The Numbers: October 9-15, 2022

[Jay]

It’s good to be back home and into our daily rhythm. Always good to get away and always good to come home. Our cafe and roastery is in high gear as to
[See the full post at: The Numbers: October 9-15, 2022]

[The_SEAM_Store]

Total Items in Store: 3781 listings for 5731 items
Items Sold: 76
Gross Sales: $5010.46 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $3616.20
Cost of Items Sold: $901 ($165 mine / $736 consignors)
$Highest Price Sold: $220 Coach Luggage
Average Price Sold: $65.93
Returns: 4
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $398
Number of items listed this week: 98

[Jay]

Nice sales. Glad they keep coming. Guess the people in suits will likely survive this recession more than other workers 🙂

[The_SEAM_Store]

This is the first my sport coats have started to sell since 2019, still holding my breath. I really would like to move a pile of them out of here. I still have several hundred suits and jackets to get listed if things keep moving.

 

[Ryanne]

–sidenote–

Just a heads up that we have some re-stocked merch on our store (Beanies, 5 Panel Caps, Travel Mugs) and we have some new coffees! A very limited edition Costa Rican and a new Half Caf Blend, Almost Average. Woo! Help keep us busy over at the roastery!

[ChristineR]

Total Items in Store: 499
Items Sold:  23
Gross Sales Ebay: $648.34 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $403.52 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $73 + 1 item ours
Highest Price Sold: $90 New hardware (quantity 12 items)
Average Price Sold: $28.19
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: About $45 (RA and thrift)
Number of items listed this week:  36

Congrats on the success of the coffee shop once again!  I see on Insta how gorgeous the fall colors are back East and hope to see it maybe next fall.  Not in the cards for this year.

I have been reading in the news about people getting cautious about spending.  It will be an interesting fourth quarter.  I’m happy with my sales but have a bunch of low dollar Halloween stuff that hasn’t sold on Mercari and Ebay.  After tomorrow I should have good time to list this week.  I kind of let myself source quite a bit and need to get back to the piles.  I made it up over 500 items on Ebay for the first time but fell below again.

Have a great week!

[tam from Tam’s Vintage & More]

After a dismal summer of small sales and sourcing problems things have started looking up the last few weeks in both areas! Heres to a good fourth quarter 🙂

[Retro Treasures WV]

Items in Store 2087
Items Sold 12
Total Sales $215.00
COGS $30.00
Total Profit $185.00
Average profit $15.42
Average sales price $17.92
New Listings 5
Items scavenged 4
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 42

And there you have it folks, the worst week in the recorded history of my store. 2 days with no sales – One of those days I wasn’t even getting offers to send to buyers. That’s all I have to say about that. Dust off the boots and continue on.

 

I didn’t get to list like I wanted this week. I did spend several hours working on organizing my ebay space.  It is something that must be done that will pay off in accelerated growth later on. I also had many family and home improvement commitments to get done with my very limited time & energy.

 

[Retro Treasures WV]

So in one day I’ve already exceeded my sales for the entirety of last week – 8 sales for $227. Nothing changed on my end, no new activity on my part. Ebay – you’re fickle. FICKLE I TELL YE!!!

[Retro Treasures WV]

So about that phenomenal Monday I had, yeah… that was a fluke. I haven’t had a sale in over 48 hours now.  Last sale was 7am on Tuesday. I’m utterly disgusted…

I don’t really have time to list this week and will be out of town this weekend so I’m thinking about just putting my store on vacation mode until mid week next week and just clearing my mind of ebay all together until I can list.

[craig rex]

I didn’t get to list like I wanted this week. I did spend several hours working on organizing my ebay space. It is something that must be done that will pay off in accelerated growth later on. I also had many family and home improvement commitments to get done with my very limited time & energy.

I had very similar commitments to you this past week and I think these are the best weeks to mess around with stuff like sell similar on old listings and markdown sales. Last week I tried a public coupon 15% off on all listings just to see if it would do much. It’s been about a week since I created the coupon and I’ve had about $250 in sales from buyers using the coupon code. I’m going to increase my promoted listings rate on some older listings this week to see if that has any impact.

I’m hopeful that ebay will run some nice ebay bucks promos for Black Friday this year. Not likely considering they haven’t used that program much in the last few years, but maybe we’ll get lucky.

[Retro Treasures WV]

I did do a 30% off and free shipping promo on my coats and winter heavy items that resulted in zero sales.

[craig rex]

I did do a 30% off and free shipping promo on my coats and winter heavy items that resulted in zero sales.

I look at promos and coupons and sending offers a lot like how I look at auctions — sometimes they work out well, but there are too many variables to rely on them. You need a specific buyer to find your listing within a specific short time frame (your auction period or markdown period) and have the money in the bank to purchase your item right now. Unless the discounts are so steep that flippers might get interested, it’s a pretty inefficient way to sell.

Still, we can give ourselves a little edge here and there. When I run promotions or coupons, I run them for a long time (2 weeks or more) and I do a big batch of sell similar on old listings before or during the promo. When I run a batch of auctions, I set the minimum bid at the lowest price I’m willing to accept and I try to list similar items in the same auction batch scheduled a few minutes apart. This leads to a future extra sales here and there.

But a lot of the time, we just have to wait for the right buyer.

[Sharyn]

I also had a piss poor week with two days of no sales.

I continue to help my neighbor downsize and sell the better stuff. I found three boxes of matchbooks in a closet. I started to look through them, and some have 5-digit phone numbers which dates them probably to the 1950s. I need to do some research so that I know which ones are worth listing. My thought is to pick out the most valuable and list in groups, then do the rest in one big lot. If anyone has a link to a good resource online, I would appreciate it.

Week of Oct 9 – 15
Total Items in Store: 1736 eBay, 32 Etsy
Items Sold: 8 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $2.74 + $41 Commission
Total Sales: $199.13 eBay, $0 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $80 Gucci No 3 Eau de Toilette Splash
Average price: $24.90
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 28

[Temudgin]

For the week ending 10/15:
Total items in Store: 309
Items Sold: 12
Gross Sales: $579.28 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $407.69 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $118.01 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $125 (Kenmore Washer Drive Motor – free shipping cost me $17)
Average Price Sold: $48.27
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $46
Number of items listed this week: 39

My sales picked up last week, finally, but it is costing me in promoted listing fees. Regarding my highest dollar sale, the plastic outer tub in our old washer had cracked so I bought a used one on eBay to install. Unfortunately, the seller just threw it in the box with no padding so it arrived broken. Old plastic is brittle. It took over a week to arrive and the washer was down all that time, and that coupled with some other recent downtime for me to replace the basket drive led to my family rebelling and demanding a new washer. I suppose with 16 years of good service we got our money’s worth out of it, not to mention being able to sell the motor that almost entirely paid for a new (used) washer.

I have been reading in the news about people getting cautious about spending.

Yeah; something I heard somewhere recently reminded me that anyone who bought a house with an ARM within the last 5 or so years might be trying to put some cash away to cover higher mortgage payments coming soon. Plus, the house flippers who got short term mortgages at low rates who can’t sell now with the market where it is may be screwed if they can’t refinance. It happened to me with an investment property bought in 2003 with a mortgage that came due in 2008 and the bank would not refinance it. If everyone panics now, we’re back to 2008. There was no fundamental economic reason that the entire nation had to stop spending any money anywhere and sell all their investments in 2008 other than simple panic based on scary headline news. Until, of course, people started losing their jobs because no one was spending any money anywhere.

I was on a roll listing last week – hoping to get another good week of listing under my belt this week.

[craig rex]

It can be so easy when sales are slow and offers are not coming in to look at external factors. But I know that my eBay sales have been slow lately because I haven’t been listing consistently in the last month — maybe every other day, at best.

With that in my mind, I created some new listings this weekend and then did sell similar with about 100 items last night. I also lowered the BIN prices on these listings by $10 to $20 and lowered my minimum offer settings by a similar amount. I’ll take $10 or $20 less on a $50+ item if it means it will sell this week instead of four months from now, and as I’ve spent more time looking at my older listings, I’ve realized that my past offer settings were often too high, and on many items I had received an offer weeks or months ago that I would’ve accepted if it hadn’t been auto declined. So I’m trying to change that habit going forward.

10/9/2022 – 10/15/2022

Total items in store: 1146 (down from 1158 last week)

Items sold: 23 (12 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 9 via promoted listings)

Gross sales: $1337.62 (down 69% from one year ago)

Net sales: $943.10 (down 69% from one year ago)

Average sales price: $58.16 (down 13% from one year ago)

Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 15 hours (down from 16 hours last week)

Highest price sold (net): $273.27 — Justin Herbert 2020 Panini Certified Graffiti mirror green #2/5 — this card is valuable because it has a low serial number (#2/5) and it’s a rookie year card of the star young quarterback for the Chargers, Justin Herbert

Lowest price sold (net): $11.33— Kyle Wright 2017 Panini Elite autograph ##/100 — Kyle Wright is one of the best young pitchers for the Atlanta Braves, who have a large collector base. Though the Braves season just ended in with 3 playoff losses to the Phillies, Wright pitched amazing in Game 2 and I sold this card and another to the same buyer who had purchased other Braves cards from me in the last few months.

[Robb_]

This has likely been covered already, but with the new usps shipping rate for padded flat rate envelope, it appears cheaper for customer for a 2 pound package to just offer usps parcel select ground for a package 2 pounds. Anyone else changing their 2 pound shipping option for items they normally offered the usps padded flat rate envelope to now offer usps parcel select ground?

[Lukastreasure]

Week Ending 10/15/22
Gross Sales(w/o shipping $ tax): $1,024.25
Net Sales: $860.68
Total Items Sold 18
Total Items in eBay Store: 1073
Items Sold eBay: 16
Total Items in Etsy Store: 257
Items Sold Etsy: 2
Cost of Items Sold: $149.11
COGS Percent 17.32%
Highest Price Sold: $249.95 Bakelite Backgammon Set
Average Price Sold: $56.90
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $42.89
Average Days Listed: 400
Longest Listed: 1548
New items listed: 8

First time I’ve broken $1000 since early July and I had the highest number of sales in a week since February.  Unfortunately, most were low dollar sales, but I was saved by 3 sales over $100 with one huge $249.95 Bakelite Backgammon set sale on Etsy. I have turned down so many lower offers on this set that I was considering lowering my price.  Glad I held off.

Etsy accounted for 36% of my sales this week having also had a $124.95 sale there.  What a difference a few weeks will make.  I was thinking hard 3 weeks ago about giving up on Etsy but had decided to stick it out through Christmas.

I, too, spent a few days organizing and trying to get my death piles cleaned up for better posting flow.  I had allowed my listed and unlisted inventory to mingle on some shelves in the listing area and I decided that needed to stop as my unlisted items were now taking up too much floor space.  Now I can sort through the piles and get everything off the floor.  It’ll help my mental state as well by reducing that clutter.  I’ve been pulling items aside for listing as I sort and had 15 item set aside for pictures to start the week.

[Mark S]

I recently found a new shipping trick that I wanted to share.

I have been noticing that UPS seems to be much cheaper than Fedex this year for larger bulkier items and those items getting shipping across the country. The problem was that the UPS store is fairly far from my house and most of the time the savings wasn’t worth the driving time\gas.

However, I just found a CVS Store ups access point right near my house.  You just go to the CVS store during normal store hours and they can scan it for you and send you an electronic receipt. This is great. A small shipping game changer for me.

Mark S

[ChristineR]

@Mark I’m not seeing this on Ebay labels.  It might be because I’m on the coast but FedEx is still beating UPS routinely for me. However I don’t often have items over 3 pounds.

[Ryanne]

I have also found UPS to be quite affordable for larger items, using Pirate Ship to give me the best prices. Love them!

[craig rex]

Anyone else see an unusual amount of eBay offers and purchases yesterday? I’ve gotten so used to receiving 1-3 offers a day that a day with 10 really sticks out. But I’ve also been making a conscious effort to reprice and sell similar with inventory that is 3+ months old, so maybe that is a factor as well.

[Robb_]

I agree UPS is good for larger stuff, I have been using them more lately.

[Author]

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