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We went to a local auction yesterday where it was an extremely rare situation where nothing was of value to us. Didn’t see a single thing to bid on. T
[See the full post at: The Numbers: September 11-17, 2022] -
Total Items in Store: 440
Items Sold: 7
Gross Sales: $515.24 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $347.42 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: About $110
Highest Price Sold: $152 Retired New Williams Sonoma Plates from clearance last year
Average Price Sold: $55Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $60
Number of items listed this week: 21This is one of those weeks when I am glad I looked at the numbers. It felt so incredibly slow this week. I did get back to listing though there are some distractions going on here. I also had fun shopping the newly stocked saved up Halloween stuff at my local thrift stores, though I didn’t really find any home runs. Most of my items selling are RA items even though a growing majority of my store is used items now. I don’t have the capital to invest much in RA and my favorite brands did not have good sales prices or an extra % off sale over Labor Day this year. So, I’ll just keep throwing up the used pile items.
Today I decided to up my promoted listing % from 3 to 4 as an experiment after seeing someone report results in a Facebook group. According to that group sell similar on stale listings is working for some people. I went into some old listings and cut a few prices as well as filled in some missing item specifics.
In other news, Mercari gave me a warning about hitting $300 in sales this year and they want my info. So good they are warning casual sellers about the new rules.
I listened to a couple of old SL podcasts this week while listing with my pumpkin candle on. 🙂
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Highest Price Sold: $152 Retired New Williams Sonoma Plates from clearance last year
You have really been on a roll with the Williams Sonoma stuff lately! Was there a theme to these like with your Halloween mugs from last week, or is it just that certain retired sets go for big bucks?
I listened to a couple of old SL podcasts this week while listing with my pumpkin candle on.
I am glad that I am not the only one who still tunes in to the old podcasts. I like to find episodes from the same month or season as the time that I’m listening. This gets me in the right mindset of dealing with slow season, or shipping being annoying, or listing consistently, or whatever is on my plate at that time. eBay may change but the basic challenges we face as sellers mostly stay the same. There is so much freedom with this life but a lot of unglamorous work and it can get lonely and even overwhelming, especially if you don’t feel well or have life challenges going on. The podcast was so full of positivity and honesty and even today, still helps me stay centered and put in the work to maintain my eBay business.
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I do miss my office coworkers a bit but it’s really nice just doing Ebay at home. Yes, agree it gets a bit to quiet sometimes and podcasts definitely help. I’m not a person who can do tv and list. Now that I have more time for Ebay I appreciate the Forum even more.
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@Jay – Was the auction for the house on the corner near the lake?
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09/11/22 – 09/17/22
Total Items In Store: 4693
Items Sold: 18Gross Sales: $742.97 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $604.24 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Highest Price Sold: $ 100 (Jacket)
Average Price Sold: $ 33.57
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 158.44
Number of items listed: 62Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales were decent again this week.
Focus for the week : Trying to get my items cross listed to other platforms to increase sales for the upcoming busy season.
Scavenge of the week: I found two Samsonite Silhouette Train Cases for cheap. Those sell for a good money.
Thoughts for the week: I am trying to find the best path to automate the cross posting of my items to other platforms. I think I found a solution, but I need to work out the details.
Mark S
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I was on vacation last week, and turning on Time Away for my eBay store led to my slowest week of sales in a long time. But I was too busy enjoying the food and sights and a nice Airbnb in Lancaster, PA to care too much. My week could have easily been much slower. I had three sales around $100 and zero cancellations. Every single buyer was fine with the wait time, which makes me excited for the next vacation.
I knew Time Away was going to slow down my sales, so I set up about 500 auctions to ensure that I would come back to at least some money in the bank. The first batch ended tonight, and the next batch will end tomorrow night, so all of those sales will be in next week’s numbers.
This was my first time running auctions in a long time, and I was very selective about what I sent to auction (mostly inventory that was 3+ months old) and how I priced it (around 50% of buy it now prices). It has been interesting to see what sells and what doesn’t. I added best offer to all auctions, and a few items sold for offers (including two on the day I listed them, and one today just hours before the auction was going to end). A handful of listings ended up in a bidding war, but the majority of auctions that sold only had one or two bids. Most of the listings didn’t sell, even some with 5+ watchers. Tonight’s final numbers: I sold 59 of 250 listings. We’ll see how tomorrow night goes. Since some items were 2+ years old and had received few or no offers, I’m pretty happy even with the ones that sold for opening bid of $10 or $20.
I’ll have to see how I feel after 2-3 days of shipping being a pain in the ass, but I might try auctions again the next time I go on vacation or take some time away, or want to raise some extra funds all at once. Auctions are very popular in trading cards which works to my benefit as well. I’d be curious to see how the occasional auctions would work for many of you who sell in other niches or a huge mix of items. I think there are some buyers who have been on eBay a long time and like auctions for nostalgia reasons, and others who prefer to search auctions for bargain deals or they enjoy the bidding war.
9/11/2022 – 9/17/2022
Total items in store: 1363 (down from 1425 last week)
Items sold: 17 (13 via best offer, 0 via seller initiated offer, 5 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1001.07 (down 71% from one year ago)
Net sales: $723.05 (down 70% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $58.89 (up 25% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 5 hours (down from 12 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $107.53 — Jerry Rice 1998 Upper Deck Prime Choice Reserve ##/100
I bought this card from the only other forum I post on, a big trading cards and collectibles message board, for all of $5. Everyone on those forums is obviously a collector or dealer, and a lot of the most active posters on there avoid selling on eBay for all sorts of strange reasons. Most people selling know what they have and price around eBay but occasionally I find some good deals. This is a once a year steal for me, more often my sales that net around $100 cost me $25 to $50.
Lowest price sold (net): $12.62— Bob Sanders Upper Deck Exquisite jersey ##/75
Two minutes of Googling taught me that Bob Sanders was an outstanding defense safety for the Indianapolis Colts whose career was shortened by repeated injuries. A lot of players like this (short career with one team, defense or other unglamorous positions) don’t have many cards with embellishments like an autograph, jersey, or serial number, so they end up with a small but devoted collector base. I sold another jersey card of Bob Sanders with a lower serial number for $20 to the same buyer in this transaction. These two sales covered more than half of my original purchase, which was an auction in late April — 14 Bob Sanders jersey cards for about $55 total. A great deal! 2 sold, 12 more to go.
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Items in Store 2126
Items Sold 24
Total Sales $834.00
COGS $140.00
Total Profit $694.00
Average profit $28.92
Average sales price $34.75
New Listings 5
Items scavenged 55
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 45Man I had the post vacation blues this week. Day job was demanding, took a while to get caught up on shipping, lots of family stuff and home chores to do. Then this weekend I had the joy of dealing with kidney stones. Needless to say, listing did not happen!
I did do some retail arbitrage at Walmart. They are doing heavy remodeling and set up a temporary clearance section in the middle of the store. I got lots of great end of season lawn/garden stuff. I’ll either lot it up or do some multi quantity promotions like on my markers to help them move quicker.
I also had a fascinating conversation with a supervisor there. I figured they were going to go 100% self checkout like the walmart 10 miles down the road. To the contrary the new checkout system is 2 banks of self checkout on the ends and then even more regular checkouts than they had before in between. They even actually had alot of the regular checkouts manned with cashiers!
I told the supervisor my surprise that they didn’t go to 100% self checkout. She said that after the store 10 miles away did that, their own store’s business increased over 10%. Apparently they’ve gotten the message loud and clear that a large portion of customers don’t like self checkout and will go way out of their way to another wal-mart (or other retailer) to not use it.
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I told the supervisor my surprise that they didn’t go to 100% self checkout. She said that after the store 10 miles away did that, their own store’s business increased over 10%. Apparently they’ve gotten the message loud and clear that a large portion of customers don’t like self checkout and will go way out of their way to another wal-mart (or other retailer) to not use it.
The rumor is that our rural walmart is going 100% self checkout. I like it when I have 20 items or less. Its horrible if you have a huge cart of items.
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The rumor is that our rural walmart is going 100% self checkout. I like it when I have 20 items or less. Its horrible if you have a huge cart of items.
Self checkout leads to a lot of theft and “theft” as well. The grocery chain Wegmans had a self checkout app where you could scan everything as you shopped and pay without dealing with any lines, but recently discontinued it because it led to too much theft.
I had my first experience using self checkout at a thrift store last weekend. Quick and painless. It even automatically subtracted 50 percent off for the yellow color sale tags. There was one regular cashier but the rest of the workers were on the floor. And, no coincidence, the store was super clean and organized.
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Your experience at the auction mirrored mine at yard sales on Saturday. Here in Florida yard sale season is just now starting to pick up and I have not been to hardly any since before the pandemic really. I’m finding more and more that people are pulling the best stuff to sell on the internet and just trying to dump their big furniture and worthless junk at yard sales. The best sale out of a dozen or so was one where the family was selling donated items to raise money for some sort of church mission. They had no emotional or monetary connection to the items so they were willing to sell for what used to be normal yard sale prices. Every other sale was either stuff priced with ebay prices or just total junk not worth buying.
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I’m finding more and more that people are pulling the best stuff to sell on the internet and just trying to dump their big furniture and worthless junk at yard sales. The best sale out of a dozen or so was one where the family was selling donated items to raise money for some sort of church mission. They had no emotional or monetary connection to the items so they were willing to sell for what used to be normal yard sale prices.
I’ve found this to be the case as well. When you find sales from an organization that’s large enough to require a number of volunteers to set up and run, like a library sale or church/temple/Elks lodge rummage sale, they are operating on volume sales and usually don’t nickel and dime every item like many chain thrift stores (and even some independent ones) do. There may be more competition but there are more gems to find, and one person with an irrational idea about what things are “worth” doesn’t influence pricing quite so much.
But there are still a few people in my area who I see driving around every trash day loading up the flatbed of their pickup with whatever they can find at the curb. So that type of scavenger is still out there. I would bet there are a few scavengers in my area who mostly, or exclusively, do yard sales and thrift stores, too. It seems like a real grind to me where you always have to be early or you miss the best stuff, but maybe that works for some people.
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Total Items in Store: 291
Items Sold: 3
Gross Sales: $296.25 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $235.56 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $109 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $148.89 (challenge coin for the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force Chief of Staff – consignment)
Average Price Sold: $98.75
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $60
Number of items listed this week: 22I was able to get many items listed this week and hope to continue for a couple days before an out-of-town trip to the Atlanta area.
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Total Items in Store: 3796 listings for 5757 items
Items Sold: 50
Gross Sales: $3284.61 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $2371.75Cost of Items Sold: $686 ($162 mine / $524 consignors)
$Highest Price Sold: $180 John Varvatos Suit
Average Price Sold: $65.69
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $58
Number of items listed this week: 55-
@the_seam_store – pretty impressive average sale price for clothes. One of the reasons I don’t sell them much is due to what I’ve been able to ask. Are you mostly selling suits?
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Top categories this week were…
35% Suits and Sport Coats, 10 items – $1139 ($113.90 avg)
16% Ties – 14 items – $512 ($36.67 avg)
14% Outerwear – 4 Items – $470 ($117.50 avg)
12% Pants/Jeans – 8 Items – $412 ($51.50 avg)
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Week Ending 9/17/22
Gross Sales (w/o shipping $ tax): $372.77
Net Sales: $304.15
Total Items in eBay Store: 1079
Items Sold eBay: 8
Total Items in Etsy Store: 256
Items Sold Etsy: 0
Cost of Items Sold: $12.76
COGS Percent 4.20%
Highest Price Sold: $200.00 Nutcracker
Average Price Sold: $41.42
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Average Days Listed: 680
Longest Listed: 2151
New items listed: 29Biggest sale of the week was an industrial nutcracker for $200. Some might remember my post on “what is this thing?” a few months ago. I picked it up at auction for $5.30. Sold it to a pecan farmer in Georgia who already had one and wanted another. A big thanks to Antique Frog for finding the original patent application and settling my doubts about its function.
This week had my longest tail item yet sell. A Starbucks mug from Lima, Peru that has been sitting for 2151 days. Took an offer for $17 on an asking of $19.95. I was surprised this took so long to sell as we have sold many Starbucks location mugs and they usually sell very quickly and often for good money. You never know…
Finally finished listing the lot of CDs I mentioned a few posts ago. I purchased about 400 CDs at auction for $102. Out of that 400 I listed 77 CDs for a potential total of just over $2000. I could potentially sell the remaining on Facebook but still considering whether I just drop them at Goodwill. This was an unusual lot as the seller seemed to have been involved with a few small labels and had a lot of obscure progressive rock, jazz and world music. I’m sure many of these will be long tail. Sold three already for a total of $75, so almost breaking even.
Went to a yard sale in my neighborhood over the weekend. Weird situation. The seller frequently has yard sales where she puts out dozens of storage boxes loaded to the brim with miscellaneous unsorted crap. We’ve found a few good items in the past there, but this time was a bust. I assumed she was an ebay seller that bought large lots, and this was the leftovers. I asked her if she sold on eBay and she said, “nah, that’s too much work”. If she finds something good, she has some friends that put it on eBay for her.
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This was an unusual lot as the seller seemed to have been involved with a few small labels and had a lot of obscure progressive rock, jazz and world music.
What an incredible score! I’ve found a lot of CD buyers are overseas, and since CDs are so light and your COGS is so low, I’d recommend turning off global shipping for these listings. When I was more focused on CD selling, I would get buyers from Europe, Asia and Australia all the time. They are thrilled to find a seller who ships directly to them (instead of having to pay extra for global shipping) and often pay full price plus I had a few regular buyers who would purchase multiples in one order. If you sell anything worth insuring, ShipCover is great about insuring overseas packages as well.
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I haven’t been to an auction for a while due to my commission sales for my neighbor’s stuff. Auction prices start to go up around this time of the year due to the holidays and usually don’t settle down until Feb/Mar. Maybe I’ll be done with my neighbor’s stuff by then. He is buying a house in an active adult community but will own two houses while he gets the new one move in ready.
I did go to a few garage/rummage sales. One was in my town, and they were/are emptying a home of a former flea market seller. I bought a few tea pots and added to my growing glass measuring cup collection. I don’t know why I am collecting them, but I am. On Sunday, I went to a town having a township wide garage sale event. During my walking around, I found someone giving stuff away for free. I grabbed a few things including some vintage 50s recording wire, which I just learned about in Steve’s video a week or two ago.
Anyway, decent enough week of sales. My commission sales are starting to dominate.
Week of Sept 11 – 17
Total Items in Store: 1686 eBay, 29 Etsy
Items Sold: 19 eBay, 3 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $2.75 + $138 Commission
Total Sales: $415.46 eBay, $85 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $79 for Vintage electronic organizer NOS; Etsy $32 for 2 Small Vintage Cutty Sark Whiskey Pitchers
Average price: $22.75
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $26
Number of items listed this week: 30 -
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Super slow sales this week so I took the time to do a inventory of my items. Wound up shopping my own stock as I found 6 items to list. 2 were cancelled sales that never got relisted, 2 were duplicates of an item that sold that I didn’t relist and 2 were items I had never listed but clearly planned to since they were in the bin with other sale items.
Feel good heading into the holidays knowing that my inventory is organized better. And I know I don’t have items listed that I don’t actually have.
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