like a church or YMCA.
I try and go on the first day when the sale opens. Some sales can be a bit of a dogfight with the Amazon scanner people, but in general I am always able to find items that either don’t have a barcode or the scanner people don’t see the value in the item. There are always a lot of ex-library books, which are usually not worth much, but most of these sales function on donations from the community sorted by volunteers.
Prices are usually right in line with what we like to pay as scavengers, $2 or less for most items. I prefer the large sales to maximize my chances of finding stuff that I like, but the smaller sales can have plenty of gems, too.
Every so often, I have also found good deals on the shelves or carts that most libraries have. This perfume book that I found a few years ago was probably my best find from the carts.
I’m sure that these sales are not as plentiful everywhere but in my area, library sales are a real goldmine.
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Has anyone used the QR code in place of shipping labels? I paid for my eBay shipping label, generated it and a packing slip, but my print was messed up. I tried to use the QR code, but I think it was too late as I’d already generated the labels. I cancelled the labels and the QR code option was no lomnger available. I just bought postage at the post office. I tried to use these instructions.
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/New-QR-Codes-for-eBay-Labels/ba-p/31294514
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