The Numbers: Week of January 14-20, 2024

[Jay]

For the next several weeks it’s still all-hands-on-deck trying to get our new cafe open. All the details feel endless. In smaller towns/cities, it fee
[See the full post at: The Numbers: Week of January 14-20, 2024]

[Retro Treasures WV]

Items in Store: 2997
Items Sold: 30
Total Sales: $1,000.00
COGS: $138.00
Total Profit: $862.00
Average profit: $28.73
Average sales price: $33.33
New Listings: 53
Items scavenged: 14
2024 weekly new listings Avg: 43

Whew! Kept the $1k week streak going just barely! Now at 21 weeks. I better step it up this week.

The weather was BRUTAL this week. I was able to work from home on Friday which was nice. The kids really enjoyed all the snow this week – they built an igloo in the front yard. When the weather gets cold like this it saps all the ‘drive’ for ebay right out of me. I’m just not a productive person in the dead of winter. We had our big freeze and some fun snow – TIME FOR SPRING!!!

My plan to ‘list in place’ this week was a success. I listed an entire rolling shelf cart and the top shelf on another cart. I was also able to list a bunch of items because on one of the cart shelves was a big bag of vintage hats. Hats are super easy to list and photograph quickly.

 

The weather this week will be better. As I write this on Monday, we will go from 2 degrees in the morning to 52 degrees by 3pm. Now that’s a crazy temp swing! Unfortunately there is a ton of rain in the forecast this week. Then the following week looks to be even better weather. I NEED good weather to get my workspace and inventory storage right and go on a big listing push.

 

So I really don’t know what I will accomplish this week due to the unpredictable rain. If it rains in the evening when I’m home from work probably not much. If I get clear weather from 4-7 any night I may get a ton accomplished. I’ll do some more “list in place” at least.

 

I had originally wanted to buy out the rest of the hoarder collection this month but I just don’t have the space. It ain’t going anywhere – might as well keep the capital in my bank account and use the “free” storage a few more months.

 

Premium Hoarder update:

Sold 5 items for $260. I negotiated on two different pairs of shoes but couldn’t get to an agreeable price. Both pairs I had priced $600 or more and both had the original receipts. I’m pretty precious on pricing with the pairs that have receipts. Both buyers wouldn’t go higher than $400 and I wanted to get to at least $500. Should I have taken both and collected $800? Maybe. I feel like the hoarder shoes sales will pick up in the spring so I will hold out. Nobody wants $600 shoes when there is snow/salt/ice everywhere!

[craig rex]

Did you really hit $1000.00 on the dot? If so, that’s amazing and it might be years before that happens again, if at all.

We are total opposites as far as weather and eBay. I will easily spend 12+ hours on eBay when the weather sucks, but I want to go outside and play when it’s nice out. I don’t have kids and I still like enjoying my city-adjacent life, expensive as it is.

We had our first snow in Philly in over two years last week and it reminded me how much I missed it. I would love one more snow before the end of winter and I will be ready for spring after that.

I think you’re being smart with holding off on the premium hoarder shoes where you have the provenance and for sure the weather will slow down those sales. If things don’t move by mid-spring, you can always play around with markdown sale, end/sell similar or even an auction and probably still end up in that $500ish range. Plus I’m sure one or two oddballs will sell for full-price (or close) between new and then.

Have you run any auctions on the best of the best premium hoarder haul? I forget, but in very select cases those might be a good way to move some of the inventory.

[Retro Treasures WV]

When I do my numbers for Scavengerlife (and for my weekly numbers spreadsheet), I simplify things and just round off a $9.99 item to $10. So is it really $1000? No not really. Good enough though. My spreadsheets are just for high level metrics on my business – not my tax documents. I don’t maintain individual sales line items here – just high level rounded off Sales, COGS, Items sold and a few extra values/formulas to track any other things I want to look at trends on.

Now that ebay has pretty good tools for pulling down data I really should switch to pulling REAL numbers for my weekly numbers and go ahead and take all fees and every penny into consideration. I’ve done my numbers so long this way that it pains me to switch. The benefit of switching would be that all my numbers would be done already at the end of the year.

I’ve also been hoping for years that ebay would allow a couple more custom fields in listings as I’d like to integrate my COGS right into the listing. If they would do this I think I would switch in an instant. I’ve asked ebay CS and ebay for business multiple times to add a COGS custom field.

Change….ewww.

[ChristineR]

@Retro oh man what I would give to have COGS in the listing and year end report.  I’m about to spend my usual day and half to do the COGS for the year.

[The_SEAM_Store]

Jan 14 -Jan 20, 2024
Total Items in Store: 3780 listings for 5432 items
Items Sold: 37
Gross Sales: $2794.90 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $2098.07
Cost of Items Sold: $480 ($138 mine / $342 consignors)
$Highest Price Sold: $200 Cashmere Overcoat
Average Price Sold: $75.54
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $470
Number of items listed this week: 34

[Sharyn]

Kind of a decent week for me. No bites on Ruby Lane yet.

Week of Jan 14 – 20
Total Items in Store: 1701 eBay, 35 Etsy
Items Sold: 16 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $8.70 + $155 Commission
Total Sales: $510.30 eBay, $0 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $150 for John E Costigan Signed Etching
Average price: $31.90
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 26

[ChristineR]

Total Items in Store: 1210
Items Sold: 29
Gross Sales: $1413  (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $933  (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $197
Highest Price Sold: $148 Christmas needlepoint kit
Average Price Sold: $49
Returns/refund:  1 (see below)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $120
Number of items listed this week: 32

Niknax:  Crossposted 24 listings, 0 sales

It definitely did not feel this busy last week, as I had some days with no packages going out.  Pleased I am still running my numbers.  Quite a bit of vintage has sold, not as many buyers as usual buying my RA items I would say compared to the past couple of Januarys.

Had a first this week.  Had an experienced Ebayer (buyer & seller) rip me off for $25.  She used the item and then claimed INAD in email, sending pictures of a well used, incomplete item.  I refunded right away and then reported her to Ebay and blocked her.  So glad I did after I read the feedback she has left for others.  My bad for using only stock photos.  I meant to take additional photos due to some mild water damage to the outside paper packaging, but apparently put it into inventory without doing so.  Will not make that mistake again though I will need to be careful as I often get interrupted while listing.  Still, hard to believe there are people out there doing that kind of thing.

I went ahead and cross posted some listings to Niknax.  It’s very interesting in comparsion to Ebay and super fast to use and the tags are limited click fields so you don’t have to invent and type them like Etsy.  On one hand, the buyers on there are people who like my kind of items since Crazy Lamp Lady tends to buy some of the same items I’m attracted to.  On the other hand, there are a lot fewer people shopping on there of course.  Some might only be looking at live sales too or the Lamp lady’s listings.  Some might be other sellers who have a couple of niche things they personally collect (like me with some authentic 50-60s tiki).  I tried making an offer on 3 items but two were ignored and one was countered.  These people know the value of their stuff.

I gave some thought to what to put on there and decided to post glass, animal figurines, small needlepoint art, and some pottery.  Most things under $20.  There is no like button available yet.  So, the best way to get seen is to appear on the scrolling displays on the home page (not sure the techie term for this).  One is Jocelyn’s hand picked favorites, and she picked 3 of my listings out of her 100 or so favorites – woo hoo, so that’s great.  Views on those are already triple my other listings.  One scrollbar is under $20 (now called new and affordable).  One scrollbar is ending auctions, one is “going fast” (I think this means the item had unsuccessful offers), one is a seller spotlight of the week, and one is the category of the week – this week is the perfect mug.  I’m listing holiday items to try to get in there.  I don’t really have high expectations for this platform but it was very fast.  Listings must be at least 20 years old and on a solid background (I have fudged on this last part).  Shipping is through Shippo.

Good luck R&J with all the things!  Excited for you.  Take care of yourselves.

 

[craig rex]

@ChristineR

Sorry about your eBay scammer! I had one of those recently too (which I posted about very late in last week’s numbers thread) and then had another weird thing this week. A buyer who asked me to cancel a purchases a few minutes after paying last week randomly left me a negative feedback which said this:

Very rude.

The odd thing was that I never even responded to the buyer’s message — just refunded them immediately. I was working on my eBay store when their message came in, so the refund was practically instantaneous. Then the negative almost a full week later.

Of course eBay removed it, and I’ve been doing this long enough that it didn’t even faze me, but it was still strange. Like, I would love to talk to that buyer and learn about all of their mental issues one by one. That’s the thing about selling on eBay — it’s a good life but truly anyone can buy and sell on eBay. It’s almost too easy. Fortunately, 99% of eBayers are normal people who want to buy our stuff or sell their stuff to us.

I will be interested to see how you do on Niknax, which sounds like an app the kids are using these days. I am always skeptical of other platforms, but of course my main niche of cards has a hugely successful alternative platform to eBay called COMC which is a huge part of my business. So who knows, maybe you are getting in on the ground floor of a site that you’ll be using heavily in a few years. How are the fees compared to eBay?

[ChristineR]

@Craig thanks.

Niknax is interesting in that it’s vetted experienced sellers who only sell vintage.  I haven’t spent too much time looking yet  but would like to see what types of items are doing well.  I tried asking in the seller chat but not much of a response.  I suspect that there are younger people but also some older people, probably the vast majority of members are female.  Many YouTubers agreed to sign on before this launched but we will see if they continue to promote it on their channels.  Also they all do whatnot and this site came along after that.

Final value fees are slightly less than EBay I think but no store, listing or advertising fees. You can also link listings to Instagram, etc.

The key for me is how super fast it is to cross post.  Even faster than Mercari.

[ChristineR]

P.S.  One good thing about Niknax is that you can show a cool item that has lots of company on Ebay and it looks unique on Niknax standing apart.  For example, https://district.net/product/vintage-midcentury-orange-fruit-58c  there are lots and lots of these on Ebay but only 3 on Niknax.

[Lukastreasure]

@ChristineR – Will be watching your experiment.  Good luck!

[ChristineR]

@Lucas thanks!  I sold my first item this week.  I’ll discuss more in the weekly post.  It’s interesting.

[craig rex]

Business really is simple. I’ve been on a nice run lately of listing more and I have seen more sales as a result, despite really only focusing on new listings Friday, Saturday and Sunday the past few weeks. I am listing better quality items than I was a year ago, and they are selling faster. It is an interesting life as a good chunk of my inventory storage space is taken up by items in various stages of not yet listed. I need to photograph them or lot them up or research them. A good chunk of my time is spent looking through auction listings for new things to sell through my consignment port. That business happens in volume and I have really streamlined how I spend that time, but it’s still quite a few hours each week. What I am saying is: my business is horribly inefficient and selling on eBay reminds me of this every day.

However, I am happy with my sales this week because of how many items sold, when they sold, their sold prices and my COGS. It was exactly the kind of eBay week I would like. Maybe at some point in the next few months, I will go all hands on-deck and double the size of my store by listing anything and everything I have. But right now, I am happy with my routines for buying, selling, and shipping and how they fit my life.

1/7/2023 to 1/13/2023

Listings: 379 — up from 345 last week, let’s keep this up @craig-rex

Items sold: 36 — 16 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 31 via promoted listings

My percentages are 7.5% on older listings and 5% on newer if anyone was curious after seeing such a high number of promoted listings sell. This was probably an outlier week, but I’ll be eyeing this number the next few weeks.

Gross sales: $1585.98 (down 4.7% from one year ago)

Net sales: $1039.21 (down 9.4% from one year ago)

Average sales price: $44.06 (down 26% from one year ago)

Highest price sold (net): $70.52 — Zhang Weili auto autograph card /15 2022 Panini Donruss UFC purple laser NM 张伟丽

I’ve never willingly watched a UFC fight, but they’ve made increasingly nice cards for the sport for about 15 years now as it’s grown in popularity and I can use Terapeak as well as anyone else.  This is the second copy of this card that I sold, COGS about $25 and both sales were at the higher end of the sold range. I like to think it’s because I copy/pasted Weili’s Mandarin name into the title, but both sales were to US buyers so I might be giving myself too much credit. Still: copy/paste things into eBay titles is fun!

Lowest price sold (net): $8.49 — Stephen Curry Leaf golf card

As a rule, I don’t suggest selling things for $12 when you can spend the same time listing something that will sell for higher. Unless you’re sure it will sell fast, but even then: list your more expensive stuff ASAP.

If you are interested in some education on ultra modern sports cards, normally I avoid unlicensed cards like this because they’re less valuable. Companies like Leaf don’t have licensing agreements with the major pro sports leagues, so they get creative in order to tap into the card market and mostly make 2 types of cards.

1. Minor league and other amateur players, most of whom don’t make it to the pros so the cards are worth $1 or $2 within as soon as a few months after release, no matter how low a serial number on the card or if it’s autographed or they put a big piece of jersey in the card. Making it pro in sports to the point where your cards hold value for 5+ years is kind of like making it full-time on eBay for 5+ years: it’s easy to say how you could do it, but actually getting there takes a lot of work, and even if everything goes mostly right, it might not happen.

2. Retired and pro players cards without logos. Sometimes these are clever but silly cards like Steph golfing, more often it’s cards where the picture is photoshopped to remove the team logo and occasionally they make terrifying nightmare fuel abominations like this.

Unlicensed cards like these go back decades to cards that were inserted in food products. Most of those have never been very desirable to collectors, though there has always been a market for rare oddball cards of the best players and there are some sets from the 1980s and back which have become very hard to find after all these years. But generally collectors desire the big sets and manufacturers, Topps, Fleer, Upper Deck and Panini. Better quality control and nicer cards. Leaf is probably the highest quality maker of unlicensed cards but they’re still not cards that I sell often. The demand is just not there. But sometimes they are good for a quick $5 or, in the right circumstances, $10 or $20 flip.

I acquired 14 copies of this card from this listing, as well as 13 more from two other listings for about $12, so regardless of my feelings about the card’s aesthetics, I will be selling Steph Curry golf cards for a little while and I have to be honest — I recommend it. It’s a nice life.

[Lukastreasure]

Week Ending 1/20/24
Gross Sales(w/o shipping $ tax): $504.76 (ebay $345 / Etsy $159)
Net Sales: $319.12 (eBay $187 / Etsy $132)
Total Items Sold: 19 (eBay 14 / Etsy 5)
Total Items in eBay Store: 1092 Etsy: 501
Cost of Items Sold: $23.28
Highest Price Sold: $49.95
Average Price Sold: $26.57
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $42.44
Sold via promoted listings: 9

Average Days Listed: 601
Longest Listed: 2203
New items listed: 11
New Listings Value $806.45

Not finding a lot of time\energy for eBay since Christmas. Fortunately, sales keep coming anyway. Hard being your own boss. I really need to sit myself down for a talk…
Sending and receiving a lot of offers. Any old inventory is getting a quick accept as long as it is above 50%. Even at that, profit margin is pretty good as most of the stuff that is currently selling I picked up for next to nothing. About 1/4 of the sales came from my 30% off after Christmas sale.

[ebaymom]

Well, I’ve fallen a little behind with posting numbers, but catching up tonight!

My Store Week January 14-20, 2024

Total Items in Store: 757
Items Sold: 24
Gross Sales: $637 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $304.27 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $29.76
Highest Price Sold: $44.95 (Ralph Lauren Polo Shirt)
Average Price Sold: $16.57
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $25.67
Number of items listed this week: 24

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