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This week we sold twice as many items and made three time the money as last week. What changed? Nothing. As long time sellers, we have to remind ourse
[See the full post at: The Numbers: May 29-June 4, 2022] -
Everything about your post makes me so happy. The both of you deserve all your success. Congratulations.
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I concur! Love it that you guys are still scavenging and willing to connect here with us online.
Total Items in Store: 263
Items Sold: 3
Gross Sales: $203.11 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $116.27 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $34
Highest Price Sold: $52 (new pajamas, paid $28)
Average Price Sold: $46
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $96
Number of items listed this week: 6Got the garage sale done and made over $350. It was very busy and I was more tired than I remember being after the last couple so I guess I’m getting older. My husband was taken aback by the pacing crowd at the start and ran for the hills but my dad helped me and enjoyed chatting with everyone. I told my husband “those are my people” lol. Still lots left over but we take itemized deductions, so I documented all that. Problem is that I go drop off and find a big set of Royal Albert flower of the month tea cups and plates and decided to go in on that. Oops. My daughter is off this week so it’s an easy thing for her to take photos of.
Ebay continues to be slow but listing wasn’t my focus this week. I now have some clean up to do in the garage and one more load to take to the thrift store. I also have 3 bins of clothing to sell on Mercari.
On another note, a clean out / moving company that is well run opened a consignment store in a portion of the defunct Sears mall location near my house. I finally remembered to go in there and check it out. Most of the stuff was pretty large and fussy but I would have bought a few things (art, P Barn throw pillows) at a better price. They had put that the price reduces on certain dates over time and even after the last date it was a little pricey – definitely for resale. They have a space for live music and will be doing auctions. Should be interesting to see how they do. I’m used to better prices but they did have some really cool art in there and I don’t think people are shopping it to heavily. They did not have a lot of smalls, which made me wonder where that stuff went – booth people might be in on the food chain. Also had some designer clothing selling for $75. A reminder that there is some serious money in this town. However, I like what the run of the mill ’50-’60s ranch houses produce.
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Items in Store 1921
Items Sold 28
Total Sales $835.00
COGS $88.00
Total Profit $747.00
Average profit $26.68
Average sales price $29.82
New Listings 57
Items scavenged 38
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 49A much better week and an excellent week compared to previous Junes. I spent alot of time this week peeling non-removable price stickers off of anime DVD’s. Due to the thin plastic cover, I can’t use my heat gun. Ugh…is that really necessary to put a HUGE sticker like that on a dvd that is gonna be generically priced??? Special note – packing tape works amazingly at removing residual adhesive from DVD cases. Quicker and easier than goo-gone or alcohol.
At yard sales this weekend I bought a huge Box of CD’s. Normally I don’t buy this kind of stuff but…
1: This was my era – 90’s pop/rock/rap. The good stuff.
2: They were CHEAP.
about 120 CD’s and I paid $7. Now the problem with CD’s is that most are not worth much. So how do I tackle this pile to maximize value and minimize my time? I started by creating a generic template that had all of my basic info and my generic $3.99 price. I am charging for shipping, which will greatly slow my STR BUT people do still buy games/cd’s and pay for shipping.
I started by doing a high level scan for valuable or rare cd’s. I scanned all the bar codes – if it is a common cd with alot of listings it went in my generic $3.99 pile. If it could be priced higher than that for any reason I put it in my research pile. Then I had about 25 BMG subscription CD’s that irritatingly did not have barcodes. I set those aside to research and list individually. It took about 30 minutes to sort out all the generic junk.
Next I researched and listed all the BMG cd’s. I timed myself and I average 1 minute per cd. Most were generic but there were a few I priced at $10- 20. Same for the higher priced CD’s – about a minute a listing. I still need to do the generic barcode cd’s, but with the template it is crazy fast – less than 20 seconds per cd. I just have to scan the barcode and the listing auto fills the title & item specifics and all my other stuff is already filled out.
Photography is very fast – about 10 seconds per cd. The uploading again is the bottleneck. I wish there was a bulk upload photography tool. The only benefit is that I plan for my uploading to be done in my idle time (watching TV, in line at restaurant, bedtime wind down instead of games, etc)
So far I’ve listed 53 CD’s for a total of $334 and an average list price of $6.30. I charge for shipping and my discount will pretty much cover all my fees. I’m using the buy more save more percentage discount at 5%,10%,15%.
So once I am finished I’ll have 4 hours invested and I’ll make around $530. Not a bad investment of my time at all – will just take time to sell the pipeline. I’m hoping the added bonus of extra sales movement on my store will positively affect my search rank.
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Great post – I am often hesitant to sell lower cost items because of time suck and storage issues, but it looks like you have you system down pretty solid. Â It’s also always helpful when you enjoy the things you are listing.
Tell me more about using a heat gun to remove labels. Â I am intrigued.
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Well to be honest, This really was a poor use of my time. Poor sell thru rates and low sales prices. It will take years to sell everything.
I wanted to challenge myself and I was hoping there were some gems in there. Also, it was kinda fun. Will I take another huge lot of cd’s? Nope.for removing price stickers, on hard goods ad most boxed items a heat gun is awesome. Heat up the sticker until the thermal surface changes color and then peel right off with no residue.
Vhs cardboard sleeves will deform a bit and dvd/game cases the plastic insert cover will distort and/or melt.
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CDs are one of the areas of scavenging that I know really well. I started my scavenging journey by selling the undervalued CDs I would find at the Princeton Record Exchange in Princeton, NJ, which is one of the best independent record stores in the country. I grew up in that area and I live pretty far away now, but still make the trip a few times a year for the nostalgia and to sell off any extra stuff I’ve accumulated since my last trip. They take everything you sell them which is a nice contrast to a lot of record stores which have less space and are much more selective about what they buy. I’m overdue to make another trip there soon, it’s been a few years primarily because of COVID.
I still like to buy and sell CDs when I can, but I’ve become more selective about what I list now. I really try and focus on CDs and box sets which have a track record of selling on eBay for $20 or higher in the last year. Discogs has really good historical sales data for CDs and LPs which is helpful. I suppose this is what bar code scanning does, but I’m stubborn and stuck in my ways and don’t want to scan things!
I’m not sure how expensive it is to sell on Discogs, but it might be worth looking into since I know you have a lot of media items and you don’t need to upload pictures for each listing. You just provide an estimated condition.
I can see how the different promotions that eBay now offers could encourage buyers to buy multiple CDs from your store. I had a few different regular buyers when I sold CDs and DVDs who would always buy four, five or more CDs and DVDs at a time. One was in Australia. Seeing those orders was always really exciting. But the best promotion for most CDs is usually patience — they are such long-tail items, and sometimes you’re better off waiting a year (or more) for the right buyer to come along than cutting the price 50% (or more) to get a sale. Though with the $10 and under items, I’m sure that saving a few bucks is what convinces buyers to make the purchase.
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I get what you are doing, and I’m sure that you are checking each CD to make sure it matches the cover and that it isn’t scratched up. Any time I had VHS tapes or cassettes, I felt as if I had to test each out, so they take way too long. CDs and DVDs are different, so just a quick check would work.
For the percentage discount, are you trying to do this across listings? I thought that type of discount could only be done for a single listing with multiple items unless you set up your whole account to provide it. Or, is there something I don’t know about?
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There are a couple different ways to create the kind of discount @retro-treasures-wv described. Probably the easiest is if you go into promotions manager and click on the blue dropdown and click on volume pricing, where you can set up the tiered discount to operate across either 500 items you select or by including/excluding certain categories using rules.
You can also do the same thing by creating a coupon (also through promotions manager) and set it to public. There are a bunch of different ways to discount using the coupon, like xx% off or $xx off over $50, but you can also set it up to buy 1, get 1 xx% off.
I’m sure that coupons work better with some items than others, and for some buyers and not others. I’m a big fan of the feature and I send every single buyer a 20% off coupon (you can just add it to the packing slip, it prints as a QR code) and every few months I’ll create a public coupon. I think it works well for a lot of buyers where price is the factor in them purchasing and also for items which receive a lot of watchers or offers.
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Thanks for this explanation. I’m saving the information for later.
I have a stamp collection from when I was a kid. I have been thinking of selling it in small groups or one by one, but I would want to encourage multiple purchases. I still want to ship with tracking, and the best way to have a buyer interested in making a purchase with the higher shipping is to have that discount.
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@Retro I was looking for someone like you to buy all of our CDs. One picker bought a few of my husband’s 80s metal CDs. I scanned them all and none were worth $10. I did find a couple of rare cassettes and listed those. I am in awe of your speediness listing!
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Wow, you are very efficient at listing. I know how to do templates on the ebay website on my computer and I see now how to scan barcodes on the app on my phone, but I can’t seem to figure out how to use a template on my phone app.  Are you doing the templates and barcode scanning on the phone app or do you have a barcode scanner hooked up to your computer? Thanks!
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Wow, you are very efficient at listing. I know how to do templates on the ebay website on my computer and I see now how to scan barcodes on the app on my phone, but I can’t seem to figure out how to use a template on my phone app.  Are you doing the templates and barcode scanning on the phone app or do you have a barcode scanner hooked up to your computer? Thanks!
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@retro-treasures-wv – Good job on those CDs. I’ve sold many in the past and you’re much faster than I am. If you can find the right lot they can be quite profitable. I bought a lot of over 1000 a few years ago and they are still selling. Last week sold another one for $49. It was a lot of work to go through them all. Only listed 76 out of the lot, but resold the unlisted ones for the same price I bought the lot for.
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Week of May 29 – Jun 4
Total Items in Store: 1609 eBay, 33 Etsy
Items Sold: 11 eBay, 1 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $5 + $83 Commission
Total Sales: $409.61 eBay, $14.30 Etsy; Includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $101.60 Commemorative Bicentennial Framed Print
Average price: $35.33
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 21Glad to hear your coffee shop is doing so well. When I checked it out last summer, I saw several coffee shops on that main road, but only one or two had a crowd. Broad Porch was one of them. It’s a wonderful, classy place, and I’m happy for you two that it is doing so well.
I signed up for a Broad Porch coffee subscription a few months ago, but then my husband brought home some coffee that a coworker didn’t want. We are now swimming in coffee beans, but the alternative would not be good, so I’m not complaining!!
I also had a good week. In 2020, I purchased a large lot of art that I listed over the following few months. This week, three pieces from it sold including my highest sale!
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 In 2020, I purchased a large lot of art that I listed over the following few months. This week, three pieces from it sold including my highest sale!
Nice! what kind of art is it?
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Jay –
It was a varied lot from small to large, prints to paintings, one offs to mass produced, new to old, and damaged to good condition. I listed the good stuff piece by piece. I took out the prints and glass from damaged items, and lotted up the frames to sell as a group. It was about 70 pieces, which ended up in 56 listings.
I just looked up in my records, and I bought it in Feb 2021 (not 2020). The auctioneer initially auctioned off pieces that people specifically requested, and then just auctioned the rest of the stuff altogether. No one wanted that much, so I got it for a $5 bid plus $0.75 premium. I’ve made about $800 total, which will be about $980 once I add in these new sales.
I wonder, but the previous owner must have been a seller (maybe online, but probably flea market or second hand store) who left the business or passed away.
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Weekly sales 5/29 – 6/04
Total items: 10461
Items sold: 250
New items listed: 350
Gross sales: $1,966.71
Net sales: $1,253.61
New buyers: 167
Repeat buyers: 10My average sales price was down this week but I had a lot of people buy more than one item so that always helps profits when I can ship them all for the price of one. Just trying to get through summer and hopefully see sales jump later this year.
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I had a very satisfying scavenging week. Nice weather, a postal holiday and a good week of sales are a great combination.
I took one day this week and spent a good chunk of it scavenging the same way that I started, by hunting for the gems at library sales and thrift stores. I have really enjoyed these trips even though they are not as profitable as spending a few hours searching eBay auctions for this week’s batch of trading card purchases. The library sale I went to this past Saturday had a lot of buyers with Amazon scanners. They are relentlessly fast. But I still filled two large boxes worth of books and media that their scanners didn’t see the value in. It felt very rewarding to find those items. Buying the cards that make up most of my inventory is a similar process, but sometimes it’s nice to go out in the world and get your hands dirty.
This has happened every time I’ve gone out to scavenge these last four weeks. I don’t remember finding this much good stuff when I made these trips pre-COVID. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places. I am also much more confident in the kinds of items I’m looking for now.
Regardless of why, I am accumulating a nice backlog of stuff to list for when the weather gets colder. The cards are still the priority for me and as profitable as ever, at least the types that I’m selling, and my consignment sales are also going very well. But it never hurts to diversify or have a backup plan. Especially when buy-in costs are $2 or less per item. Worst case, the local library will get a nice donation from me this time next year.
5/29/2022 – 6/4/2022
Total items in store: 2118 (down from 2152 last week)
Items sold: 55 (38 via best offer, 3 via seller initiated offer, 18 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $3672.66 (up 31% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2709.39 (up 40% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $66.78 (up 48% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 13.5 hours (down from 15 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $169.00 — Jameson Taillon 1/1 superfractor rookie card BGS 9.5
This card sold during the Yankees game on Friday while Taillon was pitching a no-hit game. He’s apparently been pitching amazing all season, and a big part of why the Yankees are having their best season in years. So maybe I should have waited until the world series to sell this card. But I’d rather just sell now. Who knows what the future will bring. I purchased the card last October for about $75. That’s about my average buy-in for these cards which sell for $200 and up. This card has a gem mint grade, but it’s really the 1/1 serial number and type of insert design (superfractor) which make it valuable to collectors.
The superfractor is probably the most popular non-autographed insert manufactured today and the prices for the best players reach pretty astronomical numbers. Here’s an article from 2019 about the sale of the top superfractor from that year, Wander Franco. The autographed superfractor sold for over $60,000 and the non-autographed superfractor for $10,000. It’s just a few years later but I’m sure those cards would sell for even higher prices now. Franco is already one of the best players in baseball at just 21 years old.
I had a much larger sale than this (in terms of total $$) with a buyer who purchased 20 (!!!) basketball cards from me 2 and 3 at a time Saturday and Sunday. Mostly autographs with low serial numbers with a variety of all the top young basketball players. It was the one time I wished I had eBay notifications turned on because I would have been hearing cha-ching all day long on Saturday. I just shipped that package out today and will be so relieved when it’s marked as delivered.
Lowest price sold (net): $9.54 — Art Howe 2004 buyback autograph /57
This card is an example of the creative way that some companies give new life to all the worthless 80s and 90s cards — have the player sign some of those old cards and insert them into new packs and sets. Probably more cost-effective than manufacturing new sets and inserts, too. It’s rare you see the most famous star players sign these buyback cards, since they don’t sign as much and their autographs are always held back for the expensive sets. So these types of cards are rarely worth much. But I like buying them for a few bucks each and selling them for $10 to $20.
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@Craig-rex – Cool sale on the Taillon card. For some reason your link didn’t take. I was able to find it on Terapeak though. Interesting that Terapeak has the sale price for $210 and clicking through shows it sold for $239.
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You found it already, but here is the correct link — for some reason I can’t edit my original post. If you used the same Terapeak search I did, then you’ll also see the original listing I purchased from back in October for $76. Funny how a few months can change the “value” so significantly.
Terapeak’s sold price of $210 is the correct one. I was running a markdown sale when the card sold, so the listing was discounted from $299 to $239, which must be why that shows up as the sold price when you click through.
Because I accepted an offer, this sale is not included in my promotion sales numbers for that particular markdown sale. I guess I can understand why, but this sale probably doesn’t happen without the markdown and it would be nice if the markdown numbers actually reflected that.
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Week Ending 6/4/22
Total Items in eBay Store: 1049Â Â Total Items in Etsy Store: 244
Items Sold eBay: 7Â Â Items Sold Etsy: 0
Gross Sales eBay (W\O shipping and tax): $383.91
Net Sales (After fees) eBay: $315.26Cost of Items Sold: $63.50
COGS Percent 20.14%Highest Price Sold: $200.00 Russian Lacquer Box
Average Price Sold: $54.84
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00Average Days Listed: 823
Longest Listed: 1302
New items listed: 6You guys with your NY street scavenging. Always setting the bar high. Love it!
Still slow but had a nice sale with the Russian lacquer box. I’ve had it for several years and was originally asking almost $700, finally couldn’t resist an offer of $200. I paid $58 for it which is why my COGs are so high.
Had another nice sale with an American Flyer train catalog mailer from 1928. It was in pretty rough shape, but someone was still willing to pay $40.
Two of our local auction houses that went virtual during the pandemic had their first live auctions last week. A good sign of the times, I hope.
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Wow, that lacquer box you sold is really beautiful! It reminds me a lot of the matryoshka dolls that my mom had on the bedroom mantle growing up. I wonder whatever happened to them…
I’m assuming you knew this was worth something immediately since you paid $58 for it. What distinguishes your lacquer box from one like this which only sold for $60 and is also signed, dated, etc?
PS – I hope your buyer of the Topps Finest basketball cards was happy with their cards. I took a look at your sold listing after your post in last week’s thread, and the listing was really well done. If you sell any more cards in the future, and need any shipping or storage supplies, please let me know. I’ve got almost every type of sleeve and case and envelope, and it would make me really happy to help out a fellow scavenger.
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I did know that older lacquer boxes can be valuable. In college I was a Russian Culture and Language major so I have a mild familiarity with Russian collectibles. Boxes made prior to the fall of the wall can sell for decent money. This one wasn’t in great shape, but I expected it to go for far more than it did, having come from a quality collective and having been made by an artist that even today can be found on the web. I bought two at the same auction and sold the first almost immediately for $350. If things weren’t so slow right now I’d have held out for more. At least I talked the buyer up from $125 to $200.
I was happy with that sale. Quite a come down from the original value I thought they had, but this sale covered the cost of my experiment and I still have to two huge boxes to sell, though they probably won’t make much more. As with a lot of test buys like this, I learned a lot and that makes it worth it. I’ll make better buys in the future. Thanks as always for your generosity.
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Oh I wanted to share two items that sold that were great scavenger reaffirming sales.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265202635124
POGS – the gift that keeps giving. I was already WAY into the profit on a big purchase of pogs, but this is the first of these star trek pogs sets to sell. I priced high and finally sold a set on offer for $25. I have 19 more of them and they’ll sell eventually.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265693717432
Vintage ugly sheets new in package – Who knew they would be gold? Trick question – THIS GUY knew! I’ve sold 6 of these vintage sheets for $170 so far. I tell ya, vintage Laura Ashley has been good to me. Prior to this I bought vintage wallpaper and made $175 on that.
And scavenging this week I went big and spent $150 on a photography equipment lot. Initially I was looking at one box that had some flash equipment right by the cash register. I saw the $150 price tag and audibly laughed and started to walk away. Then the cashier lady said the box behind it was included too. It was a Novatron studio flash set. I’ve sold that before and knew it was money…but still not at $150. So looked closer at the flash equipment, added ballpark values up for everything and came to about $300-350. I even tested the novatron set – mint and fully working. Still, I was on the fence. As I started to step away the lady said “Oh yeah, the laundry basket is included too.” Inside the laundry basket was a new in package $100 light filter and a Vintage Linhof West Germany Tripod, as well as a bunch of filter odds/ends. The Linhof tripod is big bucks too. So yeah, at that point I handed over my credit card for the $150. LoL!
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Love the story about the photography equipment and everything that came along with it. A great reminder to always ask questions if we think there might be value there. Sometimes employees have a lot of discretion to sweeten a deal and get something sold. I can’t help but wonder if you hemmed and hawed for a few more minutes what else she might have thrown in to close the sale!
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